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Comment by byoung2 | Hacker News Reader

Education

Agreed, but that's pretty broad. Are we talking:

-Learning materials? ie- textbooks -Learning software? ie- someone just kill blackboard already

Our county got smartboards in every school, and, the thing is, about a third of the teachers can actually use them effectively.

And they cost 6000 dollars to lease. And our county is short on money anyways, so all in all people aren't really too happy about them...

But at least it's a step towards progress.

Smart boards seem like many lazy school boards' way of saying, "Here, now we can say we're up to speed in terms of technology." My high school did the same thing, and they were never used, but always brought up in school presentations.

Investing that money into getting an excellent technology administrator or computer science teacher would have made much more of a difference.

It's not really a step towards progress, it's administrators trying to make it look like they're making progress without actually having to do anything other than spend money.

My aunt teaches at a school where they accidentally threw away all the power cables for the smart boards before they were even used.

At MIT we still use chalkboards. They seem to work pretty well, even with new curriculum.

I've seen the MIT OCW courses, and yeah, professors seem to be pretty efficient with them.

I think he means Blackboard, Inc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.

They have probably the worst UX I've seen in a web-app; their discussion board software I've had to use for a few classes- and it's abysmally pathetic. phpBB beats it by light-years. But apparently they have a monopoly thanks to some dubious patents.

No, I think he's referring to digital whiteboards that capture what is written on them.

They've been around for a while (I remember seeing them at Tech/Edu conferences in the web 1.0 days).

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree then, unless jasonlbaptiste would like to weigh in and clarify? :-)

I meant these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promethean_Ltd

Jason's referring to the web software.

Pie is referring to the digital boards on walls.

I think "he" may have been referring to two different people

Can't you make a smartboard with a laptop, projector and wiimote ... http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/

Then you might want specific software but I'm sure it's available - tablet-PC software should probably do it.

Absolutely but in education, like other industries, any technological innovation cannot succeed on its own.

Immediately comes to mind is political change (political in the sense of the interaction between a governing body and the people/users). Usually this involves a nontransparent decision process by a centralized power. This thread was particularly enlightening: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803287

Also in education, one cannot forget the social element. Any game changing innovation today will likely embody some web2.0 ideals.

Not only does it contribute to the spread of innovation. I hate to use the word viral but in today's world it likely will have to spread virally through the internet. Reminds me the adoption of the printing press, arguably the greatest educational innovation, was really helped by pornographic material.

What really interests me in the web2.0 and education space is crowd sourcing. Not only Wikipedia but Wikibooks.

Edit: Expanded on web2.0

I second education. Not just the software for teaching, but the software that the teachers use to manage schedules and grades. And the software that the school uses to manage student information. And the software that the school library uses... something that doesn't need to be rebooted every Saturday. I won't even mention the ugly, slow software that the school nurse uses. It's all slow and insecure, the UIs are never intuitive. This is why educators have trouble adopting new software: their days are broken up into finite slices of time. They have only a few short minutes to get ready for the next class, and an even shorter number of minutes to capture the attention of the students... there's just no time to be struggling with fussy, unfriendly software. This is equally true for the smartboards -- half the time they don't play nice with whatever is being plugged into them, and you have to believe that the students lose respect for a teacher they see cursing at a machine.

Education is starting to being disrupted by various companies: straighterline($99month college courses) , Guaranteach(personalized online learning for k12) , and quite few others. but it's a huge industry so there is place for many companies. but i'm not sure the big barrier here is good technology, probably making sales , and building contents are the barriers here.

Yeah, I would say especially secondary education. It seems like that's an industry in need of a serious overhaul.

they just need to stop teaching useless shit.

Take math for example, why are we teaching kids how to do calculus using a piece of paper, when in the real world they'll be using an Excel spreadsheet?

Math, Chemistry, Physics, Finance, pretty much any course that requires calculations wastes 90% of the course, teaching the kids how to do the calculations by hand, in most cases without even a calculator.

Excel is being widely used in the real world, yet you never see it taught in the classroom. Why? Excel is what the kids will be using in their jobs, shouldn't you be teaching them the skills they'll actually need? Instead of teaching them outdated concepts? Why don't you teach them how to do calculus using an abacus?

Knowing intimately the underlying principles of a field is important to creating sophisticated manipulations of existing theorems and ideas. Yes, we could teach them how to change what we know sooner, but they wouldn't understand exactly what they're doing.

Also, the mental processes engaged by writing by hand are different than those used when computing. I think there's room for both when teaching people things.

An abacus is a better idea than you think. Most people struggle with mathematics because it's not presented in a way that people who are not mathematicians will understand. Read the biography for any $FAMOUS_SCIENTIST and you shouldn't be surprised to find "read Euclid's elements at age [5-12]"

That's a horrible idea, and it sounds a lot more like training than education. 90% of Math, Chemistry and Physics are calculations? You're doing it wrong anyway.

The material content of the calculus class is nigh useless, the goal is to get to get people to be able to think and solve problems.

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