Telling time (was: StopWatch activity)

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Nick,

At Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:13:34 -0500,
nick knouf wrote:
> 
> > 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?

  Well, it seems that you are responding to a wrong message.

> 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.

  So, what do you think about the idea of letting kids make their own
clocks?

-- Yoshiki