Best museums are the ones where the old stuff still works ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MTOz7eOvmg
Like the Tank Museum in Bovington.
I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens
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Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens
#292There is an incredible pressure on a lot of public facing endeavors to include digital , no matter whether it makes any sense at all or not. Take education, for instance - if it weren't such an important topic, it would be almost comical to observe how our schools are trying to jump through hoops to cram more IT into the classroom. (I wish the people responsible would take a look at Scandinavia though, where they are…
> the year 7 comp sci classes they teach in our local high school have what on their curriculum? Yep, that's right, you guessed it: AI. Because that's apparently the absolute basic CS that every student should start with these days. I think, if you went back to the origin of the term "AI" and tried to teach an introduction to the very fundamentals, this could actually be a fun and inspiring class - one that might not…
Another funny option could be to have the AI class be a linear algebra class.
Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens
#293There is an incredible pressure on a lot of public facing endeavors to include digital , no matter whether it makes any sense at all or not. Take education, for instance - if it weren't such an important topic, it would be almost comical to observe how our schools are trying to jump through hoops to cram more IT into the classroom. (I wish the people responsible would take a look at Scandinavia though, where they are…
My wife and I toured our neighborhood public elementary school a couple years ago. Almost every classroom we passed the kids were staring at their chromebooks, even in the art room—digital art, I guess [1]. In the music room the kids were sitting at rows of desks with electronic keyboards and headphones while the teacher sat at the front of the class and gave them instructions through a microphone (to be heard throug…
To be fair, we had a keyboard setup like that at school in the nineties. I can’t remember using it more than a handful of times though.
Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
When my kid was going to start preschool, we went to see a relatively posh private school in the neighborhood. The first thing they showed was a photo of a 3-year-old kid solving a jigsaw puzzle in a big touchscreen. A jigsaw puzzle, you know, that thing where 80% of the challenge for a kid that age is physically inserting the pieces the right way. In a touchscreen! They also boasted about not having any books until…
Now days is is the other way around, the expensive private schools boast no/minimal screens and the public schools have Chromebooks.
This is definitely true in SF.
Preschools definitely brag about having no toys with electronics and the posher the elementary school, the less screen time they have.
Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens
#295There is an incredible pressure on a lot of public facing endeavors to include digital , no matter whether it makes any sense at all or not. Take education, for instance - if it weren't such an important topic, it would be almost comical to observe how our schools are trying to jump through hoops to cram more IT into the classroom. (I wish the people responsible would take a look at Scandinavia though, where they are…
My wife and I toured our neighborhood public elementary school a couple years ago. Almost every classroom we passed the kids were staring at their chromebooks, even in the art room—digital art, I guess [1]. In the music room the kids were sitting at rows of desks with electronic keyboards and headphones while the teacher sat at the front of the class and gave them instructions through a microphone (to be heard throug…
My son went to one of those chrombook-intensive public schools (though at least at the time they didn't start using them until 3rd grade; they start younger now).
Any time he had the chromebook out, he just played webgames. Not an exaggeration, he would go back on task when the teacher corrected then switch tabs the moment the teacher was not looking over his shoulder. I told the teacher to take the chromebook away if he did that and the teacher said "but then he can't do the assignment." The obvious reply was "he also can't do the assignment if he's playing games on the chromebook" but that somehow didn't compute.
We finally got him a plan under section 504 of the ADA that stated if he was off-task on the chromebook, then it must be removed. The teacher ignored this. We complained. The teacher still ignored it. We paid a lawyer to draft a scary sounding letter and the teacher finally complied. We sent his younger sibling to a private school.
Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens
#296I get the articles point. I too feel as though things should be more actual hands on, less flash-game-y.
But one kinda-counterpoint was my experience in Amsterdam at Micropia [0]. Museum containing many small things including fungi, bacteria, ants etc etc.
Some stuff you didn't want to actually touch with hands really anyway...
Yes they had magnifying glasses but many exhibits were simply using the screen to show the image from a microscope. And they let you control the microscope to focus, zoom in and out, etc.
Left an impression on me as being a museum that did digital right.
Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good feedback. I wouldn't put "taking care" in quotes, however; my wife is a former museum worker and has graduate degrees in the field, and preservation is a key part of the role. Exhibits aren't just for the now, they're for the future. People would love to sit in the cockpit of the Bockscar bomber (little bit morbid, but true); allowing that would result in serious damage over time. This is less important for educ…
Oh I didn't put it in quotes out of disdain or anything, more because I couldn't think of a better description. Preservation sounds better indeed.
Ah! Fair enough and thanks again for a great comment from an informed position.
Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know what exactly they teach about AI, but trying out different AI tools could be very important, it’s a great learning tool if you want it to be. It can help students learn math, history, programming…
Indeed, but it's more like computer literacy not comp sci. We also had a course in "computers" in high school. We had to know by heart the contents of "File" and "Edit" menus for Paint in Win3.1. Windows95 was just came out that year, so naturally the curiculum had not adapted yet. Anyway, guess how useful that was. The only one student who knew how to program got an F in the course :) It was, of course, a way to tea…
Usually, knowing where and when a poet or author is born does matter — it sets the cultural context for what and how the author is writing about.
Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
My company has a tech convention every year. Last time I went I played spot the tech person - most people there failed the test (they were former engineers now in management trying to pretend they were still technical). I'm a staff engineer and I was the lowest position person I saw there - not even senior engineers much less the low or mid level engineers that would benefit from talking to the seniors at a tech conf…
You're completely misunderstanding the purpose of a tech convention. The sport you need to play is "spot the customer".
There are community open source and adjacent conventions that don't really have customers or, necessarily, many managers there. I'll be at one in a couple weeks. But directly company-run events are absolutely about generating leads/business. A lot of foundation-led events are somewhere in the middle.
Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Physical books in libraries is another example: They can typically last just a few dozen circulations.
Some books are well made but others are crap. I think mass market paperbacks in standardized sizes hold up pretty well considering everything. My collection mostly from the 1970s and 1980s held up pretty well up to 2010 but they are going yellow now because of the acid paper. Libraries rebind them and I notice they have a lot of rebound paperbacks of the same age that have the same yellowing mine have despite better…
I think they meant that books being handled and read by dozens of readers annually won't survive for too long.