On: Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Re...

[jolan]

One of the smartest things my parents did was never put a TV or computer in my bedroom. That kept me from being up all hours of the night leaving me exhausted for school the next day.

I don't think I'd be the person I am today without a computer growing up. I used GEOS to type my papers on a Commodore 64 in elementary school. I was "online" with Quantum Link (precursor to AOL) and BBSes when I was 6. Since then every new technology has basically seemed like a twist on the same concepts from the 80s.

[nostrademons → jolan]

And one of the smartest things my parents did was to put a computer in my bedroom. They thought it was a big mistake at the time, because it kept me up at all hours of the night and left me exhausted for school the next day. But I've made far more money and derived more life satisfaction from those computer skills than from anything I learned in school.

[arghnoname → nostrademons]

I personally wonder how the advance of usability has hurt the educational aspects of a computer. We had a computer when I was a kid, and sure, all I wanted to do was play video games. The problem is, at that time, this required a lot of work. I spent hours trying to figure out how to free up enough memory so the damn things would run. Before that it was messing with an Apple IIe

Computers were a real chore then, and I'm young enough that I was spared much of the difficulties. My little brother, only six years younger, never had any difficulties in doing what he wanted to do. Put the CD in and it automatically fires up. He's never had to do anything about interrupts or whatever to get sound to work, or anything like that, but his computer skills have never been beyond your typical user.

I've often though if I were to have children I'd give them a computer, but I'd intentionally leave it crippled so that some pain is needed to actually use it.