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Special News
ComputerTime 3.0 is coming! Read more about it below, in our feature story about it.
Other Resources
In This Issue
- Student 3.0: Now with Gigabit Ethernet Built In
- Do educators think that your kids minds work like a computer does? If not, then why are they always trying to hook them up with the Internet?
- Is Myspace Good for Society?
- If you follow the mainstream media, you'd think not. Some experts recently weighed in with balanced responses, and inspire some rethinking.
- ComputerTime 3.0 Limited Beta
- More than one computer in your home that your children share? ComputerTime is about to get easier to configure with one set of limits across the network.
Student 3.0: Now with Gigabit Ethernet Built In
Have you tested your kids to make sure that they are operating at the optimal download bit-rates in school?
Parents, school administrators, and teachers can’t seem to effuse enough about the wonders of computers in education. They insist we need to have wired schools; otherwise, a lack of adequate computing resources is going to cripple our kids’ success when they enter the real world.
Computers are beneficial. Their ability to simulate, automate, and communicate is amazing. The Internet can easily retrieve text, sound, video and more, from anywhere in the world in mere milliseconds. Over one-hundred million websites exist, ready to render up information and Google is ready to connect you with it, assuming that you can put the right keywords into the search box and click the mouse.
Some view education as the transfer and buildup of knowledge, so connecting kids with computers seems like the right thing to do, since computers are very adept at storing, retrieving, transferring, and presenting information.
Unfortunately, people sometimes confuse the way computers work with how kids’ brains work. They assume that googling something and getting back information is educational. Steve Talbott refers to this as the fact-shoveling model of education. Worse, some people think it’s less important to know things because you can always look it up on demand, later when you need it.
In Steve’s most recent newsletter , he points out that real education involves much more than acquiring facts. Minds also need training to be “capable of attending in a sustained, focused, ever more deeply penetrating way to whatever aspect of the world and its problems we are addressing…” The way that the mind’s cognitive processes and creative, imaginative abilities work is entirely unrelated to the way computers process and deliver information.
He’s concerned, not that we don’t have enough computers in education, but perhaps education has already become too computerized. He’s concerned that in the past couple of decades that education has gotten away from teaching kids how to connect the dots, and creative and imaginative problem solving. Education is evolving into fact shoveling, in part due to the influences of the information revolution and people’s blind enthusiasm for technology.
Do you see efforts in your schools to wire them and put technology into the kids’ hands without a real understanding or plan as to how this is actually going to benefit the kids? Do they just see technology as a silver bullet and just assume that it will make the kids smarter because it can just download more facts into their brains?
Have any thoughts you'd like to share? Come join the discussion.
Is MySpace Good for Society?
According to some experts, the mainstream media has been unfair to social networking sites like MySpace, and Facebook. School principles even send memos home, warning parents to beware of the dangers of the popular web hangouts that kids are increasingly spending time on.
A handful of people who study these types of things were asked if these sites were as bad as they are made out to be. Their opinions varied on what the pros and the cons were, but none of what they had to say was scary in the least, and some were critical of the negative media coverage.
Social networking is about building social capital, and these tools facilitate that. These virtual worlds aren't a good place to live your whole life in, but they are making it easier for kids to make connections with people outside of their local social circles. In doing so, they learn new things, get exposed to new ideas, and can blaze new trails. The vast majority of kids are wise enough to know to stay out of trouble and when trouble finds them, they know how to deal with it.
If parents help to guide their children in their use of these tools, they can minimize the chances that the kids will engage in risky behavior, or put too much personal information online, and then the kids can safely benefit from the positive aspects of social networking.
Read the article, and then let us know your thoughts.
ComputerTime 3.0 Limited Beta
We've released a beta version of ComputerTime 3.0 to a small population of ComputerTime customers, and so far it's going well.
We'd like to open the doors a little more and invite more of you to give it a whirl. Are you feeling adventurous and want to put ComputerTime 3.0 through its paces with us?
The big news in ComputerTime 3.0 is that you can set up profiles once, and can be applied across all of the computers on your network. So regardless of which computer each person logs on to, they're using up their time from a single bucket of minutes! For example if there are three computers on the network and Zoe uses 30 minutes on the computer in the family room, and 45 minutes on the one in the kitchen, and then goes onto her laptop, after 45 minutes, her two hour limit will be up and she'll be logged off by ComputerTime.
A lot of work has gone into this new networking feature. We wanted to make it as easy to configure as possible, and we know that busy parents do not have time to get a certification as a network engineer. We think we've come up with something that will be easy to use and require only a few short steps to configure.
So if you're OK with using beta software — there will be changes, fixes, and additions — then let us know that you would like to help by sending an email to support@softwaretime.com, especially if you're a more technical person.
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