The inevitable phenomena of globalization has brought many inventions to society. Computer is one them. With burgeoning of computer use in every aspects of life, extant form of education has confined computer education in K12 education. In some of the countries few decades back crafts making activity was considered one of the activity that had drawn attentions for many reasons. Now, crafts making activity in education became obsolete. Computer education is a new form of skill and knowledge acquiring activity that has been introduced in education recently. Crafts making activity in education was considered to teach mathematics, science of crafts, social science through crafts products and material being produced and utilized in community, synchronization of hand and eye, judgement and concentration. Does computer education impart those skills, knowledge and values which were considered to be taught by crafts making activity? What are differences between these two forms of activity of learning?
Kapil: you will find some relevant information regarding the arts and their effects on the human brain in this e-book, freely available on the web:
Learning, arts, and the brain, the Dana Consortium report on arts and cognition, organized by Michael S. Gazzaniga, Carolyn Asbury y Barbara Rich, editors, New York/Washington, Dana Press, 2008, pp. v-viii (http://www.dana.org/workarea/downloadasset.aspx?id=88374, access: March 23, 2014).
Kapil - that is a very interesting question for 2 reasons (well...there are more).
1. It relates to the relationship between "learning and doing", the relationship between craft apprenticeship and cognitive apprenticeship.
2. It challenges us to explore the relationship between the notion of "craft" and such broad terms as the "knowledge economy".
Firstly, how we envision a curriculum in relation to digital technologies can be influenced by our assumptions about the relationship between the individual and technology.
Associated with the above is how the nature of digital technologies is seen to mediate the relationship between the individual as a productive entity and the wider economy.
It might be argued that, if approached in a particular way digital technologies and learning about them is returning us to a partially "digital craft environment".
We might offer s simple 3 phase model like this.
Phase 1 - Craft production.
Phase 2 - Large scale industrial production.
Phase 3 - The re-emergence of a digital craft economy.
The shift from phase 1 to phase 2 created enormous challenges to the notion of the small scale craft worker and the redefining of the relationship of "one to many" as the nature of early industrialisation places barriers of capital and technological knowledge between the individual and the process of production.
It might be argues that the rise of digital technologies with low barriers to entry works in the favour of "digital craft workers". Indeed we are beginning to see the re-emergence of the high skill - low capital digital craft worker in the provision of specialist digital services, web development and app production.
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