Las TICS NO son necesarias (Alan Kay)

Hay una discusión super interesante (aunque larguisima) y
en inglés en la lista de Python y Educación. Hablan de:
si migrar las ideas de Etoys (Squeak) y Logo a Python,
y crear materiales curriculares para una tal herramienta,
o crear materiales curriculares para herramientas existentes:
Logo, Squeak, Python; o no crear materiales curriculares,
sino herramientas para unshoolers y homeschoolers porque
el sistema educativo no cumple con lo que debe hacer,
sobre cómo prepara científicos escépticos en lugar de 
obreros complacientes... y otras cosas interesantes.

Todo esto porque hace poco hubo una reunión de personajes
convocada por el tipo sud-africano que se compró el pasaje
al espacio, Mark Shuttleworth, sobre cómo mejorar la educación 
en sud-áfrica, Shuttleworth Summit. Creo que es el tipo que 
patrocina Ubuntu.

De esa discusión extraigo esto para ustedes, quizá lo traduzca:


Consider what Alan Kay says here: 
http://www.squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/dynabook_revisited.htm

"B&C : So is the Dynabook just another potential learning 
tool? AK : It's just like a musical instrument. You don't 
need it. The most important thing about any musical 
instrument is that you don't need the damn thing in the 
first place. Because people all have got an instrument 
inside them. If you have a great musician and a bunch of 
children, you've got music, because that person can teach 
them how to sing. On the other hand, you can have the best 
instruments in the world, but if the music teacher is no 
good, nothing's going to happen. You can look for the music 
inside the piano, but that's not where it is. Same thing 
with the Dynabook. You don't need technology to learn 
science and math. You just absolutely don't need it. What 
you need to have are the right conditions. In music, if 
you've got the right conditions and you've got music 
happening, then the instruments amplify what you've got 
like mad. The best thing a teacher can do is to set up the 
best conditions for each kid to learn. Once you have that, 
then the computer can help immeasurably. Conversely, just 
putting computers in the schools without creating a rich 
learning environment is useless -- worse than useless, 
because it's a red herring. There's a sense something good 
is happening, when nothing real is happening at all. 
Marshall McLuhan made the point that one of the crucial 
things about printed books was that you didn't have to read 
them in a social setting, such as a classroom. People can 
pursue knowledge independently and from the most 
unorthodox, subversive, or just plain weird points of view. 
But that is rarely how things are taught in school. Most 
educators want kids to learn things in the form of belief 
rather than being able to construct a kind of skeptical 
scaffolding, which is what science is all about. The 
ability to explore and test multiple points of view is one 
of the great strengths of our culture, but you'd never know 
it by looking at a classroom. Science today is taught in 
America as a secular religion. But science is not the same 
as knowing the things learned by science. Science itself is 
a stance in relationship to knowledge. In order to do 
science, you have to give up the notion of truth. Because 
we don't know the world directly; we know the world through 
our mind's representational systems, which are like maps. 
Science is a map that is always incomplete, and so it can 
always be criticized and improved. And that's why it's so 
effective at, say, treating diabetes, or whatever. Because 
the map is incomplete, it can always be improved, and so it 
is the best way to deal with what is. One of the problems 
with the way computers are used in education is that they 
are most often just an extension of this idea that learning 
means just learning accepted facts. But what really 
interests me is using computers to transmit ideas, points 
of view, ways of thinking. You don't need a computer for 
this, but just as with a musical instrument, once you get 
onto this way of using them, then the computer is a great 
amplifier for learning."