Jim Knight, Nanny's schools minister, is drawing up plans to require and enable parents to provide their children with high-speed internet access.Knight is working with a.o. Microsoft, BT, Sky, Virgin and RM to help close the widening achievement gap between pupils from the richest and poorest families.
Seemingly over one million children have no access to a computer at home.
The drive for online access is part of Nanny's plans to have parents of every secondary school student given access to continuous online updates on their child's lessons, performance and behaviour as early as next year.
Knight wants IT firms to bring down the cost of equipment, so that internet connections are in effect made compulsory for nearly six million children.
Quote:
"We need to get to a point where in the same way when they start school the expectation is you've [the parent] got to find a school uniform, provide them with something to write with and probably these days a calculator, and in secondary school some sports gear - well, you add to that some IT.
Obviously you need to make that affordable, you need to make that universal otherwise you just advantage those who can afford it. To some extent that's the case at the moment, where 50% of homes have got IT broadband, but they are hugely powerful educational tools ... we know from the research evidence the difference that information technology can make."
That's all very well, but shouldn't Nanny and the parents be focussing on ensuring that the kids can read and write basic English first, before launching them into cyberspace?
So Nanny is talking to IT companies and telling them to make their product affordable....Emmm Could the word talking be replaced with either threatening or bribing...I wonder. It seems to me, if Nanny is telling a company what it can or can't charge for it's services, then that is almost price fixing in all but name...I wonder what the share holders will think....I always assumed that, in a competitive market, the market decides the price not Nanny.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you Ken that , Nanny should ensure the little darlings can read, write and count as well as string a sentence together before she starts worrying about access to the internet. I agree it is indeed a useful tool for education purposes, but if we believe many of Nanny's other pronouncements, then it is a dangerous place for kids to be and therefore Nanny is proposing to put kids at risk....Nanny can't have it all ways can she?
I take tonk's point about price-fixing, but we can look at this from another persepective. Nanny is trying to make high-speed internet access mandatory for parents of schoolchildren. I'd imagine the shareholders of these internet providers wouldn't quarrel with that!
ReplyDeleteThe computer - in combination with the internet - is trotted out these days as the latest educational miracle whch will lead all of our children to Nobel prize candidacy. Nanny just loves to hoodwink the public with promises that all of her little charges will be made into geniuses, celebrities, and business tycoons if only Nanny's tax-payers allow their udders to be drained a bit drier.
Nanny knows her audience well. The promise that the computer-internet combination will "help close the widening achievement gap between pupils from the richest and poorest families" makes it almost impossible to oppose. They cite the fact that students raised in homes that have high-speed internet do better than students whose families don't. Nanny then turns this into a class issue.
Further research will however reveal that children raised in large, expensive homes perform better than those who aren't. Children who are driven to school in expensive cars perform better than those who aren't. And on and on.
On average, the financially succesful are more intelligent, self-disciplined, goal-oriented, and hard-working than are the poor. A computer is not going to close that gap.
Nanny knows perfectly well that the internet is a dangerous place and puts children at risk. Letting hordes of kiddies loose on the net for 'educational' purposes will give Nanny the perfect excuse she craves for imposing heavy censorship of the net for ALL users.
ReplyDeleteAnticant is close. But it may not be censorship that Nanny craves so much as personal tracking data.
ReplyDeleteOdd that she might encourage couch-potatoism though, given the parallel drive for health.
Of course ensuring a direct propaganda influence that currently is the intent of just the TV/Radio and newspapers would provide total control over what information people, especially the malleable, are fed. After all the internet is full of useful reliable information and complete bullshit with stuff in between. How will nanny control her charges so that she ensures that they only get to the 'right' information?
So, when is nanny going to subsidise my internet experience? Or, now that my kids are old enough to be, theoretically, self supporting do I not qualify for the subsidies that will no doubt be offered?
I presume MPs get free internet access for their 'research'?
Presumably the trough will continue to expand to accomodate the snouts available.
We don't need no stinking ejacashun!
ReplyDeleteSpling and al tert is jst shiite!
My nanny never tot me nofink, and i have forgoten even that.
Washing machines cost about the same as a computer.
ReplyDeletePeople don't go around covered in filth.
They use launderettes.
So let the 'poor' kids use Internet Cafes.
Complete with guides and technicians to help get them started.
If necessary, get Kinko involved.
(Whatever happened to Kinko?They were supposed to be moving into the UK a few years ago).
As I write this my dishwasher has busted and flooded the kitchen. Woe and calamity! Nanny must help me otherwise I and my family will have to wash dishes by hand or something - what can we do please help nanny please.
ReplyDeleteWhile the above dishwasher malfunction is true and my kids have learned some very interesting new words on the back of that fact, does my lack of a dishwasher mean nanny must supply me with a new one as to do otherwise leaves me at a disadvantage to my dishwasher enabled neighbours - bastards I need to put a brick through their windpw and then get counselling from nanny for my dishwasher rage.
Is this just a Brownian re-run of The Blessed Tony Blair's vow to put a computer in every home?
ReplyDeleteWhatever happened to that piece of lunacy?
Typical NuLab: make some earth-shattering announcement, give some of their mates a few billion quid to make it look as though something is being done, then let everybody slowly forget about it. The next time there is a problem about education, re-announce this new 'initiative' and tell everybody - once again - how this will make all our kids into geniuses.
Meanwhile, of course, the kids can't actually use the 'net because none of them can read the instructions on how to switch the bloody computer on.
After my secon Master's Degree in 2001, I was unemployed.
ReplyDeleteSitting in the welfare line one day a bloke came up and said "Psst, would you like a cheap computer off the gumment?"
Form filled and 60 quid later, I had a shiny old IBM P1 in my front room, complete with an unemployed people's dial up account.
The company doing this on behalf of the gumment went bust with allegations of corruption a few months later.
Bless.
At one stage I had three old computers running broadband.
All off e-bay, and all less than 60 quid.
But I still have bits of the IBM in use.
If this is for education, I’m sorry but doesn’t nanny remember what a Library is? You do have Libraries in the UK right? *sarcasm* Sorry, but when I was a kid my parents were of the ilk that computers were evil and weren’t to come in the home. This caused me to have to go to the local library to have to look things up in books. Never had any problem finding things there for reports.
ReplyDeleteAs for my parents they are now hopelessly addicted to email.
LitlePepito@yahoo.com