Telling time (was: StopWatch activity)

[nick knouf]

> Bert Freudenberg writes:
>
> > I question the very assumption that continuously telling
> > the time is even remotely important on a learning machine
> > for kids in elementary school age.
>
> Dealing with time is a critical life skill that must be learned.
> Having a clock is thus very important.

Whose time?  Hours minutes seconds?  Days since a recent feast?  When  
the sun is at a certain position in the sky?  Since I last saw you on  
the road?  How much do I quantize?  Is quantization of time even a  
concept I am familiar with?

The notion of time is _highly_ contingent on situated cultural  
factors.  Just because in the West we measure things using hours,  
minutes, and seconds, does not mean that the entire world does so.   
In fact, our conception of time is directly related to churches and  
clock towers in the middle ages (see Lewis Mumford on this idea)  
first, and then assembly lines and educational/disciplinary  
institutions (see Foucault) .  The rest of the world has not  
necessarily adopted our way of dividing days into ever smaller  
chunks---perhaps there is no quantization at all!

A clock application, especially given the areas of deployment, is  
_not_ something you rush into with the assumption that you can merely  
write a graphic display of 00:00:00.  One must understand the local  
conditions to know how time is told _on the ground_ and be careful to  
not impose a Western notion of quantization and temporal division  
that might be entirely foreign.

nick knouf