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For those who are in the "technology will solve education at scale" camp and open-minded + curious to learn how this has played out over the past century, I hig

For those who are in the "technology will solve education at scale" camp and open-minded + curious to learn how this has played out over the past century, I highly recommend Audrey Watters' work ([0], [1]) Every new flavor (radio->TV, TV->Internet, Internet->MOOCs) was going to succeed where the previous one had failed, but (spoiler alert), cutting human teachers out of the loop has had a 100% failure rate (at scale -- though small pockets may have seen success). [0] https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/far-reaching-legacy-first-teaching-machines https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/far-r... [1] The Monsters of Education Technology (book)

zug_zug 4y ago
I feel like a lot of people are taking a very emotional stance on this. Everything I learned about coding I learned through new mediums (software/internet) myself, no human in the loop. Just a bit of a generalization.
- disqard 4y ago
  I'm an autodidact like you. However, I'm under no illusions that what worked for people like us will work at scale. Extrapolating from our experiences is how Nicholas Negroponte came to the conclusion that air-dropping laptops over villages in Africa would magically teach a bunch of children how to code. Another level-headed perspective in this area is provided by Kentaro Toyama (author of "Geek Heresy") who saw several such well-intentioned projects up close during his tenure as director of Microsoft Research Asia: > All of the evidence stands on its own, but I will tie them together with a single theory that explains why technology is unable to substitute for good teaching: Quality primary and secondary education is a multi-year commitment whose single bottleneck is the sustained motivation of the student to climb an intellectual Everest. Though children are naturally curious, they nevertheless require ongoing guidance and encouragement to persevere in the ascent. Caring supervision from human teachers, parents, and mentors is the only known way of generating motivation for the hours of a school day, to say nothing of eight to twelve school years.

zug_zug 4y ago

I feel like a lot of people are taking a very emotional stance on this. Everything I learned about coding I learned through new mediums (software/internet) myself, no human in the loop. Just a bit of a generalization.

disqard 4y ago
I'm an autodidact like you. However, I'm under no illusions that what worked for people like us will work at scale. Extrapolating from our experiences is how Nicholas Negroponte came to the conclusion that air-dropping laptops over villages in Africa would magically teach a bunch of children how to code. Another level-headed perspective in this area is provided by Kentaro Toyama (author of "Geek Heresy") who saw several such well-intentioned projects up close during his tenure as director of Microsoft Research Asia: > All of the evidence stands on its own, but I will tie them together with a single theory that explains why technology is unable to substitute for good teaching: Quality primary and secondary education is a multi-year commitment whose single bottleneck is the sustained motivation of the student to climb an intellectual Everest. Though children are naturally curious, they nevertheless require ongoing guidance and encouragement to persevere in the ascent. Caring supervision from human teachers, parents, and mentors is the only known way of generating motivation for the hours of a school day, to say nothing of eight to twelve school years.