Article by Rowe

Personal Computing: A Source of powerful Cognitive Tools. Helga A.H.Rowe.
This article led me to feel that computers should be the new blackboards of the future, and that learners will be more comfortable with them than holding a pencil in their hot little hands. This sets off some very deep alarm bells for me as an educator, and begs many questions on the level of metacognition and other cognitive capacities. The reference to learners having limited memory capacity, now for junior learners, I would have thought that building the foundation stones step by step was an essential process. When has the human mind or brain done this huge change that now requires us to jump from peak to peak without the filling in of the valleys. I've raised 3 children of my own and I have always been acutely aware of their learnling styles and capacity, and I've done reading at school. Now from my experience I have found that children fare better in a well developed step by step learning approach than trying to jump the gun and get them to develope new cognitive strategies and then put them inthe position of having to generate hypothesis and decision making skills etc this is for far more advanced learners. While I will of course acknowledge that yes,you will have some children in every class that will be able to fulfil this new vision of learning, I feel that has to be introduced very comprehensivly into all primary schools at the same time and not based on some quota system so the schools with only 170 kids will get 1 computer per classroom and schools with 570 kids will get 5.
I guess I am concerned that this article made me feel that there is a move towards a huge reliance on the computer to do a lot of the mental work for us that we used to do in our heads, some people are better than others at doing this. What happens when the systems break down, and thats just what they do. So what happens then when the baseline as I will call it, the step by step instruction, the foundation stones of what we need to learn hasn't been put into place.
I don't accept that the human mind has limited capacity, I'm sure that the great mathmeticans and philosophers would understand what I am trying to say. Computers are an adjunct to learning and they will only be a useful tool in cognitive learning if all the basic steps are in place.