Impressing the Science out of Children
This is Chapter 13 of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter in its entirety for noncommercial purposes. For information about the author's online newsletter, NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, see http://www.netfuture.org/.
The Science and Engineering Television Network (SETN) would like to help science teachers. In a draft Internet announcement,/1/ SETN's president, Gary Welz, talks about the moving pictures that scientists and engineers create, ranging from “dazzling supercomputer animations produced by mathematicians and physicists to the video images of living cells shot by biologists through powerful microscopes.” Teachers lack access to this “exciting visual material” -- which he thinks a shame, for “it is precisely the stuff that could stimulate a greater interest in mathematics and science.” His proposed solution? Employ the Internet's video capabilities.
The assumption here is dead wrong. Video images, of course, will have their worthwhile uses. But high-tech dazzle is not what stimulates interest in math and science. Such a notion nevertheless seems implicit in much of the push for online science lessons today. Unless nature comes packaged with cinematic drama and slick technology -- unless we find some way to capture the most remote and astounding phenomena (so our ...
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