Re: Computers in Schools?
He kind of has a point, though hasn't made it very well. This obsession with putting laptops in front of every primary school kid can detract from actually getting on and learning.
That said, being given one of the coveted slots to play The Crystal Rain Forest with a partner on a Friday afternoon was a serious sweetener for the Primary school version of me to work hard. There was a Wizard of Oz text adventure as I recall. Those early RM games were great puzzle solving activities. Yes, there were non-computer based ones that we could do as a group - and we did - but variety is the spice of life and an hour on a computer each fortnight was no great detriment to our education, quite the opposite. Of course, those were the pre-95 days when the school had precisely two RMs (the Normal and the "CD-ROM") and few had a computer at home, so getting a go was a big deal to an 8 year old.
However, fast forward a few years and when I was using Autograph for my GCSE Maths coursework it didn't detract because I already knew how to graph a function on paper. I'd been doing it since we started separate science classes in Year 5. There was no gain to be had by me spending an hour doing that when I can rapidly plot multiple functions in autograph. But I understood what the software was doing on my behalf.
Likewise, submitting essays digitally allows much easier/quicker editing and writing for a student. It's also a lot easier for a teacher to copy-paste into a plagiarism-checker. Just because something is handwritten doesn't mean it wasn't plagiarised from somewhere.
It's wrong to say computers have no place in schools, but equally I think they've become overly pervasive. I did GCSEs just when a few kids started to have laptops, and by the end of A-Levels a lot had something they could bring in for writing up coursework. The school didn't have wifi by then though so the computer labs were the only source of internet access.
Even then though, I know one guy who spent all his A-Level Physics classes playing Half-Life, and someone I met at uni a couple of years younger than me reckoned a friend had become a reasonably senior Wikipedia Editor off the back of the stuff they'd done during lesson time when the teacher was at the board and had no idea if you were actually working or doing something else behind the screen.
There's a balance, and computers are best suited as a tool to speed something up and make the most of lesson time once they've learnt how to do it by hand.
I recall seeing a program lamenting the death of traditional skills and they visited a stone masons where everyone was workign with power tools - rotary sanders, etc. Looked very modern and industrial, but every apprentice had spent their first 12-18 months with a hammer, chisel and glass paper learning how to work stone properly before they were allowed the power tools as labour saving devices to apply their skills more rapidly and efficiently.