I'm one of the weirdos that should be on board with this, but I'm against it. This will do harm to marginalized youth and push younger people to lie and find ways around the ban.
Plus, we saw that in Australia that the lobby behind the ban was in fact an ad agency that makes ads for gambling apps.
Here is France, the ban is probably just a way to avoid legislation against companies selling crap that isn't for kids like vape pens and sports gambling apps.
We were gifted our old work laptops. My partner and I work for the same place. She gave hers to the mother in law after I wiped Windows and put Linux on it.
I gave mine to my son. I figured that my son might want to use the touch screen I went with Gnome because it seemed a little more touch friendly. I told myself it doesn't matter because he is 8 and I can always reinstall.
I chose Debian (Stable) so I wouldn't have to deal with keeping it updated, put a root password to prevent them from going crazy with installing stuff.
I will have to put Scratch on it someday, for the moment he cares about the following:
- the LEGO website to look at instructions
- the music player to listen to soundtracks from his favourite games
- MyPaint for making drawings
He is starting to figure out the idea of folders, deleting things, undo, etc., but hasn't asked for any other software or even games yet.
I am a professor and would like for my son to learn about word processors, spreadsheets, programming, etc.. If he ever asks, I will give him the root password and let him browse the repos. Right now, I'm just happy to see him enjoy it without doing what lots of his friends do: sit in front of YouTube all afternoon.
I recently installed Ubuntu on a little Geekom mini PC for my 6 and 8 year olds to share. So far my 6 yo isn’t too into it, but her older sister mostly uses it for the games I’ve put onto it through Epic and Steam and programming using MakeCode, mostly for Arcade (https://arcade.makecode.com) (I have a couple of micro:bit-based handheld shields) and more recently getting into the awesomely simple networking that the micro:bit provides (https://makecode.microbit.org).
Since the micro:bit requires some file management for programming them, that’s been a good entry point to the file system.
I’d agree with deferring any and all social media as long as you can get away with.
On the YT front a small thing that helps is an extension that removes all recommendations. So YouTube opens to a blank screen with only search and after watching a video there’s no now shady this. So it becomes much more functional to their interests.
“How to _____”
“Explain how ____ works.”
Helps reduce the addictive parts and keep the “it’s a tool” parts in focus.
Yeah, Youtube for my six year old son is restricted to us looking up stuff for him to watch. Want to know how pencils are made? We'll look up a good video. Recently, that's not often either.
CocoMelon and its ilk on Youtube are abhorrent. It's digital crack tailored to absorb every little bit of attention. Avoid that shit.
The first list on the thread is not the greatest advice, in my opinion. But, I suppose that is a good way to start a thread: mix reasonable with unreasonable. Later commments mix security and privacy together.
I used to be a try-hard. I'm not infosec or a programmer, I'm just a person with a computer. I would install every extension possible that claimed to do something, I encrypted everything, basically following every how-to article willy-nilly and fell down a rabbit-hole[1].
Now I keep things simpler:
- social media has been whiddled down to Fediverse and LinkedIn, phone is degoogled
- I do send many of my important emails encrypted
- My browser has minimal extensions installed --- because I learned about fingerprinting
- No cloud, no AI
- Never use public WiFi at McDonald's or hotels
- I've used Linux for the past 18 or 19 years as my daily, but that isn't a magic shield.
In short: didn't get into hardening; some encryption, no cloud; mostly avoiding social media (LinkedIn will soon be deleted).
Out of interest, during your try-hard phase, did you use VPNs?
The try-hard meta seemed to be the opposite of midwit meme e.g.
Newbie: Use the VPN it prevents tracking and password leaks on wifi!
Mid level: Don't use the VPN as the VPN owner could be tracking everything!
Elite level: Use multiple VPNs for different things, self host Tor and VPNs in other countries
I do remember Knoppix. In particular, being able to recover my very important data (ok, fine, it was pirated music) from a computer that wouldn't boot anymore.
I'm a professor. At my school we would never let a student record us. Hell, the school had to force some of the teachers to give out their PPTs so the students could study them. Those profs responded by printing them 6 slides per page.
We also stopped using YouTube for anything more than 5 years ago when the first pre-LLM summary apps appeared online and when students complained about paying to watch YT. Same thing for podcasts.
The subjects I teach can all be taught on the board, so I am lucky.
Within the next 5 years we will be phasing out written evaluations and exams.
- on one side recording a typical frontal lesson is next to useless because a classic frontal lesson is meant to be listened during the speech itself, where the teacher surveil the class and change the narrative according to his/her own feeling of the class;
- on the other IMVHO it's about time to deeply rethink the lesson model. We have IT, a "relatively new" tool and it's about time to properly integrate it, meaning instead of classic lesson recorded and carefully tuned lectio magistralis TED-format alike. Students listen the alone, perhaps in the evening and alone, listen, replay, take notes etc. In high schools, in the subsequent morning they develop a lesson on what they have learnt and got randomly chosen to teach that lesson to their peers and teachers, using teachers questions to drive/correct/show missing parts of their learning, at the uni teachers will only be available for direct interaction for all questions, meaning a kind of one-to-one dialogue where the student learn alone and have someone to ask for anything, than classic exams where students notes assembled became a small book to refresh all already learnt.
Most people today fails to act alone, really understand basing themselves on memory and repetition, to crack this obscene state of thing IMVHO we must force people to be active instead of passive/interactive spectator, so on one side they really show their competences and on the other they really have to learn.
Is this because you are forced to prepare your own course material for every course you teach? Because this whole setup seems insane especially for supposedly standardised courses.
> Hell, the school had to force some of the teachers to give out their PPTs so the students could study them. Those profs responded by printing them 6 slides per page.
Why? I never got why this is made so hard. Isn't the transfer of knowledge the whole point?
A lot of academics are precariously employed (short, term-time only contracts). They are often against the recording of lectures because they're concerned that the universities won't bother paying them to deliver the lectures again next year when they could just give students the recordings.
Yeah, recordings are one thing. But I'm asking about the presentation itself. If the teacher doesn't provide more value over reading the presentation... that's not a good sign for the teacher.
I was just thinking about Sonic Pi the other day and watched a few videos online. I only ever played with it briefly years ago(busted out the classic Old MacDonald and Hot Cross Buns jams).
