thanks for a long, well thought reply, though i also disagree with you on a lot of things.
If that was B&W, shouldn’t you agree that forcing screens in schools is also seeing things in B&W: no good teaching can be achieved without using high-tech.
I am not saying it is hi tech or low tech. I have been taught primarily on white/black boards (third world country), and in college was thee first time that we had presentations or digital drawing boards. I know it can be taught the old way, because that is how i was taught, but here is why i feel digital can be done better
teachers can be creative - you have infinite canvas - you can write as much as you want, you can show 3d visualisations which you for practical purposes can not with drawings - it is tedious.
students can focus on learning instead of copying the board - I have seen that a lot of students have always just copied what teacher says or writes, and consider that attending a class. I know it is partially teeacher's fault for not being interactive, but when you can actually focus on listening, and do not have a rac against time.
sudents who miss the class are no longer 3rd world, they still get the same information, obviously not the same as attending in person, but this is the best you can get unless you record all lectures always.
I in my last 2 years started typing my college lecture notes instead of hand writing them. problems with me are that - i have a really bad hand writing (just because i learned writing cursive, does not mean i write nicely. i mad a deliberate switch around 8th grade to never write cursive again because my cursive was so bad. and my current writing is still so bad). I also share my notes with a lot of students, and it is much easier to have a digital file, in a folder, which i can sync to a shared folder, which is shared with others. It improves my typing, and also improves my typesetting skills. for diagrams, i mostly draw with touchpad, and it takes more time for me to draw in the beginning, but for example in my case, in physics, a lot of our diagrams iterate over others, so i can start with a copy of my older diagram, and then save time.
They mimic it. They are not equals.
why do they have to. consider this. before reading and writing was something almost everyone did, people used to hear stories from elders or lecterns or a priest. that involved different skills. you had to understand the expressions, intonations, and pauses. I as a person whose primary method of "consuming" stuff is reading, am very bad at understanding pauses. for a lot of poems, just reading them does not feel "special", just rhyming, but when heard, it is like whole different experience.
a lot of what people want to replicate the hand writing in digital world is involving multiple senses. for example, when you hand write, you feel the paper, you feel different amount of "touch/pain" for writing different letters or numbers, and almost all your senses are involved (except of taste and smell maybe). you feel what you wrote. you can feel the differencee between the letters written when you are less tired vs more tired, or when writing somethign difficult.
I understand you do not get the same thing with typing. I can tell you that, even if it hurts my arguments, but it is not that much worse. you still see stuff, you can also tell tiredness with mis-spelled words. maybe not the paper friction, or your hand being chafed, but maybe that is a good thing.
(how that emitted light impacts brain (or not) and increase fatigue.
this is one of the common "myths" i think people have. yes most screen are self emmisive (unless you use e-ink, then it is also reflective), but there have not been conclusive findings on fatigue. what you can have is too white or too bright, or you can have disturbed circadian rythm. but you can changed color temperature of screen, or choose to reduce brightness.
The (lack of) privacy.
I am not going to speak about anything privacy related - it is a solved problem - use foss software. it is there, you can choose to use it. you can choose not to buy windows or apple or google ecosystem.
Compare that to learning a new keyboard layout
is that a thing? i never had to learn a different layout, the qwerty remains the same. or are you talking about other keys changing - even then, you can choose not to buy bespoke hardware with custom key layouts.
also with handwriting - does that not depend on what you use to write - pencils (and different grades like 1B, 2B, 4F require different strengths to hold or pressure to apply), pens (ball point, gel, fountain, or something else) or even with same kind, with each model of each brand, how and where you grip, how much pressure you apply changes. you can choose to buy same pen/pencil for your life, but so can you choose to buy a keyboard.
a new UI in an app (hello, MS Word’s Ribbon)
use foss stuff where you get to choose ui. or you can even make one if you like none of the existing things.
new version of the OS
i hate windows and macos for ruining updates. I use rolling distros (constantly updating) and i look forward to updates. in foss world, updates mean new features or better performance, or ease of use. I have a system that i have designed (in notebook - handwwriting design - think of it as choose what paper you use, or how your noteebook is bound or what the sleeves are made of. some people (me) prefer spiral bound, some prefer strung/stapled).
Longevity
i have 12-13 year old laptop still working, a 6-7 year old one still working. a 3 year old one which failed because of outer body failing, because of my stupidity, but still functional as a server, and my current laptop is a year old. I think in these 13 years, going through 4 laptops may be oon higher side than average population, but in one year, i can go through about 1500-2000 pages of notebook very easily. now add books. and i (and my family) have always chosen to use second hand or lent books because of financial reasons, but still th amount of paper used in all this is a lot.
consider this. my laptop at idle consumes 2-3 W of power. on video playback with wifi and bluetooth - 5 W. If i use paper and books (not self emmisive) - i atleast need a bulb. depeending on how big my room is or how direct the lighting is, youu need 10-20W LEDs for illumination. Yes you can go out and read in sun, but that may not be out, or there are clouds, or it is too hot or too cold. Energy savings can happen with this.
paper is cheap and instant
(and the following few points about cost)
it is not. i have come from point where we would tar blank pages from used notebooks (still do) to reduce waste or reducee costs. buying a notebook, lets say a 200 page noteebook for 1$ (i do not know how are they priceed where you live). I for 1 course, depending on content and duration, can go through 0.5-1.5 or 2 notebooks, lets consider an average of 1. in my school times, i would use 5-6 notebooks each year (maybe 2 for maths because of longer problems). for 5 years, that is 551 = 25$. that is very less, but consider this. second hand books - with 5$ for 1 book and 5 books a year (in college courses, i may use more than 5 books for a single course, but they can be lent from library, so still considering 5 books), and 5$ for cost (rental or secondhand or photostats), that is 555 = 125$. in total that is 150$. my current laptop is 450$ 8 core 24 gib ram 512gib storage, and decent build. yes that is still 3x more expensive, but that is not a chap and instant vs expensive and slow thing. it is quantisable. and this is consider a well spec'd laptop, you can go 4 core, 8gib ram, 128/256 gib storage, and you can get it down by 100$ more.
that needs much more regular updates and upgrades.
again with updates -- how badly have MS or appl messed people's expectation of updates. people in other spheres do not get afraid of updates - your steel bars can now hold 1.5 more load because we changed alloying composition - oh great. your cpu performs 10% better because of new vulkan updates - oh great. in ms apple owrld - your notepad may or may not use ai to analyse sentiments of your random vegetable list, and use 20% gpu/npu to find spelling mistakes, where th usual/older dictionary spell checks used 0.5% cpu, which was optional.
Again - use foss software and updates become good.
browsing the Web on a 15+ years old laptop?
you can choose to use 15 year old websites - like wiki and lemmy (not 15 year old, but designed with same principles). the way you do not expect 200 year old physics book to explain QM to you (it was not yet formulated), you should not expect your 15 year old laptop to run modern AAA websites. or if you want to watch youtube on it, do it the way we did 15 years ago - download video -play with video player. or use a lighter youtube client. you can not really blame poor laptop for not bing as performative, as you do not blame old books for not having modern information.
which is not what most schools use, right?
chrome os is linux, so most schools these days by "linux" laptops. yes chrome os is not as flexible as "usual" linux, but it is still performant.
ever increasing shit ton of tracking scripts and ads (and purely visual effects scripts)
these are again complaints of closed platforms. In my mind if a school or state/district or country chooses to provide digital hardware, it is there responsibility to select suitable software.
they way it is responsibility to not havee "cheesy magzines" in school library, you should have a content blocker (ublock origin) to block these.
making that laptop/tablet a… desktop, tied to a power outlet
most laptops (basically anything thicker than 2 cm) has a replaceable battery. you can just do that. again modern apple design principle of sticking/soldering things is stupid.
my older laptops could not hold charge either, i got batteries changed for 10-15$. the way a old book requires restoration, you need to take care of laptop.
if it is not touch screen (most laptops are not), you can buy a 30-40$ sketching tablet, that is connected simply via usb. You can upgrade laptops. (i replace hard drives on my old laptop with a ssd, and it feels like 50% better in responsiveness, even with 10 year old cpu).
I cannot not notice the increasing numbers of young people that are barely able to read
this is not a laptop/notebook problem. it is problem of only consuming information through videos, with subway surfers playing beneath, someone dancing on top, and relevant info on the corner. as you said, screens are not restricted for personal use, where they actually should consider better educating the children. instead, we restrict the laptops in classes. an equivalent situation some 80-50 years ago would be banning of newspapers, because people are only reading cartoons, or the cheesey magzines, because they all use same medium.
consider this - you wrote some 1000 word reply, to which i wrote 1000 more. neither of us would likely even write a 50 word letter to each other, just because we are very less likely to meet irl. if we restrict th good parts of tech, just because bad exists, it would restrict people like you and me from debating. I still consider this productive - we both are using our minds. screen is just a medium.
where teaching/learning has become ‘digital’ and at the same time where screens have become so prevalent
no and yes. in my third world country - still only like 40% people have screens. women even less. kids are practically just as bad (you can say that is because of lack of screens), but it is not because the kid has screen. it is because of what kid watches on screens.
i am very pro choice - govt/schools should not restrict what kids watch - that is parents responsibility.
They see adults wasting their lives on screens (be it TV, streaming, social media, YT or TikTok, playing games, and so on). None of that being an issue in itself, the fact this mostly is only that becomes the issue.
now that is problem with adults. if they see adults reading on screens, they would do that.
Most of us have probably watched the ‘Lord of the Rings’, right?
I have not, but mostly because i do not watch much stuff, and english stuff is a small section of small pie. Hence I can not comment on anything about writing.
But I understand the general principle - manga vs anime, book vs movie adaptation, it is often the case that for a nice source, the adaptation is not as good.
Kids will do what they see adults around do. Be it to constantly hate on people that are different to them (or don’t share their world view), or to become addicted to their screens.
so i consider my self addicted to screens - yes, but whenever i think of any specific thing, i do not feel it is addiction. i read articles, i do some work stuff, i read forums, i watch youtube (educational as well as entertainment). In that sense, I do not find screens bad, as i see them as a flexible window to larger world.
