My assignment was Postman and I offer the following both as guidance and questions to ponder.
In his book, "The End of Education", Neil Postman is searching to a answer to the question, What are schools for? In the past he names gods of inspiration and purpose in as the gods of schools but he now names new gods in education and this chapter is about two of them, technology and multiculturalism. As this discussion is about technology, I will limit my focus to technology.
The following includes a few interesting quotes which I feel will be a good start to use as discussion points. Others in the group may want to think about them.
"Schools are not now and have never been chiefly about getting information to children...the computer vaults information access to the top." p 42
"...any problems the schools cannot solve without computers, they cannot solve with them." Alan Kay as quoted in Postman p. 45
"People who have no clear idea of what they mean by information, or why they should want so much of it?" Theodore Roszak as quoted in Postman p 44
"I do not go as far back as the introduction of the radio and the Victrola, but I am old enough to remember when 16-millimeter film was to be the sure cure, then closed-circuit television, then 8-millimeter film, then teacherproof textbooks. Now computers." p 50
Finally, there were a few authors in the Postman article that I would like to read more from, one is Seymour Papert as I wrote about before and the other is Joseph Weizenbaun.
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