Flutterby™! : Thinking about the '90s when school

Next unread comment / Catchup all unread comments User Account Info | Logout | XML/Pilot/etc versions | Long version (with comments) | Weblog archives | Site Map | | Browse Topics

Thinking about the '90s when school

2025-03-12 21:30:03.000286+01 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Thinking about the '90s, when school boards were all gaga over "technology in education", that was not driven by a curriculum need, that was diverting budgets from known solutions, and was teaching skills that were obsolete before they hit the students.

Anyway, discussions about LLMs in schools...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Education ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: Thinking about the '90s when school made: 2025-03-13 18:59:49.80696+01 by: battjt

In 7th and 8th (84-85) grade we had a 9 week class on BASIC on TRS-80s. I think everyone at least gained an appreciation for what computer programming is. Similar to the shop class and home-ec that were also in that rotation. It wasn't to make you a programmer, it was to demonstrate the option.

I think it was a great program that should have continued. Today all our kids have chromebooks, but because the world works on computers, not to entice them to be programmers.

I'm not familiar with wasted money in the 90's, so I'm not disagreeing.

Today's AI is just an evolution of search. There's nothing magic about it and we need to quit treating it as such.

#Comment Re: Thinking about the '90s when school made: 2025-03-14 00:08:00.774712+01 by: Dan Lyke

I think that's a perfectly reasonable curriculum driven need... Basic BASIC programming teaches some thought patterns that are super useful and, yeah, opens up some horizons. It was the "computers in every classroom" thing that... well...

Anyway, yeah, mirrors some of the "bullshit generators in every classroom" rhetoric of now.

#Comment Re: Thinking about the '90s when school made: 2025-03-14 00:08:00.774712+01 by: spc476

Back in the mid-90s, when I worked at an ISP (the second one in the area), I was asked to give a talk about the Internet to a class at a middle school. While at the school, I was given a tour of the new (and as I recall, only) computer lab. I did some quick math, and realized that at most, about 10-15% of the student body would ever get exposed to those computers, and the entire lab must have cost some major money (near top of the line computers, in a custom designed lab). I privately lamented the amount of money wasted on it.

Add your own comment:

(If anyone ever actually uses Webmention/indie-action to post here, please email me)




Format with:

(You should probably use "Text" mode: URLs will be mostly recognized and linked, _underscore quoted_ text is looked up in a glossary, _underscore quoted_ (http://xyz.pdq) becomes a link, without the link in the parenthesis it becomes a <cite> tag. All <cite>ed text will point to the Flutterby knowledge base. Two enters (ie: a blank line) gets you a new paragraph, special treatment for paragraphs that are manually indented or start with "#" (as in "#include" or "#!/usr/bin/perl"), "/* " or ">" (as in a quoted message) or look like lists, or within a paragraph you can use a number of HTML tags:

p, img, br, hr, a, sub, sup, tt, i, b, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, cite, em, strong, code, samp, kbd, pre, blockquote, address, ol, dl, ul, dt, dd, li, dir, menu, table, tr, td, th

Comment policy

We will not edit your comments. However, we may delete your comments, or cause them to be hidden behind another link, if we feel they detract from the conversation. Commercial plugs are fine, if they are relevant to the conversation, and if you don't try to pretend to be a consumer. Annoying endorsements will be deleted if you're lucky, if you're not a whole bunch of people smarter and more articulate than you will ridicule you, and we will leave such ridicule in place.

Flutterby™ is a trademark claimed by

Dan Lyke
for the web publications at www.flutterby.com and www.flutterby.net.