I keep hearing this mantra quite often, whenever the subject of computers in education comes up. I don’t quite know what to think of it. Certainly when I was in school, there was no computer for every two students, we had very little to do with computers at all. And to me the computer wasn’t associated with school either, it was always a home thing. Although there were computers in school, a few at least, they never seemed to be for anything. They never seemed to have a purpose.
I got into it pretty early, my school had a lab of Macs when I was 11-12 and we used to hang out there a lot. Aside from a handful of classes, it was a free for all after school event, so we could explore a lot. Obviously, computers then were not what they are today, we had some set of applications and that was all, no internet, no games brought in from home, nothing like that. But I think that was actually the most meaningful learning experience using computers, as we had actual classes where we used the machines for something. Like we made animations of the solar system at the time we discussed this in science class. And we used them to print up school projects and draw and so on.
But then we went off to junior high and there were no computer classes and there was no open, accessible computer lab. I remember taking a computer class as an elective, that involved sitting in a room full of 286 machines running DOS (unless you came in early and hogged the eight or so 486 machines that actually had Windows) and doing nothing at all on them except messing around. I learnt nothing from that class. Then in high school again there was one computer lab for the entire school and we had about 6 months of ‘IT classes’, using the wonderful Microsoft Works that they so gladly give away to everyone.
