Do Laptops Help Learning? A Look at the Only Statewide School Laptop Program
peoriapublicradio.org
peoriapublicradio.org
1. Most of the software was glorified flash cards, a complete waste.
2. The medium strongly influenced the message. The sheer effort required to create software that supports a varied and interesting curriculum was (and probably still is) staggering. As a result, the software was typically one-dimensional, e.g., a single lesson structure varied by changing the parameters.
I've seen my kids use "educational" software today. In my view it suffers from the same problems, though it's graphically more sophisticated. A history lesson consists of looking at a screen, clicking on items, and reading the text that pops up for each item. A math lesson consists of choosing steps in a derivation from a menu of options.
Most of what they do using "educational" software is busywork, or drill work for the standardized tests.
On the other hand, I've also seen them use what I call "real" software, which is just general purpose stuff intended for a wider audience. For instance they write papers and engage in genuine collaboration using Google Docs. There's some really killer real software out there, that kids could be turned loose on, such as Jupyter/Python, Arduino, Scratch, any of the Office apps, Blender, etc. Also, kids need to be taught how to do real research via the WWW, especially the challenge of separating fact from bullshit.
The educational aspect of the mod reminds me of visiting one of those 'pioneer living' re-enactment places. The game is setup to force you to bootstrap up from being a cave (person) through farming and livestock and basic metal working, to actually achieving something that resembles medieval tech. The ores are actually named what geologists call them, you have to actually prepare the leather somewhat like in RL. Things aren't exact, but for a game that's just a mod it's pretty close.
Oh, and never forget the tedium of applied statistics that is Forestry bees/trees (breeding and Punnett squares). :(
As you point out, producing a new /type/ of educational product is very difficult. There need to be experiments in that space and some of the ideas will work better than others.
Contrast this with that recently linked story about how electricity did in factories. At first it wasn't that disruptive. It was changing the model of how a factory worked that allowed the true potential of electrification to shine. Today, at /best/, the most effective use of computers is as office software and assignment submission tools. In that use model a student might be better served by a cheaper or more powerful fixed station in their room and a portable 'notepad' (or large cell phone) for field use.
Agreed, with the proviso that "office software" includes some sort of computational environment. It bugs me that "school math" is so radically different than how adults -- possibly including mathematicians -- do math in their work and lives. Don't get me wrong, I breezed through school math, but I rarely use it now.
I open up a Jupyter notebook. It's not doing math for me. It's doing computations that are guided by my math knowledge, which is often coupled with empirical data.
Many people use Excel, including those who claim to be bad at (school) math, yet they are capable of doing useful computational work, even if it is relatively simplistic.
I'd like to see students learn math in more of an exploratory fashion, aided by real world software. For instance I think that probability and statistics would be a lot more intuitive if it were approached through modeling via random numbers. Problems that are hard to grasp via equations might be easy to grasp by modeling to predict an outcome.
I don't know if any youngsters have learned probability from there first. Would be interesting to hear.
Companies like Apple try to convince high schools that every student needs an iPad or parents that if they don't send their to college with a mac book pro - they aren't good parents.
It would take one hell of a peer-reviewed article to make me believe constant computer presence in classrooms did anything but harm students. Are their situations that rely on constantly looking up information on the internet? Probably. But we have to weigh that value of constant internet access (which students already have today with their smart phones) against two decades of manipulative practices by software and hardware vendors finagling their way into already ineffective and poorly spent education budgets.
I am learning a musical instrument. My practice is much more reliable when I have weekly lessons.
People are funny. Not haha funny. Complicated funny.
There's really no point teaching most kids anything beyond the basics of most subjects.
Spend more of our resources on motivating subjects & topics, rather than just telling kids to learn things.
If the kids aren't interested in learning what you're teaching, it doesn't matter what you're teaching anyway, you're just creating stress on everyone for no reason.
Maybe I'm extrapolating too much from my own experiences, but I lost nothing when I dropped physics because my teacher was an asshat, nor from sticking with chemistry because my teacher was a non-asshat.
(It should be noted that I don't say that any student will benefit from writing their notes in LaTeX. 90-99% will be absolutely lost when the first big formula appears, and that's before you get to figures describing tree algorithms.)
EDIT: Just saw the link in the article to another article about a study where hand-written notes resulted in better recall. Must be just me then.
After a year or so, we ditched the handwritten notes, and moved to a rotation between writing and proofreading. Images were still copied on paper only, tagged with an ID on paper and where it should appear in LaTeX, and drawn in Inkscape after the lecture.
I only really learned TikZ during my final physics thesis. When I started the CS degree, I was comfortable enough with it to stop bringing paper to class. (Also, I was now working alone, since my two collaborators moved on to other things.)
On one hand, I disagree with the current governors assertion that the program is a failure. Change in standardized test scores seems like the wrong metric.
Kids need to use computers because it's a societal standard. Low income students may not have access at home and gaining familiarity is crucial. It's a form of literacy.
On the other hand, I've seen tech become the tail that wags the dog in schools. In my home school district, there was a huge purchase of Smart Boards. A year later, they were universally used solely as projector screens.
Very interested to see the comments evolve here so I can hear others' experience with edtech.
As an adult, I'm sure that the thousands of hours I spent trying to diagnose hardware problems, get games to run, mod games, create graphics (of all types), write software, and playing strategy games ended up giving me a tremendous advantage over my friends who finished their homework and watched TV or play console games.
The laptop is a tool, albeit a very useful one. Eliminating the laptop is not the solution. Most universities have already addressed the issue of plagiarism. One sets explicit, written standards, explains that it is self-deception as well, and then use software that can detect it. Warn the first time, fail the second. Actions have consequences in the real world. The sooner students learn and accept this, the happier and more productive their lives will be.
Having grown up in an era where we wrote essays by hand and later used typewriters, computer word processing is a very useful tool. Abandoning it is foolish. Start by requiring drafts, encourage revision, and hold students accountable. If they are old enough to use laptops, they are old enough to use them properly.
#1 problem with education is that nobody is building for the student. The student is never the user.
Think about all of the companies and institutions that make up the experience of the modern student.
Think about who they are serving. Who are they building for? Who are textbook publishers building for?
It's probably not the students. Tools will not fix this. Laptops will not fix this.
Until students' experience affects schools' bottom line, education will not change for the better.
Did anyone ever ask what students actually want to learn? Did anyone ever talk to them like adults, and put them in charge of their own learning process?
I think for primary school there needs to be some sort of structure and "guidance from above" but starting with high school, students need to be put in charge. Sure we'll still need some sort of standardized testing and "proof of knowledge," but learning will be so much better if we let students follow their interests and their own pace, possibly working in small groups.
Companies are not not building for the student. It may very well be true that companies can be guided by other factors (businesses do need money to run), but it's not that they are not looking at students experience' when writing, creating, or publishing content- which at the heart of it is meant to get students to learn and engage.
At best, that's happening indirectly. Which isn't good enough.
You aren't wrong, but you are not describing the bigger picture. There is a vicious cycle going on. And school and district administrators are painfully aware of it, and would love to break it.
No doubt we could have done a better job on that software (including about marketing and financing). But puzzling over that situation, to try to understand what went wrong (despite magazine articles back then going on about the need for better educational software), I read widely in the alternative educational field. I discovered many surprising things about the differences between "education" and "schooling" (including regarding self-development, citizenship, employability, and obedience).
One big clue though should have been reading Seymour Papert writing about how almost all schools took his Lego/Logo system and turned a playful fun open-ended educational experience into a structured unpleasant one.
This book by NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto explains why hardly anyone cares whether kids learn, especially page 363-365 (power divided by 22) which explains twenty-two groups involved in education none of whom benefit by kids actually learning anything: https://archive.org/stream/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEd...
See also by Gatto: https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/uncategorized/two-social-rev... "I’ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world’s most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises—no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do “creative” work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system. Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
Even most parents don't care about expansive educational experiences, sadly. Most of them, schooled themselves, just want to see their children rise through the grades of the same religious-like cult of compulsory schooling they went through so their kids can "get a good job". It's the only life the last few generations have ever known since compulsory schooling was invented by the Prussians (contributing to two World Wars made possible by trained reflexive blind obedience to authority). As Gatto says, maybe such schooling was an idea that could have been justified at one time to produce material abundance -- but it no longer makes sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CeWip5BpU
As Gatto says: http://ojisanseiuchi.com/2014/08/10/schools-are-adoption/ “Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted. ... But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.”
This is what most school teachers really teach: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt "Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes."
That said, there are exceptions, usually informal education like at museums or arts programs or software like Kerbal Space Program. And some schools and teachers do better than others (like Gatto would bend or break the rules for his junior high school students such as by getting them internships). And homeschooling provides an (expensive-in-lost-income) alternative. https://xkcd.com/1356/
Lots more related links collected by me: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives...
Kids can certainly learn a lot via the web and using a search engine. There are a lot of great educational resources out there from the more conventional Khan Academy to the unconventional and everything in between.
But there is also the flip side of a flood of too much exciting information leading to the risks of:
* "supernormal stimuli" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli
* "the acceleration of addiction" http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
* "the cyber effect" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/14/the-cyber-effe...
* "[addictive] video games and the human condition". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqFu5O-oPmU
So, it sure helps to have guides and a community of learners (of all ages and abilities) learning together. And it helps to have resource centers (including libraries and makerspaces) the learners can spend time in to learn hands-on skills. But sadly such good places are few and far between even while hundreds of billions of dollars in the US flow into conventional "schooling" every year.
I have a lot more optimism that something like a basic income can remake the nature of education in our society by giving people freedom to pursue their own interests (including social interests and family interests including homeschooling their own kids) -- than optimism that tech entrepreneurs can improve schooling by pouring billions of dollars into helping fundamentally broken schools break kids even faster. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/business/dealbook/the-mel...
One alternative I proposed along those lines of an educationally-funded basic income and local educational resource centers: http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-s...
In middleschool, when the laptop program first rolled out, we were so excited to try the sleek new machines. I have distinct memories of asking a relative for an AppleScript book as a present. We would make simple "MadLibs" scripts with text-to-speech, scripts to animate windows and draw ASCII art in accordance with user commands, and even fake "viruses". We also attempted to use Xcode, but only got as far as making toy web browsers with the default UI toolkit.
Keynote was an amazing program because it allowed us to create full games using tens to hundreds of slides. These were mostly point-and-click, but we did attempt some fast moving action games. By fast moving, I mean a few frames per second. I also remember using Keynote to make a presentation about the Fukushima Daiichi disaster; it had an animated reactor, and interactive buttons to show what would happen with certain water levels, and so on.
When we switched to Windows in highschool, the computers temporarily lost some of their magic and we ended up playing Halo during lunch. Very soon we discovered Scratch[0] and Phun[1], and we were back at it again creating even better games, or sketching and dreaming up physics simulations on the bus ride home. One of the greatest benefits of these programs - I'm not sure if this is still the case - is that we could take the laptops home over summer break. This lead to many late nights of programming while putting off those summer essays.
Sometimes we could use online textbooks for a class, but most classes forced us to carry around heavy textbooks, so we ended up painfully lugging bags containing a laptop and 2+ textbooks between classes. I haven't mentioned class much, but we used them for news, for studying language, for creating music, and for math. Above all, we used them as an outlet for our curiosity, and that was their greatest strength at the time.
Now I understand many students receive iPads.
This limitation allowed us kids a very limited time to work on the computers, during that down time I and those who "got it" would be scribbling away on paper, reading books, magazines or whatever to plan what to do next when we had computer time. If there was some programming that needed fixing, we'd be working on solving these problems. Back then it was BASIC and assembly code on paper. Now its some pseudocode, simple flowcharts, and wireframes I pen down.
This similar might be a good thing for todays' students is to also limit computer time, (some will work at home, but the schools have a computer lab for those that don't) in the down-time (most of the school, day), they would be working using traditional methods with the final being word processed or whatever. Now they would be taking notes, and as they get to enter it in, during the downtime they'd be editing whatever they've written and printed out. Would make them more aware of what a great tool the computer is, afford them time to plan their projects the resources to maximize what access they have. This also gives them time to actually think of about what their project will be without some errant web sites distracting them along the way.
Some popular apps/platforms have millions of users and tens of millions in venture funding, yet they haven't done any efficacy research. Or perhaps they've done it privately and gotten results that they didn't want to publicize...
Very comprehensive video lectures for many fields of engineering, set up by Indian universities/government.
Have the kids write their own curriculum modeled after Wikipedia and/or wikibooks. Have them review each others work. And have them use smart notebooks like Jupyter to explore economics, math and physics.
Solving the "copy and paste" problem is about finding re-mixing techniques than strengthen learning, in a similar way that writing notes does. Maybe making visual collages to go with the wiki-essays is a better approach than forcing "re-writing in your own words". The point isn't the technique itself, but the result - are you able to acquire, internalise and in turn express new knowledge?
I think it's also notable that "professional" tools encompass spreadsheets, text editors, desktop publishing packages, version control (with reviews), photo and image editors and drawing programs - but not really word processing or powerpoint-like presentation tools.
Yet that seems to be the focus: the laptop of the 1950s - a smart typewriter.
I think that hints at the error. Computers aren't made for the "read/watch this thing" model. When we used computers in school it was to research some subject, answer some questions and that worked great.
There's also the issue of diminishing returns - if you need to spend one hour to get a 75/100 grade but need to spend 3 hours more just to get 80/100 it won't be worth the effort for a lot of kids - it sure wouldn't have been for me.
Laptops and pencils become learning tools when they are used with appropriately engaging experiences that are relevant to help the student learn and develop new competencies.
If we had an open educational stack we might have actual free content and then it might be possible to use the laptop like an e-reader. However, still, in that use case the student would be better off with a fixed main workstation and more of a consumption and quick-scribble-notes device for portable use.
Plus, books are a different kind of reading experience and a more tactile feedback. It might improve learning retention to read a book relative to reading a tablet or laptop. Having said that, /using/ that content in a trans formative way was always MUCH stronger for me.