Comment by ekjhgkejhgk
1 day ago
Uncertain if this is OT, but given that the CCC is politically inspired organization, I hope not:
One thing that still seems absent is awareness of the complete takeover of "gadgets" in schools. Schools these days, as early as primary school, shove screens in front of children. They're expected to look at them, and "use" them for various activities, including practicing handwriting. I wish I was joking [1].
I see two problems with this.
First is that these devices are engineered to be addictive by way of constant notifications/distractions, and learning is something that requires long sustained focus. There's a lot of data showing that under certain common circumstances, you do worse learning from a screen than from paper.
Second is implicitly it trains children to expect that anything has to be done through a screen connected to a closed point-and-click platform. (Uninformed) people will say "people who work with computers make money, so I want my child to have an ipad". But interacting with a closed platform like an ipad is removing the possibilities and putting the interaction "on rails". You don't learn to think, explore and learn from mistakes, instead you learn to use the app that's put in front of you. This in turn reinforces the "computer says no" [2] approach to understanding the world.
I think this is a matter of civil rights and freedom, but sadly I don't often see "civil rights" organizations talk about this. I think I heard Stallman say something along these lines once, but other than that I don't see campaigns anywhere.
The C3's attendees are quite knowledgable in computing topics, so there is no need to bring coals to Newcastle.
The CCC is a German organization. In Germany, the general public already is quite skepctical of tablets in classrooms, so there is not such a necessity to inform the general public of something many people already think.
While there exist initiatives to use tablets in school in Germany (see for example [1]), these (in my opinion misguided) initiatives rather typically fail for financial reasons and because most teachers simply are incapable of using the technology. And, of course, tablets fail all the time.
So, in other countries this may be an important problem, but in Germany, any initiative for tablets in school already fails by the mere incompetence and the mills of bureacracy, so this is rather a potential topic for hacker conventions in other countries.
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Schuelertablets-in-Niedersachsen-M...