6 ms·

In my old man yells at cloud moment: I'm pretty sick of experimenting with technology on kids under the guise of learning. Tablet use in classrooms is bad enou

In my old man yells at cloud moment: I'm pretty sick of experimenting with technology on kids under the guise of learning. Tablet use in classrooms is bad enough. I want my kid to be able to focus throughout his life, not be a phone zombie.

guestbest 4y ago
I have the same wish as well, but people who turned 40 when the iPhone came out are already phone zombies. Looking for a solution for my daughter
Xeoncross 4y ago
Yeah but, kids and teens are the easiest group to trick with dark patterns and addictive behavior. What other age group is going to give you better engagement metrics and help you raise capital? /s
- bombolo 4y ago
  Why the /s?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - NazakiAid 4y ago
    Yeah, no sarcasm as it's the truth
    - valine 4y ago
      Its not the truth. Young people are more difficult to persuade online. Technical literacy is on average higher than previous generations (though still not universal), and teens seem to be practically immune to current forms of online advertising. The "kids these days" trope is as old as time, and its no more true this time around.
      - bombolo 4y ago
        All youth is easy to convince of stuff. Not just these days. That's why religions and the military prefer young recruits.
      - 7speter 4y ago
        Wait just a minute here, I read this article a few weeks ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/27/gen-z-tech-shame-office-technology-printers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/27/gen-z-tec... What does “technical literacy” mean?
        haswell 4y ago
        I don’t see a strong correlation between older/legacy tech know-how and a broader notion of technical literacy. I think it might be more helpful to look at this as information literacy, or at least roughly speaking a higher degree of “Internet smarts”. Scanners and copiers are in that weird phase of product life where they’ve been mostly eliminated as core computing needs at home, but still see widespread business use since business will always be the long tail on fully digitizing. I think it’d be prudent to be specific, because for whatever degree of literacy or smarts or whatever you call it is true about teens in the information environment, the technology through which they experience that environment inches closer and closer to pure magic from a layman’s perspective.
      - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
        Hard disagree. We now have a whole generation of teenagers that grew up with iPhones and I have seen exceptionally poor average technical ability. When we were coming up you had to install modem drivers to get online. In windows 95... with no internet to check on a how-to. I don’t think I can imagine anything more delusional than a parent, handing their kid an iPad so they will go away and thinking that they’re also preparing this kid for a career in computers.
        karp773 4y ago
        Worse yet a misguided school district buying tablets instead of chromebooks, for example!
    - kurthr 4y ago
      It seems to me that they're only "hard to persuade" because they are constantly bombarded with these mental viruses. There was (books/telegraph then?) radio, then TV, then internet, social media, scrolling social video... While it's true that each generation eventually develops some immunity to their entertainment afflictions, it does seem to be accelerating, and those not exposed as youth have less immunity (grandpa on facebook). It also seems to have continuing impact even if most become functioning members of society.
    - ta1243 4y ago
      /serious
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Xeoncross 4y ago
    Because I didn't want to be lectured about why this is a bad idea.
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    Because this is HN and there are people here who think that unironically.
    - avmich 4y ago
      Did you forget /s? /s
ben_w 4y ago
When I was at secondary school, the teachers said they would focus on Windows because MacOS didn't have a future. That was about one year after the computer rooms got rid of their Acorn RISC OS machines. That era of Mac OS may well be dead and gone, but so is that era of Windows. So, don't worry, the phones and tablets aren't what's going to make your kids into attention addled zombies — neither will the AR glasses, though I'm not so confident about the inevitable brain implants let alone the equally inevitable DIY gene engineered pseudo-Ophiocordyceps.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
Dunno, we pretty much know our current classroom education system is abysmal compared to tutoring[1], which is on the other hand prohibitively expensive. Managing to bridge that gap would be an enormous benefit to humanity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
- gonehome 4y ago
  I learned way more useful skills from getting internet access in 1998 than from 90% of my in school teachers (and I went to a decent public school). For kids that are curious and want to learn - access to something like gpt-4 is amazing. All I had were guides like Eric S. Raymond's how to be a hacker that I had stumbled onto while trying to learn. It was so much harder to learn programming back then if you didn't know where to start and nobody around you knew about it. With gpt-4 you can just ask and get examples.
  - Avicebron 4y ago
    There is something to be said about struggling through learning difficult material on your own, and the sense of accomplishment/retention that it instills. I started programming a few years after you and there was a similarly difficult learning curve in sourcing the materials, setting up my own environment, and making progress on your own. My little brother is doing some form of machine learning in grad school currently and when I saw him last around when ChatGPT was starting to become a mainstream talking point we discussed a lot about how immediately going to something that can answer a question (e.g. how do i write code that does X) is tempting but, can be a bit dangerous when we offload our own ability to reason through something to an external entity. Shouldn't we be fostering thinking patterns that allow for creativity and innovation when given very little, versus fostering a sense of "oh I can always get the right answer to a question whenever I need it. So why bother with building a general mental problem solving framework for myself"?
    - chatmasta 4y ago
      You could have made that same argument about memory and recall skills prior to search engines. But I'm not sure anyone is now arguing search engines have been detrimental to working intelligence.
teucris 4y ago
In this case you are actually yelling at a “cloud” I’m more optimistic about tablets and AI, but the word that resonates with me the most here is “experimenting”. I don’t think there’s a guise, eg using learning as an excuse, but I do think that we have to be careful with how we present tech to children, even if it is with an altruistic goal. So if we shouldn’t experiment on students, how will we figure out how to make these new technologies improve student learning?
- boilerupnc 4y ago
  Maybe we're focusing on the wrong end of the spectrum to evaluate learning. I keep reading about how important it is cognitively for our aging population to embrace incremental learning. Maybe we should focus on using AI to help our older populations become more comfortable understanding technology and accessing information. As a bonus, they can also provide some compare/contrast feedback with what they already know from past experiences to improve the experience. My in-laws and parents already are enthusiastic Youtube consumers, mainly because in a very consumable way - they can hear/see how to [Fill in the Blank]. Stuff like changing out the washer in their faucet and feeling confident enough to try to do it themselves with the Youtube video as their crutch/sherpa was a game-changer for them. Otherwise, it falls back to paying $$$ (if you can find someone) to do it for you ... or lean on the generosity of a knowledgeable friend/family member (when they have time to give). Self-empowerment is their preferred choice in terms of shortest time to action at the least cost. To me, AI Tutors seem aligned with consumability (natural language engagement) and can also provide some confidence to older populations to better "understand" and maybe "do". My dad felt intimidated by Windows because the error and information dialogues were so intimidating in technical speak and worse, they were one-way communicators. The net vibe resulting was: "Windows is yelling at me that I'm doing something wrong, but I can't ask it a follow-up question to get more context on why or to fill in a hole in knowledge that I have about what TCP is/means. How can I proceed without making things worse". BTW, this is the same frustration people feel with automated customer service flows that aren't modeled to handle a broad enough range of customer inquiries. This next rev of AI engagement has the potential to make this two-way again. And I'll happily be out of a job as resident family tech expert or perhaps just evolving into the AI tutor model trainer for my loved ones.
la64710 4y ago
I think I’m on the contrary of the opinion that AI , phones and tablets also help kids … humanity needs these tools to process the vast amount of information that is continuously generated. By getting familiar with these tools the kids are getting equipped for the future not for the past. But while we do that I agree that we should also equip kids with the ability to focus and persevere and being patient. In fact we need to focus more on these abilities. We need to focus on the inside world as much or more as we focus on the outside world. Both needs to be done hand in hand to progress.
usrusr 4y ago
"I want my kid to be able to focus throughout his life" Tanks for granting old bachelors a moment of yelling "then don't have any!" at cloud. History suggests that they will always find a way, perhaps not all of them but at least as a whole, as a generation, but are we really exaggerating of we claim that it's worse than it used to be? Every bad turn that had ever happened before has at some point been unprecedented and would have been clearly ruled out before by apppeals to "pessimists are always predicting worse than what actually happens"
- mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  > Tanks for granting old bachelors a moment of yelling "then don't have any!" at cloud. Everyone has to learn the lesson for themselves. I can prepare them for it as best I can, however. So I don't really worry about this insomuch as lament the cultural fetish for "more tech = better." > Every bad turn that had ever happened before has at some point been unprecedented and would have been clearly ruled out before by apppeals to "pessimists are always predicting worse than what actually happens" I mull over this frequently. My objection stems from constant tablet use/availability during school hours. Being a tablet zombie in 4th grade is not healthy even if you're only using learning apps. I'd much prefer kids to binge tablets at home for 3 hours after school occasionally than have it at hand 8 hours a day, everyday. If tablets were something that were occasionally trotted out at school for specific tasks: no problem. Assigning kids tablets and making them an integral part of the teaching workflow really bothers me. This is part of a larger strategy of mine: controlled exposure to high-stimuli things alongside building a full enough life to try to avoid addiction. My kids will eventually play video games (probably not trashy mobile games), use tablets, watch TV (they already do) and eventually, correspond with AI. (I am hoping social media dies a fiery death before they get old enough to think it is actually important.) Obviously, these are all plans in the abstract. All we can do is give our kids the cognitive tools to see how technology use affects their life.
- lastLinkedList 4y ago
  Part of me is worried that we'll be giving kids a distorted perception of what AIs actually are - hell, the general adult public can't help but anthropomorphize them to a degree that I don't necessarily think is warranted.
aaroninsf 4y ago
You might find my comment elsewhere in the thread of interest, my high school age kid is able to leverage AI in a way that is augmenting rather than replacing her native intelligence, and accelerating her own learning and integration. I find these tools are not unlike "smart drugs"—a necessary aid to some, a destructive crutch for others, and performance enhancement for a subset of the already competitive seeking advantage. Gattaca approaches from an unexpected direction... (I have joked that encouraging use of AI but forbidding social media, feels not unlike championing psychedelics while decrying stimulants and opioids.)
tnel77 4y ago
I love technology, but I don’t get how anyone can think it’s wise to let their children stare at a screen all day. My nieces and nephews spend all of their time staring at iPads, but my children have much more limited screen time rules. It’s a small sample population, but my kids are generally pretty calm and well behaved. I love my nieces and nephews, but they are heathens.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  As opposed to white collar work where we stare at screens all day?
  - tnel77 4y ago
    I feel that it’s less about the screen and more about what you’re doing with it. When my children stare at screens, it usually to play an educational game. When I stare at screens, most of it is work or adulting. About 2-3 hours/week is gaming and 4-6 hours/week is watching some silly show with my wife. Now, kids in school are obviously doing educational stuff on their tablets so I see the fallacy in this line of thought. Idk. I feel like staring at a book is better, but what do I know? Maybe the increased engagement from a tablet is worth the downsides?

guestbest 4y ago

I have the same wish as well, but people who turned 40 when the iPhone came out are already phone zombies. Looking for a solution for my daughter

Xeoncross 4y ago

Yeah but, kids and teens are the easiest group to trick with dark patterns and addictive behavior. What other age group is going to give you better engagement metrics and help you raise capital? /s

bombolo 4y ago
Why the /s?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- NazakiAid 4y ago
  Yeah, no sarcasm as it's the truth
  - valine 4y ago
    Its not the truth. Young people are more difficult to persuade online. Technical literacy is on average higher than previous generations (though still not universal), and teens seem to be practically immune to current forms of online advertising. The "kids these days" trope is as old as time, and its no more true this time around.
    - bombolo 4y ago
      All youth is easy to convince of stuff. Not just these days. That's why religions and the military prefer young recruits.
    - 7speter 4y ago
      Wait just a minute here, I read this article a few weeks ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/27/gen-z-tech-shame-office-technology-printers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/27/gen-z-tec... What does “technical literacy” mean?
      - haswell 4y ago
        I don’t see a strong correlation between older/legacy tech know-how and a broader notion of technical literacy. I think it might be more helpful to look at this as information literacy, or at least roughly speaking a higher degree of “Internet smarts”. Scanners and copiers are in that weird phase of product life where they’ve been mostly eliminated as core computing needs at home, but still see widespread business use since business will always be the long tail on fully digitizing. I think it’d be prudent to be specific, because for whatever degree of literacy or smarts or whatever you call it is true about teens in the information environment, the technology through which they experience that environment inches closer and closer to pure magic from a layman’s perspective.
    - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
      Hard disagree. We now have a whole generation of teenagers that grew up with iPhones and I have seen exceptionally poor average technical ability. When we were coming up you had to install modem drivers to get online. In windows 95... with no internet to check on a how-to. I don’t think I can imagine anything more delusional than a parent, handing their kid an iPad so they will go away and thinking that they’re also preparing this kid for a career in computers.
      - karp773 4y ago
        Worse yet a misguided school district buying tablets instead of chromebooks, for example!
  - kurthr 4y ago
    It seems to me that they're only "hard to persuade" because they are constantly bombarded with these mental viruses. There was (books/telegraph then?) radio, then TV, then internet, social media, scrolling social video... While it's true that each generation eventually develops some immunity to their entertainment afflictions, it does seem to be accelerating, and those not exposed as youth have less immunity (grandpa on facebook). It also seems to have continuing impact even if most become functioning members of society.
  - ta1243 4y ago
    /serious
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Xeoncross 4y ago
  Because I didn't want to be lectured about why this is a bad idea.
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  Because this is HN and there are people here who think that unironically.
  - avmich 4y ago
    Did you forget /s? /s

ben_w 4y ago

When I was at secondary school, the teachers said they would focus on Windows because MacOS didn't have a future. That was about one year after the computer rooms got rid of their Acorn RISC OS machines. That era of Mac OS may well be dead and gone, but so is that era of Windows. So, don't worry, the phones and tablets aren't what's going to make your kids into attention addled zombies — neither will the AR glasses, though I'm not so confident about the inevitable brain implants let alone the equally inevitable DIY gene engineered pseudo-Ophiocordyceps.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

Dunno, we pretty much know our current classroom education system is abysmal compared to tutoring[1], which is on the other hand prohibitively expensive. Managing to bridge that gap would be an enormous benefit to humanity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

gonehome 4y ago
I learned way more useful skills from getting internet access in 1998 than from 90% of my in school teachers (and I went to a decent public school). For kids that are curious and want to learn - access to something like gpt-4 is amazing. All I had were guides like Eric S. Raymond's how to be a hacker that I had stumbled onto while trying to learn. It was so much harder to learn programming back then if you didn't know where to start and nobody around you knew about it. With gpt-4 you can just ask and get examples.
- Avicebron 4y ago
  There is something to be said about struggling through learning difficult material on your own, and the sense of accomplishment/retention that it instills. I started programming a few years after you and there was a similarly difficult learning curve in sourcing the materials, setting up my own environment, and making progress on your own. My little brother is doing some form of machine learning in grad school currently and when I saw him last around when ChatGPT was starting to become a mainstream talking point we discussed a lot about how immediately going to something that can answer a question (e.g. how do i write code that does X) is tempting but, can be a bit dangerous when we offload our own ability to reason through something to an external entity. Shouldn't we be fostering thinking patterns that allow for creativity and innovation when given very little, versus fostering a sense of "oh I can always get the right answer to a question whenever I need it. So why bother with building a general mental problem solving framework for myself"?
  - chatmasta 4y ago
    You could have made that same argument about memory and recall skills prior to search engines. But I'm not sure anyone is now arguing search engines have been detrimental to working intelligence.

teucris 4y ago

In this case you are actually yelling at a “cloud” I’m more optimistic about tablets and AI, but the word that resonates with me the most here is “experimenting”. I don’t think there’s a guise, eg using learning as an excuse, but I do think that we have to be careful with how we present tech to children, even if it is with an altruistic goal. So if we shouldn’t experiment on students, how will we figure out how to make these new technologies improve student learning?

boilerupnc 4y ago
Maybe we're focusing on the wrong end of the spectrum to evaluate learning. I keep reading about how important it is cognitively for our aging population to embrace incremental learning. Maybe we should focus on using AI to help our older populations become more comfortable understanding technology and accessing information. As a bonus, they can also provide some compare/contrast feedback with what they already know from past experiences to improve the experience. My in-laws and parents already are enthusiastic Youtube consumers, mainly because in a very consumable way - they can hear/see how to [Fill in the Blank]. Stuff like changing out the washer in their faucet and feeling confident enough to try to do it themselves with the Youtube video as their crutch/sherpa was a game-changer for them. Otherwise, it falls back to paying $$$ (if you can find someone) to do it for you ... or lean on the generosity of a knowledgeable friend/family member (when they have time to give). Self-empowerment is their preferred choice in terms of shortest time to action at the least cost. To me, AI Tutors seem aligned with consumability (natural language engagement) and can also provide some confidence to older populations to better "understand" and maybe "do". My dad felt intimidated by Windows because the error and information dialogues were so intimidating in technical speak and worse, they were one-way communicators. The net vibe resulting was: "Windows is yelling at me that I'm doing something wrong, but I can't ask it a follow-up question to get more context on why or to fill in a hole in knowledge that I have about what TCP is/means. How can I proceed without making things worse". BTW, this is the same frustration people feel with automated customer service flows that aren't modeled to handle a broad enough range of customer inquiries. This next rev of AI engagement has the potential to make this two-way again. And I'll happily be out of a job as resident family tech expert or perhaps just evolving into the AI tutor model trainer for my loved ones.

la64710 4y ago

I think I’m on the contrary of the opinion that AI , phones and tablets also help kids … humanity needs these tools to process the vast amount of information that is continuously generated. By getting familiar with these tools the kids are getting equipped for the future not for the past. But while we do that I agree that we should also equip kids with the ability to focus and persevere and being patient. In fact we need to focus more on these abilities. We need to focus on the inside world as much or more as we focus on the outside world. Both needs to be done hand in hand to progress.

usrusr 4y ago

"I want my kid to be able to focus throughout his life" Tanks for granting old bachelors a moment of yelling "then don't have any!" at cloud. History suggests that they will always find a way, perhaps not all of them but at least as a whole, as a generation, but are we really exaggerating of we claim that it's worse than it used to be? Every bad turn that had ever happened before has at some point been unprecedented and would have been clearly ruled out before by apppeals to "pessimists are always predicting worse than what actually happens"

mattgreenrocks 4y ago
> Tanks for granting old bachelors a moment of yelling "then don't have any!" at cloud. Everyone has to learn the lesson for themselves. I can prepare them for it as best I can, however. So I don't really worry about this insomuch as lament the cultural fetish for "more tech = better." > Every bad turn that had ever happened before has at some point been unprecedented and would have been clearly ruled out before by apppeals to "pessimists are always predicting worse than what actually happens" I mull over this frequently. My objection stems from constant tablet use/availability during school hours. Being a tablet zombie in 4th grade is not healthy even if you're only using learning apps. I'd much prefer kids to binge tablets at home for 3 hours after school occasionally than have it at hand 8 hours a day, everyday. If tablets were something that were occasionally trotted out at school for specific tasks: no problem. Assigning kids tablets and making them an integral part of the teaching workflow really bothers me. This is part of a larger strategy of mine: controlled exposure to high-stimuli things alongside building a full enough life to try to avoid addiction. My kids will eventually play video games (probably not trashy mobile games), use tablets, watch TV (they already do) and eventually, correspond with AI. (I am hoping social media dies a fiery death before they get old enough to think it is actually important.) Obviously, these are all plans in the abstract. All we can do is give our kids the cognitive tools to see how technology use affects their life.
lastLinkedList 4y ago
Part of me is worried that we'll be giving kids a distorted perception of what AIs actually are - hell, the general adult public can't help but anthropomorphize them to a degree that I don't necessarily think is warranted.

aaroninsf 4y ago

You might find my comment elsewhere in the thread of interest, my high school age kid is able to leverage AI in a way that is augmenting rather than replacing her native intelligence, and accelerating her own learning and integration. I find these tools are not unlike "smart drugs"—a necessary aid to some, a destructive crutch for others, and performance enhancement for a subset of the already competitive seeking advantage. Gattaca approaches from an unexpected direction... (I have joked that encouraging use of AI but forbidding social media, feels not unlike championing psychedelics while decrying stimulants and opioids.)

tnel77 4y ago

I love technology, but I don’t get how anyone can think it’s wise to let their children stare at a screen all day. My nieces and nephews spend all of their time staring at iPads, but my children have much more limited screen time rules. It’s a small sample population, but my kids are generally pretty calm and well behaved. I love my nieces and nephews, but they are heathens.

theGnuMe 4y ago
As opposed to white collar work where we stare at screens all day?
- tnel77 4y ago
  I feel that it’s less about the screen and more about what you’re doing with it. When my children stare at screens, it usually to play an educational game. When I stare at screens, most of it is work or adulting. About 2-3 hours/week is gaming and 4-6 hours/week is watching some silly show with my wife. Now, kids in school are obviously doing educational stuff on their tablets so I see the fallacy in this line of thought. Idk. I feel like staring at a book is better, but what do I know? Maybe the increased engagement from a tablet is worth the downsides?