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Are Computers in Classrooms Bad for Learning
Sideshow Vox writes "Evidently a number of experts in the education field see more harm than good in exposing young children to computers in the classroom. The article raises some good points about the darker side of the current fashion of computers in every classroom." I don't know when I would have found the time to write Slashdot during college if we didn't have computers in the classroom ;)
Jeez.
- Education is not just about transferring information, and isn't improved by transferring it more efficiently
- Kids will always know more than the teachers. This will inevitably lead to huge conflicts. The teacher in charge of computing is often the one who wasn't any good at anything else.
- Computers aren't programmable. Not anymore. They used to come with BASIC interpreters. Now you just get Windows on the home PC, or a Mac. Kids can't learn as they play.
- A lot of the so-called educational software is a joke, rewarding little kids with visual stimuli too easily, leading them to fire at the programmes at random. Some studies have found that a lot of the educational software for very young kids discourages rational thought and promotes trial and error.
- Multiuser systems in schools tend to be run on an utterly fascist basis, due to admin cluelessness and underfundedness.
That really was an unordered list.I think that the emphasis on having computers in the classroom is a bit too high. I think that people go out of their ways to find ways to put computers in every classroom. If there isn't really a reason for the computer, I don't see a reason to put it there. That's the case in most high schools. Some colleges dump ethernet jacks into every classroom. Sometimes this is useful, sometimes it isn't.
One interesting thought. I'm a computer science major. Most of my lectures are taught in rooms without computers (at least, not ones that we are really using). They get the concepts along fine without them as well. True, that means that I have to spend a few hours a week in a computer lab to get my assignments done, but what use would the computers be? If I'm in a math class learning Big-O notation, I could see a computer demo helping with the concepts (graphs and such), but if I'm a computer science major, and don't find it NECESSARY, I can hardly see how it is even applicable in most high school classrooms. I can see computers helping out a LOT, I can see how my classes are MUCH improved by their use, but when people are just saying, "Yeah, and we need a computer because computers are cool." It's kind of pointless.
Also, teachers should concentrate on actually teaching their students what they need to know. If computers are helping this, cool. Don't just have them sit and chat on ICQ during your lecture though, it's not productive. The only thing that that might help is the students who need a little distraction during your lecture. They might as well be reading a newspaper and ignoring you completely.
Anyways, just a few thoughts, use them if you can, but don't force it if it's useless.
Eh...
for years, we've been told that the "computer gap" or "technology gap" between underpriveleged students and white, middle-class students is going to leave the poor out of the lucrative technology jobs.
the solution is to get modern computers into schools, and to allocate massive federal funds to implement the solution.
right?
some questions for the slashdot audience:
1) which would you teach programming to a middle school student with:
a) an apple II with logo and BASIC.
b) a pentium III running Microsoft Visual Studio.
2) how many of you had computer classes in school that consisted of playing "oregon trail"?
3) do you think that computers in classrooms are being used to teach computer skills, or as glorified slide projectors?
4) how much does it cost to get large coporations to donate their old XT's and apples to your school? (hint: they're dying to use this as a tax writeoff).
5) do you need a pentium III to teach assembly to a child? will an XT do? might an old XT or an apple be better?
when i was 14 i designed a robot that would sweep a photocell across my room, detect intruders, and alert me via a modem. when i was 16 i used the same system to control an optical fiber-measuring test gear for a science fair. it was an apple II. i haven't seem a more accessible computer since.
-food for thought, and my 2c.
"The Internet," Roszak recently told The Dallas Morning News, "offers electronic graffiti. The idea that they should be swimming in a sea of information is idiotic. The essence of thinking is mastering ideas."
well i'm all for keeping 10-year-old third graders off of slashdot. we've got too many 30-year-old third graders already.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
When I was in kindergarten, I had already learned the basics of reading before my classmates. So my teacher, in her infinite wisdom, sent me up one day a week to practice reading with the 3rd graders in the school's computer lab. The procedure was simple: I was given a color-coded disk (different colors meant different levels) which contained a story to read and then some comprehension questions. That way, students could read on their own and get instant feedback on their progress.
The program worked well, even given the basic hardware specs (Apple II's or XT's). There was no problem with me understanding the material -- even illustrations and hyperlinked definitions of "hard words" were available. However, the comprehension questions were a different story. Students who gave a wrong answer to the multiple-choice questions were prompted with a reassuring "Try Again!" and a chance to choose from the remaining options. Although the total score went down as a result of second-guessing and the usage of "hints" (eliminating incorrect answer choices a la "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire"'s 50-50) the teachers rarely paid attention and merely were on hand to dispense disks.
What does this teach children? If you're asked a question, choose any answer. If you're not correct, don't worry -- the computer will guide you in the right direction. The computer does all the processing, while the students exist to push buttons. Anything requiring cognition and thought, or (gasp!) an answer in some form other than multiple choice, is neglected completely. Of course, the lack of human interaction and group thinking also come into play.
Bottom line: computers are certainly very useful in education, but they should not replace teaching methods that involve more than just pushing buttons and getting responses.
For more information, click here.
As James Glieck points out in Faster, we used to wait weeks between lettered discussions and conversations -- even in professional fields. With the advent of typewriters and the enhancement of the postal service, this was reduced to days. Still, days of contemplation and reflection are good. You have time to think about things before you comment on them or reply to them, while waiting for a response.
In this instantaneous age, you have seconds, minutes or hours. I fire an email off to a customer, student or friend and can often receive an immediate response. Not much thought there. Or, if there is a lot of thought, certainly not much pause for reflection and contemplation before hitting the send button. We would consider minutes to be sufficient time for thinking these days.
Political polls are the same. What used to be a matter of days and weeks to form opinions now is, literally, seconds. Ten seconds after a politician says something, it is regurgitated on the news in sound-bites and immediately, opinions which have not been codified and split-second polls are returned and broadcast. Shazam -- you now have material to form your ill-understood opinion on.
Let's not just blame this on computers and the internet -- or short attention spans of children. Processing of information has grown greater than exponentially. If we're going to blame anything, blame TV Dinners, 22-minute news-casts, 10 second commercial jingles and minute-rice.
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seumas.com
It serves no purpose and doesn't teach children anything?
Don't get me wrong, if your going to attempt to teach children something about computers, then, by all means, but a computer in each class room, and install Logo, or BASIC, or something.
But, don't do what was done to me. In the school district I grew up in, every grade (small schools too) had it's own computer room, which consisted of about 40 computers. So, once a week, we would join up with another class, and go to the computer room to learn.
This consisted mainly of three actives, in order of use:
- Playing learning games. Absolutely useless. You learned how to play stupid games that were supposed to teach you grammar and math. Almost always the edutainment games seemed to be below our learning level. I can never once remembering a game that reinforced some just taught lesson. It seems to me that this was just done to give the teachers a break from teaching us.
- Writing essays and such. Mildly useful, but still pointless. Perhaps if they had instructed us on how to use a word processor, it would have been good, but instead most students would hand write their essay, and edit it using pen and paper techniques. Then, in one shot, type it into the computer, and this was the preferred way, since it kept the children out of the teacher's hair (they often knew very little about how to actually use the word processing program)
- Actual instruction on computers. I had one class (the only one ever offered to me) on programming. It was in Pascal, and this was only in high school. They should have done this more often.
Perhaps it's just a bad experience, and I had lazy teachers, but I don't think it's that abnormal. Computers were just used as gaming devices, in a bizarre attempt to ease parents concerns that we would be ready for the coming technology age.All of my knowledge of programming (I took the final for the Pascal class the second week and didn't have to take the class) came from my self-teaching, by reading books and the like. So as a result, I tend to think I would have been better off (merely because my teachers would have been forced to teach me more) if our schools didn't have computers. And that coming from someone who makes his living as a "Software Engineer".
-- It is too late for the pebbles to vote, the avalanche has already started.
I read through this article, and I have to agree with these educators: Bringing the cutesy video-game world of Windows and the MTV-esqe Internet (not the meaty content that experienced surfers go for, but the eye candy kids will gravitate to naturally) would be little better than having kids watch cartoons all day in class.
I got a computer of my own for my eighth birthday. Prior to that, I had used other people's computers to program, both at school and at friends' houses. I learned quite a lot on that machine, because it was a machine that did little on its own. It was raw clay, and I got to learn how to sculpt. How could you deny that that's valuable to a child?
Sure, there were game cartridges, and yes, I played them. (Moon Patrol anyone?) But kids have N64 or Dreamcast or PS2 or whatever nowadays, and so don't need the computer for that. Most of the value I derived from my computer was learning how to make it do things. It was like a box of Legos, only the building blocks were program statements and the structures I built were on a TV screen.
Today's computers aren't like that. Rather, they're like TV. Force feed eye candy. They exist for "wow" and "fluff." I personally had started falling into that trap in the PC world. I got pulled out of that trap when I went to college and learned Unix. Now, whenever I go to use a PC running Windows, I feel like I'm watching MTV or something. It's all so uselessly flashy and relatively devoid of content compared to its volume.
It's really sad.
I intend to keep my Apple ][e's, Commodore 64's, TI-99/4A's, and so on, to give my kids machines to learn on. When they're old enough, I'll give them logins on my Linux network and start teaching them C or some other structured language, before BASIC's brain-rot sets in too heavily -- you're ok if you catch them by puberty.
Sitting a kid in front of a web browser does not teach computing. Showing a kid how to make the computer do things it's not already trained to do (ie. program) opens the door for true creative exploration.
No comments about posture though... (as I slouch heavily into my chair).
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!