Computers Not Working In Education

salimfadhley writes "BBC Radio 4's current affairs program 'Analysis' is reporting [realaudio] [txt transcript] on emerging evidence that computers have harmed, rather than helped educational progress. There is still much debate among even the most enthusiastic supporters of schools technology about how computers should best be used. Despite record investment in computers in the USA and UK, recent studies (not the ones funded by educational software companies) have shown a significant drop in core subjects (Math, English) in schools that place strong emphasis on Information Technology. Evidence also suggests that whilst information technology has great potential in the classroom, teachers have not yet found better use for computers than as a big library. Very few schools have been able to use the new technology for cultural exchange, or to build practical educational networks with other schools. Teachers do not know whether computers should be seen as an exciting but peripheral educational 'accessory', or if computers can actually be used to solve the most pressing problems of literacy and numeracy - the sorts of things that get kids through exams." The Economist had a similar article a month or two back, about Israeli schools that had similar results, along with an interesting comparison between how people see computers now, and how people in the early 20th century saw film strips in the classroom.

Comments

They wrote a book about this

[Hoover,L Ron]

See "Silicon Snake Oil" by Clifford Stoll in which he arrives at a similar conclusion. This came out about 4 or 5 years ago, don't know why anybody is surprised by this.

More information

[Resseguie]

Here is more information along the same lines. It's an interview with Cliff Stoll (author of Cuckoo's Egg and Silicon Snake Oil.

http://www.familyhaven.com/parenting/hightechheret ic.html

If you haven't read his book "High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian" you really should. It's got some great reading and some things we should think about as we design software.

What can we do as software developers to actually make computers useful in the classroom instead of so distracting? Any thoughts from educators out there?

Re:More information

[DeadSea]

My Aunt is a teacher and she is somewhat frustrated by the computers that her elementary students get to use. She thinks that there are some valuable things that can be taught on the computers: Typing, internet research, math drills, etc. The biggest problem to her is that by the time you get the kids hearded to the computer room, everybody logged in, and the correct program loaded, you only have 15 minutes of instruction out of an hour period left. She also feels that the computers would be too distracting on the students desk in the main classroom all the time.

Having every kid have their own login is too much of a pain. Getting them set up, then having kids forget their passwords, took too much time. Her kids did not want use a computer logged in as somebody else because they wanted it personalized as "theirs".

Another headache was software licenses. Some programs required a disk be brought around to each computer to activate the session. The school district was (understandably) reluctant to spring for the best rated (but expensive) instructive software. This is an area in which free software would be a boon.

One can easily see how the headaches of computers easily distract from the learning process.

solow paradox in education

[kedi]

Mentioned Economist.com article "Pass the chalk", found here: http://ron.unique.cc/economist/economist1.htm, names three possible reasons for negative relationship between computer use and test scores.

"The authors offer three possible explanations of why this might be. First, the introduction of computers into classrooms might have gobbled up cash that would otherwise have paid for other aspects of education. But that is unlikely in this case since the money for the programme came from the national lottery, and the study found no significant change in teaching resources, methods or training in schools that acquired computers through the scheme.
A second possibility is that the transition to using computers in instruction takes time to have an effect. Maybe, say the authors, but the schools surveyed had been using the scheme's computers for a full school year. That was enough for the new computers to have had a large (and apparently malign) influence on fourth-grade maths scores. The third explanation is the simplest: that the use of computers in teaching is no better (and perhaps worse) than other teaching methods."

One might add a possible fourth reason which may explain negative math score: EASE. I think if the pupils use computers to learn and solve mathematical problems they might start relyiong too much on computers and in effect "unlearn" maths.

Another skeptic voice when it comes to possible role of IT in development and education is found here:
http://www.himalmag.com/2002/august/essay.h tm

Yet another voice Prashant Sharma from School of Oriental and African Studies University of London
http://www.dgroups.org/groups/OKN/docs/dis sertatio n.pdf

And skepticism about IT in production is best represented by "'Solow paradox'-- widespread evidence of computer use, little evidence of (widespread) productivity growth --continues, at least in modified form." found here:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/FredMoo dy/mood y990818.html

The Economist

[artemis67]

The link is wrong... if you click on it, you are taken to a cybersquatter's page with a butt-ugly picture of Alan Greenspan.

The real link to The Economist is here.

Incorrect conclusion

[ccady]

Who came to the conclusion that "Computers Not Working In Education"?

As far as I read, there is no conclusion:

CAIRNCROSS So, having put it in place have there been any real attempts to try to measure how well it's working? Any success in doing that?
WATSON Oh yes. There's a substantial ongoing programme to try and measure the results. So far, the results are not tremendously clear or, at least not tremendously impressive.

and

CAIRNCROSS Now of course, it is notoriously difficult to prove conclusively that any teaching method has a good or bad impact. And lots of studies of computer-based learning have reached different conclusions from Professor Angrist's

Thoughts from a college IT guy...

[weave]

Hoo boy, have I got a lot to say. But first, let me throw out a disclaimer that I am an IT person in a hier-ed (college) institution and not a trained educator, therefore my opinion doesn't mean squat (some sarcasm, some truth). I'd like to throw out the following observations, points, and opinions on this topic...

• Teachers from all subjects are being expected to integrate technology into their lesson plans. In many cases the students know more about the tech than the instructors. The place I work provides training opportunities for instructors, but many don't seek them out or resist.
• I find limited utility in using computers in teaching some subjects such as English. For example, one shouldn't be teaching how to use a word processor in an English class. It takes away from the core reason for the class. I do realize that people need to type up papers on computers, but that activity should be done in general labs staffed with support people to help students who don't have these skills. However, see below about stressed support staffing problems.
• Grants are usually given for new equipment purchases, not maintenance or infrastructure. In my employer's case, that has meant a large new base of installed systems, which increases the need for tech staff, but since there is no budget for that, tech support suffers. Infrastructure such as networking and back-end servers suffers. And most importantly, the issue of replacement cost is not considered. For example, we currently have 2,000 computers. If you use a 5-year replacement cycle, which I consider not enough, you're looking at having to set aside around a half-million dollars a year to replace equipment. Despite this, we continue to add new labs. Eventually we'll have hallways full of computer ghettos... It's hard to convince people that that fast p4 today will be a dog 5 years from now (or two whenever longhorn or whatever comes out and basically uses a back-end database running on each desktop to store data instead of a file system... ooo, that'll kill a currently fast machine I'm sure...)
• I find teaching vendor-specific programs in a college unwise, for example, programming in Visual Studio or network design using literal examples for a Cisco environment. For example, I wonder about former students who were taught dbase III when that was hot. If they were taught the concepts and theory, they could then adapt, if they were taught just dbase iii, they are now in need of retraining. But that's just a personal opinion.
• Many computer textbooks are horribly rigid and instructors are unable to adapt in some cases. For example, stupid personalized menus in Office apps. After getting way too many complaints like "The print menu disappeared" and trying to tell people to hit the chevron, we hear that the book doesn't say to do that, so we turned off personalized menus in a GPO. Then some instructors using a different book say "The book tells the student to go down to the chevron at the bottom of the menu to expand it, but our system doesn't do that. How can I teach when our system doesn't match the book?" Another example, a textbook that tells students to do create files and dirs on the C: drive, which we have locked down via ACLs. Some instructors actually expect us to toss out desktop security so they don't have to tell students to use Z: instead of where it says C: in the textbook. And speaking of textbooks, a curse to all textbooks that include a CD-ROM that requires software to be installed to use it.
• Computers can be a big distraction in a classroom. For example, students IM'ing each other during a lecture. Some teachers are looking at IT for a solution, which I believe we should offer, but due to staffing shortages, right now everyone is putting out other fires...
• A few years ago, there was a big push to wire every K12 school in the state to the Internet. I remember thinking "Ah, who is going to manage all of this stuff?" One school district in my area has *one* IT person who runs around to about 20 schools. Talk about a job from hell... The schools hardly ever see this IT person, so they often appoint the most computer-literal teacher to handle many of the issues, taking that person away from their main job of teaching.
• One tech I really do like is a single desktop in a classroom with a "smart board", something that allows an instructor to not only manipulate the mouse by touching the board, but also to annotate what's displayed with markers and save the board notes and displays at will to pdf files for later review by students. No desktops at the desks to distract students, cheaper to spread tech to every classroom, and students can practice what they learn later in a lab exercise of some sorts. I have taught evening classes before and I can first-hand testify that a lesson plan that has students repeating what you do on their own desktops drags down the pace tremendously. There is always one or two that claim that their computer isn't doing what you demonstrate and you have to stop, go back to them, and help them catch up.

The Internet.

[Cyno01]

Very few schools have been able to use the new technology for cultural exchange,...

Well duh. I'm a student in a public high-school, we dont use the computers for much, because we cant use the computers for much. The internet is horribly filtered and major legitimate sites are blocked(it took a month to get BBC unblocked). My mom works for the school system so i use her login to read slashdot in the morning at school. Not only is there a list of blocked sites, but it also has keywords blocked, rendering almost every search on google blocked. We're not alowed near anything like newsgroups or discusion boards(/., kuro5hin etc). All of the PCs have deepfreeze on them, which sucks for so many reasons. We're not allowed to use e-mail except for our school acounts, which have adresses as long as my arm, and its stressed to us over and over again that the e-mail accounts are not ours and that they (administration) have a right to go into them at whim. For the contract type thing we have to sign to get net access, click here.

Re:Not suprised

[richieb]

Logo for third grade? How old were you? 10? I'd teach someone at that age Basic not Logo. In Middle School I'd move on to Visual Basic and or C.

Actually Logo is a quite powerful language. It's much better for teaching about structured programming and mathematics. Turtle graphics, which everyone starts with, is just a small part of Logo.

Check out StarLogo for some really cool massively parallel programming.

Re:Not suprised

[xenocide2]

Logo is a surprisingly powerful language designed around teaching. Its not meant to be a low level hardware language, but rather a system of combining fundamental programming constructs with a visual toy. I'd argue that for instructional purposes that C is written too ugly to be very instructional. Having said that, I really don't like the logo syntax or environment, its far too instructional to be useful ;). The language is actually a functional language, although I do not believe that it has HOF. Which easily confounds undergraduates, let alone 9th graders.

I think that an advanced year long programming course could work well if you spent a semester on C and a semester on asm, but learning one without the other is fairly uninformative.

To bring up a point I think you can recognize, teaching children in C is like making them take a class in MS Word. They're both extremely complex and used in the business world. That doesn't make them appropriate.

Re:But you do.

[maddskillz]

Hate to break this to you, but there have been ADD cases diagnosed outside of the US, for several years they have been diagnosing them here in Canada