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My 7 yo tested positive yesterday, so we kept her and her 5 yo sister home today to "learn from home". I had forgotten how bad learning from home was. My wife

My 7 yo tested positive yesterday, so we kept her and her 5 yo sister home today to "learn from home". I had forgotten how bad learning from home was. My wife stayed home to help them - she spent most of the day trying to get them connected to the various videos to listen to stuff and very little time actually learning

chii 5y ago
I highly suspect there's room for disruption in at-home education - it's so terrible right now. It'd be interesting to see if VR is a possible solution for such use cases. I think VR tech has to advance a bit more (in terms of ease of use, as well as affordability) before it can be used this way, but these early adopters' experience (see https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385 https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385) seems pretty positive to me.
- folli 5y ago
  From a practical perspective: outfitting every student with a VR setup sounds very expensive.
  - bronco21016 5y ago
    For now. But at the end of the day a Quest is essentially a smart phone with a nice screen attached to your face. There’s no reason this hardware can’t come down in price. I mean the thing is only $300 as it is. Plenty of wealthier schools send every kid home with a Chromebook of similar price. I believe broadband access is the bigger hurdle to having every kid attend in VR. When schools closed during the pandemic there was a shortage of hardware, because of the pandemic. However, even the schools that did snag hardware quickly learned that many of their students didn’t have access to broadband.
    - chii 5y ago
      yea, i agree that broadband access is vital - not just for education, but for everything. It's the new roads and rail of the 21st century. Broadband should be a public utility, regulated as such and invested in as such imho.
- blindmute 5y ago
  Students learned with nothing more than books for hundreds of years and were better educated than most people today.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    >Students learned with nothing more than books for hundreds of years I don't think that is true >and were better educated than most people today. I'm really certain that isn't true
jay_kyburz 5y ago
What shocked me (here in Australia) was that every teacher is creating their own resources to give to the kids. They are probably all working towards a similar curriculum, but all the "projects" and handouts and stuff that the kids were given to work from was created by their teacher. Thousands of teachers all over Australia (and the world) are recreating the same resources every year! How is there not a national level library of resources they can draw on. Khan academy is really great, why is Mr Briggs from my small town recreating it badly in power point every year.
- abyssin 5y ago
  I’m shocked by the same thing in Belgium. Most of teachers’ work outside class could be automated if they decided to work collaboratively. I still can’t understand why they decide not to, and frankly I’m a bit worried that such people are in charge of teaching my kids. As a child, I remember seeing the poor quality of the material we were given, and hearing how hard teachers had worked to produce it. What’s the message behind it? Hard work is good because it’s work?
  - piva00 5y ago
    I'm shocked that you are shocked and blaming the teachers for not organising themselves. Who the fuck is in charge of coordinating these efforts? Teachers have a lot to do, kids to care about, other stresses, and they aren't experts in ED-tech or even technology in general. They use the tools they know about or have been told about, they aren't going out of their way to learn new tools in their spare time, it sucks but not every profession is focused on min-maxing like software engineering does, not everyone is out there thinking about how to automate their menial tasks, you need to be educated/trained in that, maybe with programming as basic school curriculum we can train a whole new generation to think about automation through software? I know I wouldn't be thinking much about that if I was a teacher. I worked in the ED-tech space (related to music) for a while and for me it's shocking you are expecting teachers to be on top of this. The issue is systemic, the teachers are doing the best they can, the people on the top aren't trained either on using software to leverage and scale their teaching resources. There needs to be someone/some government that implements that as a policy, with experts guiding and driving the adoption of ED-tech in a better and more productive way. > As a child, I remember seeing the poor quality of the material we were given, and hearing how hard teachers had worked to produce it. What’s the message behind it? Hard work is good because it’s work? The message probably was more in line with "look at how much more work outside your expertise you'll have to do in real life, rather than just what you were hired and trained for". Seems pretty in line with our economic systems, no?

chii 5y ago

I highly suspect there's room for disruption in at-home education - it's so terrible right now. It'd be interesting to see if VR is a possible solution for such use cases. I think VR tech has to advance a bit more (in terms of ease of use, as well as affordability) before it can be used this way, but these early adopters' experience (see https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385 https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385) seems pretty positive to me.

folli 5y ago
From a practical perspective: outfitting every student with a VR setup sounds very expensive.
- bronco21016 5y ago
  For now. But at the end of the day a Quest is essentially a smart phone with a nice screen attached to your face. There’s no reason this hardware can’t come down in price. I mean the thing is only $300 as it is. Plenty of wealthier schools send every kid home with a Chromebook of similar price. I believe broadband access is the bigger hurdle to having every kid attend in VR. When schools closed during the pandemic there was a shortage of hardware, because of the pandemic. However, even the schools that did snag hardware quickly learned that many of their students didn’t have access to broadband.
  - chii 5y ago
    yea, i agree that broadband access is vital - not just for education, but for everything. It's the new roads and rail of the 21st century. Broadband should be a public utility, regulated as such and invested in as such imho.
blindmute 5y ago
Students learned with nothing more than books for hundreds of years and were better educated than most people today.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  >Students learned with nothing more than books for hundreds of years I don't think that is true >and were better educated than most people today. I'm really certain that isn't true

jay_kyburz 5y ago

What shocked me (here in Australia) was that every teacher is creating their own resources to give to the kids. They are probably all working towards a similar curriculum, but all the "projects" and handouts and stuff that the kids were given to work from was created by their teacher. Thousands of teachers all over Australia (and the world) are recreating the same resources every year! How is there not a national level library of resources they can draw on. Khan academy is really great, why is Mr Briggs from my small town recreating it badly in power point every year.

abyssin 5y ago
I’m shocked by the same thing in Belgium. Most of teachers’ work outside class could be automated if they decided to work collaboratively. I still can’t understand why they decide not to, and frankly I’m a bit worried that such people are in charge of teaching my kids. As a child, I remember seeing the poor quality of the material we were given, and hearing how hard teachers had worked to produce it. What’s the message behind it? Hard work is good because it’s work?
- piva00 5y ago
  I'm shocked that you are shocked and blaming the teachers for not organising themselves. Who the fuck is in charge of coordinating these efforts? Teachers have a lot to do, kids to care about, other stresses, and they aren't experts in ED-tech or even technology in general. They use the tools they know about or have been told about, they aren't going out of their way to learn new tools in their spare time, it sucks but not every profession is focused on min-maxing like software engineering does, not everyone is out there thinking about how to automate their menial tasks, you need to be educated/trained in that, maybe with programming as basic school curriculum we can train a whole new generation to think about automation through software? I know I wouldn't be thinking much about that if I was a teacher. I worked in the ED-tech space (related to music) for a while and for me it's shocking you are expecting teachers to be on top of this. The issue is systemic, the teachers are doing the best they can, the people on the top aren't trained either on using software to leverage and scale their teaching resources. There needs to be someone/some government that implements that as a policy, with experts guiding and driving the adoption of ED-tech in a better and more productive way. > As a child, I remember seeing the poor quality of the material we were given, and hearing how hard teachers had worked to produce it. What’s the message behind it? Hard work is good because it’s work? The message probably was more in line with "look at how much more work outside your expertise you'll have to do in real life, rather than just what you were hired and trained for". Seems pretty in line with our economic systems, no?