Quote:
Originally Posted by desertgrandma
Steve. How do you reconcile this with teaching small ones to write?
I'm assuming you are thinking of little 'smart boards" (we have them at our school) for each student. Then what do they do when they go home? How do they practice their penmanship?
How do you save their progress from the beginning of the year to the end, for comparison?
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desertgrandma, I think I want to extend your point. And here it is what I read into what you're saying:
there is NO REASON to wholeheartedly adopt electronics for EVERYTHING when there isn't a real reason to aside from the desire that one may want everything to be electronics.
Let's take a look a a map of light pollution. Here, you can tell immediately where in the world electricity is easily accessible and where it is a rare resource
Notice in the map above where the coast of West Africa is. See how dim parts are and how unlit other areas are? I grew up in West Africa and electricity there is still a major problem as it is in many other parts of Africa. And notice the unlit areas in large portions of the Americas, Australia and large portions of Asia.
When my then partner came to visit me while I was doing fieldwork in West Africa, he carried with him his American Express card. He thought that like in Europe, America, his Platinum AmEx card could "save" him. He has been in many situations when travelling around Europe and America where a phone call to AmEx would allow him to get the help he needed--extra money, a place to stay, travel aid, etc.
It was his first time in West Africa and using his social constructs of how life works in America, he thought the same would work for him in West Africa.
Wrong. I told him, ditch your AmEx card. It's entirely useless in West Africa except for some capital cities and even then only at major international businesses, and people living in capital cities don't rely primarily on major international businesses. In their immediacy, they rely on small-scaled so-called informal sector of the economy the most.
We weren't going to the capital. We were going to other major towns and some small villages but phone lines are not easily accessible (nor is the cellular network available!!!!). Ditch the card, I persuaded him because here you don't rely on AmEx. You rely on human face-to-face interaction with people you may not know but have to depend on. Along with ditching the AmEx, I was trying to inform him how his reliance on AmEx was really also reliance on a certain electricity/electronics infrastructure that was not available.
My point? It's not always personal preference that dictates what can or cannot be used. Social and physical conditions play a role in that too.