Becoming Digital: Toward a Post-Internet Society (SocietyNow) by Vincent Mosco

Author:Vincent Mosco [Mosco, Vincent]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781787436756
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2017-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

CHILD’S PLAY

Nor does it help to be a child. That is because the model of how a computer operates or “thinks” is now a staple for teaching pre-school and school-age youngsters. The buzzword is computational learning and although it is most popular in university courses, enthusiasts are encouraging parents to insist that childcare centers and elementary schools make it available to their children. It is responsible for the revival of computer science departments, whose very survival was threatened when the IT bubble burst at the turn of the century and were once again threatened by the financial meltdown of 2008. Computer science classrooms are now full to capacity and departments are turning away potential majors. Philosophy departments teach the same things, often with great skill and depth, but computer science has the added benefit of sprinkling a little Silicon Valley gold dust on those who learn its principles and practices.

Gold dust aside, there is nothing especially novel about computational learning. It brings together logical and analytical ways of thinking that were once mainstays of curricula, but which have since been discarded for more “practical” approaches. The best of computational learning is the legitimacy it offers to tried and true methods for “how to think” such as generalizing from a handful of observations. Unfortunately, it also involves attempts to teach the details of computer coding that are best left to specialized courses. If the image of preschoolers given a batch of old-fashioned blocks to learn the rudiments of programming seems to be more than a bit over the top, it is. What makes computational learning more significant, and more insidious, is the widely accepted view that computers hold the key to thinking and learning. It is not enough to teach computers how to think like humans. With computational learning, the goal is to teach humans to think like computers. Along with the quantified and commodified self, the computerized brain challenges what it means to be a human being.

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