4 ms·

I'm honestly not all that surprised, seeing as nearly every "technology in education" initiative really just amounts to using iPads for virtual textbooks. If sc

by nv-vn 11y ago

I'm honestly not all that surprised, seeing as nearly every "technology in education" initiative really just amounts to using iPads for virtual textbooks. If schools used the technology to enrich education (specifically where it would be useful rather than just every single class) then at the very least it would be helpful in teaching new skills. However, treating computers as a magical gateway to better educations will never accomplish anything and I fail to comprehend how people thought it would be in the first place.

glesica 11y ago
> how people thought it would be in the first place. Naive educators desperate to show they are doing everything possible to improve outcomes + mountains of marketing and lobbying dollars from the companies that make the "solutions". Source: I used to work in academic technology.
- ZeroGravitas 11y ago
  I said in another comment, it's basically enterprise software, bought by one small group of people and foisted on another much larger group (both students and teachers are in this latter group) and suffers many of the same market dysfunctions as a result.
frik 11y ago
Really great used to be the education software that was available in the multimedia CD-ROM era (Win3.1 and Win95). Nowadays all the PR and marketing budget dwarfs the development costs and newer education software is a lot less creative and useful and often full of advertisement. Today certain websites fill the niche for good education resources including Wikipedia.
radmuzom 11y ago
On a similar note, people seem to think that internet access will magically allow people to lift themselves out of poverty in developing countries. I personally find this idea to be pretty stupid; just because you have the sum total of the world's knowledge available to you (a paraphrased quote from the article) does not mean you are going to do anything with it or you can do anything with it.
- flohofwoe 11y ago
  Probably not for the majority, but for the people who want to learn new stuff the internet is invaluable. I learned programming as a kid in the 80's, and the amount of time I spent only with finding and obtaining information is mind-boggling. Even in the early 90's if you wanted to get the official OS documentation for e.g. the Amiga you had to order them as several kilograms of dead tree from the States.
  - sulam 11y ago
    So, 15 years ago I traveled to Senegal to help evaluate how the Internet could be useful to them, economically speaking. Before my trip, I was imagining things much like you're describing here. What I saw on my trip was fairly eye-opening. First of all, in much of the country basic services like electricity and running water cannot be taken for granted. Phone service is available -- for a price paid by the minute to some equivalent of a local entrepreneur who has invested money into getting a mobile phone plan and has some means of charging / powering the equipment (solar was the typical method, although I saw more primitive techniques as well). Internet access was generally many miles away in a regional capital, which is probably an all day trip for someone walking or on a horse (cars are for the wealthy). When you get there, access is very expensive. I'm assuming things have gotten better in the last 15 years. For instance mobile phone penetration was already dramatic when I visited and can only have improved since then. However literacy was a serious problem -- you have to be able to read in order to make sense of almost anything on a computer, and in Senegal at least just knowing French is an elite signifier since most speak Wolof. Very few people were fluent English speakers -- I effectively had to learn pidgin French just to have conversations with the local telecom employees, although thankfully most Internet-specific technical terms were just directly taken from English. In Dakar (the capital city) things were very different. It was pretty much what I imagined a typical city in Africa to be like -- and Internet access there was still expensive but in the realm of affordable. University students got some sort of access that was reasonable, although the pipe out of the country was pitifully small at the time (we had more bandwidth for our office than the whole country had in 2001). The really interesting thing was that no one could figure out how to make money off Internet access other than Internet cafes and connecting people to the very large number of Senegalese who live outside the country. I imagine the remittance market is huge now. However things have changed, it almost certainly hinges on the extreme motivation people there have to better their lives. They will move heaven and earth to make a buck -- SV entrepreneurs could learn a lot from the drive on display everywhere I went. If you can imagine a way to make money from a situation, they were way ahead of you. One last thing -- Senegal is considered one of the African success stories, generally speaking. It is relatively democratic, has a growing economy (without all the problems that come with having oil deposits) and has been the recipient of decades of development funding. Many countries in Africa are worse off than Senegal, and I would imagine the snapshot I got in 2001 looks like utopia to them now.
zamalek 11y ago
I'm honestly not all that surprised because we're still doing education the same way as we did over 1000 years ago. Of course news tools aren't going to help with archaic platforms.
- eru 11y ago
  You know how expensive books were 1000 years ago? With cheap books it's much easier to pick up a random subject on your own.
  - zamalek 11y ago
    > With cheap books it's much easier to pick up a random subject on your own. This is moving toward the correct approach; however, the topic of the article alludes toward elementary/high school. I strongly doubt the majority of youngsters would take this initiative if their parents just dropped off a bunch of books in their rooms, this is the one thing that the current education system does teach a good amount of students to do.
    - eru 11y ago
      Oh, my comment was purely about your claim that there were no changes in teaching in the last 1000 years, and especially no technologically induced changes.
bengale 11y ago
These devices could be doing so much more. Showing which kids are struggling in different areas, perhaps even creating groups of mixed skills to try and share the knowledge around. Letting teachers see where they need to spend more time, maybe even issuing tailored homework assignments. All we've got so far is books that can be read in the dark.
- crististm 11y ago
  not even that - all you need is a flash-light and a conventional book
dsuth 11y ago
Students at my sons school (Australia) use the school computers to research topics, and create PowerPoint presentations. It seems like a reasonable way to introduce early school kids to computer skills, as well as some of the better uses for them.
aries1980 11y ago
I taught college pupils to math and basics of cs. I think the "multimedia" materials make things worse in many cases, because people are not enforced to imagine things or just think hard on problems. The mistakes, the way of discovery toward e.g. a formal proof also help them to understand more tougher problems and advanced learning materials and instant solutions on the net take this opportunity away.

by nv-vn 11y ago

glesica 11y ago

> how people thought it would be in the first place. Naive educators desperate to show they are doing everything possible to improve outcomes + mountains of marketing and lobbying dollars from the companies that make the "solutions". Source: I used to work in academic technology.

ZeroGravitas 11y ago
I said in another comment, it's basically enterprise software, bought by one small group of people and foisted on another much larger group (both students and teachers are in this latter group) and suffers many of the same market dysfunctions as a result.

frik 11y ago

Really great used to be the education software that was available in the multimedia CD-ROM era (Win3.1 and Win95). Nowadays all the PR and marketing budget dwarfs the development costs and newer education software is a lot less creative and useful and often full of advertisement. Today certain websites fill the niche for good education resources including Wikipedia.

radmuzom 11y ago

On a similar note, people seem to think that internet access will magically allow people to lift themselves out of poverty in developing countries. I personally find this idea to be pretty stupid; just because you have the sum total of the world's knowledge available to you (a paraphrased quote from the article) does not mean you are going to do anything with it or you can do anything with it.

flohofwoe 11y ago
Probably not for the majority, but for the people who want to learn new stuff the internet is invaluable. I learned programming as a kid in the 80's, and the amount of time I spent only with finding and obtaining information is mind-boggling. Even in the early 90's if you wanted to get the official OS documentation for e.g. the Amiga you had to order them as several kilograms of dead tree from the States.
- sulam 11y ago
  So, 15 years ago I traveled to Senegal to help evaluate how the Internet could be useful to them, economically speaking. Before my trip, I was imagining things much like you're describing here. What I saw on my trip was fairly eye-opening. First of all, in much of the country basic services like electricity and running water cannot be taken for granted. Phone service is available -- for a price paid by the minute to some equivalent of a local entrepreneur who has invested money into getting a mobile phone plan and has some means of charging / powering the equipment (solar was the typical method, although I saw more primitive techniques as well). Internet access was generally many miles away in a regional capital, which is probably an all day trip for someone walking or on a horse (cars are for the wealthy). When you get there, access is very expensive. I'm assuming things have gotten better in the last 15 years. For instance mobile phone penetration was already dramatic when I visited and can only have improved since then. However literacy was a serious problem -- you have to be able to read in order to make sense of almost anything on a computer, and in Senegal at least just knowing French is an elite signifier since most speak Wolof. Very few people were fluent English speakers -- I effectively had to learn pidgin French just to have conversations with the local telecom employees, although thankfully most Internet-specific technical terms were just directly taken from English. In Dakar (the capital city) things were very different. It was pretty much what I imagined a typical city in Africa to be like -- and Internet access there was still expensive but in the realm of affordable. University students got some sort of access that was reasonable, although the pipe out of the country was pitifully small at the time (we had more bandwidth for our office than the whole country had in 2001). The really interesting thing was that no one could figure out how to make money off Internet access other than Internet cafes and connecting people to the very large number of Senegalese who live outside the country. I imagine the remittance market is huge now. However things have changed, it almost certainly hinges on the extreme motivation people there have to better their lives. They will move heaven and earth to make a buck -- SV entrepreneurs could learn a lot from the drive on display everywhere I went. If you can imagine a way to make money from a situation, they were way ahead of you. One last thing -- Senegal is considered one of the African success stories, generally speaking. It is relatively democratic, has a growing economy (without all the problems that come with having oil deposits) and has been the recipient of decades of development funding. Many countries in Africa are worse off than Senegal, and I would imagine the snapshot I got in 2001 looks like utopia to them now.

zamalek 11y ago

I'm honestly not all that surprised because we're still doing education the same way as we did over 1000 years ago. Of course news tools aren't going to help with archaic platforms.

eru 11y ago
You know how expensive books were 1000 years ago? With cheap books it's much easier to pick up a random subject on your own.
- zamalek 11y ago
  > With cheap books it's much easier to pick up a random subject on your own. This is moving toward the correct approach; however, the topic of the article alludes toward elementary/high school. I strongly doubt the majority of youngsters would take this initiative if their parents just dropped off a bunch of books in their rooms, this is the one thing that the current education system does teach a good amount of students to do.
  - eru 11y ago
    Oh, my comment was purely about your claim that there were no changes in teaching in the last 1000 years, and especially no technologically induced changes.

bengale 11y ago

These devices could be doing so much more. Showing which kids are struggling in different areas, perhaps even creating groups of mixed skills to try and share the knowledge around. Letting teachers see where they need to spend more time, maybe even issuing tailored homework assignments. All we've got so far is books that can be read in the dark.

crististm 11y ago
not even that - all you need is a flash-light and a conventional book

dsuth 11y ago

Students at my sons school (Australia) use the school computers to research topics, and create PowerPoint presentations. It seems like a reasonable way to introduce early school kids to computer skills, as well as some of the better uses for them.

aries1980 11y ago

I taught college pupils to math and basics of cs. I think the "multimedia" materials make things worse in many cases, because people are not enforced to imagine things or just think hard on problems. The mistakes, the way of discovery toward e.g. a formal proof also help them to understand more tougher problems and advanced learning materials and instant solutions on the net take this opportunity away.