Blaming poor internet availability is just an excuse for failing to look at what's out there and adapt.
He started his career as a coaler on a steamship, probably one of the worst jobs at the time. Correspondence courses were a way up for people who could not afford attending college.
Did correspondence courses come with the same sort of negative stigma in their time?
This could have been implemented in a better way. That's all I'm saying. It's still good that there students are getting access to computers at home. Even if 25% of them can take advantage of this, that's still a huge number of people.
as usual, its the hard work to set up the infrastructure, courses, support etc for the students and teachers that is needed and almost never gets done
as they say, the music isnt in the piano, same with computers
It was for many of us, at least in some ways. In the 80's when we got an Amiga 500 our parents had no idea what to do with it, it was up to us to learn and read the books it came with. That meant a lot of games but it also came with plenty of creativity software from music programs to basic. The same was true with music, we had a keyboard in the house and some kid friendly music sheets so I was playing regularly from about the time I could reach the keys. I can only imagine how much joy I would have had from a rasberry pi beginner kit.
You can't dump computers/instruments on kids and expect a full general education, but you can expect the curious ones to pick things up and learn if they have access.
The piano I started off with by trying to play along to TV theme tunes and songs i heard on the radio, then I started making my own music up. That was 40 years ago and I still make music just about every week if not everyday.
Probably impractical, India 4G connections seem to have been very succeful.
Been spitballing the same concepts but with mobile phones (on a person or stashed on aircraft doing their weekly freight/mail run) where unused space is the bandwidth. Can move hundreds of gbs at zero cost but meh latency, as you’re imagining.
- used "FTP via email"
- connected via a national call ($$) to a shell account
- used pine to copy+paste email text into local files and vice-versa
- assembled segmented files by hand, then decoded and decompressed
- all on a Mac Portable
Without home internet no distractions, no dopamine hijacks, no content control issues, most importantly no imperative for parents to gain technological familiarity if they want to protect their kids. Kids could simply use school internet for research, download the relevant content, do the deep dive at home like they would do with any book from a library.
Yes, the Amish have managed in the USA so far, but I think that even those days are numbered. Just as many Amish already own mobile phones, though they limit their use and keep them stashed away most of the time, they will be forced to do online things, too.
And by old I mean > 55-60.
I'm ashamed to admit I didn't think of this earlier recently when I needed some printing/scanning done. I went and bought a cheap hp cloud printing (they don't even come with cables anymore) abomination. After trying to get that to work, screwing around with HP accounts, configuring a cloud printer from a linux desktop, installing an app on my phone, etc I ended up going to the local library and got it all done in 30 minutes It was cheaper, easier and better option for something I need to do a few times a year.
This is smart though, since it costs very little to give someone a smartphone with internet these days (ALDI talk in Germany is 8€ a month with a bit of data, a cheap smartphone maybe 100€).
Trying to keep up a service that <0.1% of the population uses costs a lot more.
The Internet isn't what gives meaning to life.
At this point I'm not at all sure what people do or make there except they eat a lot of beef.
In reference to COVID... nobody was prepared for distance learning because why would they?