Slashdot Mirror
Too Many Computers Hurt Learning
An anonymous reader writes "The Christian Science Monitor is running a story on a recent University of Munich study of school children in 31 countries that found a correlation between frequent computer usage and poor academic performance. Having more than one computer in the home was found to be particularly bad news! For those Slashdotters with children, how do you deal with your kids' computer use?"
When I was eight, we had three computers... one in the family room, one in my sister's room, and one in my room. Of course, they were an Apple IIe clone, and Apple IIe, and an Apple II+, respectively. My sister was valedictorian. My grades sucked, but that's because I didn't do homework. :)
I don't think that multiple computers in a household are patently bad. I think that poor parental understanding and control of their children's using habits is to blame. The key is not too much computer usage, it's too much computer usage doing the wrong things. Half-Life 2 is not a learning experience. How Stuff Works can be.
Computer use in the school is still a fairly new tool. We aren't adept at producing good on-screen content for learning, yet. We still try to push everyone along at the same pace , where computer-based learning should preferably guarantee that a student meets the class requirements and has an opportunity to extend their knowledge beyond the "lowest common denominator" teachings.
Bottom line, computers are still too new to teachers and too unfamiliar to parents right now. Give it some time.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
when i moved house and didn't have internet access for a couple of weeks i got a lot more done (no slashdot for one!)
sure the correlation isn't between those with internet access and those without?
I wonder how much of that "frequent computer use" is spent on entertainment instead of educational software?
For instance, I used computers a lot when I was younger, but it was playing around with Logo and Basic on an Apple 2. I turned out to be a pretty good student.
i note some objectivity here (if not much) as i was not one of the geeky computer guys (i am now).
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
1. No computer games. Yup. None.
2. TV has to be PBS, Discovery or History Channel during the week, and no more than one hour.
3. the computer is used for schoolwork and research.
4. No TV in the bedroom.
5. No headphones indoors, no excessive volume indoors.
6. No TV during Dinner. conversation is encouraged. Dinner is served at the dining table 5 nights a week (Friday is swimming, so dinner is shortened, as we go out for a snack after swimming, and Saturday dinner is often out (and never at a fast food joint.)
7. One DVD may be rented a week.
8. books, magazines, and newspapers can be read at anytime except during meals.
9. Homework is done FIRST. Then play is permitted. Making things with paper, glue, wood, paint, ink, rubber stamps, etc. is encouraged. Puzzles, word games, and other intellectual riddles are encouraged.
10. Music is always permitted, but at reasonable volumes. Playing music and singing is especially encouraged, and preferred to listening.
That's the way the house is organised, and mommy and daddy (me) follow the same rules. No exceptions.
We have 7 computers in the house, but 2 of them (a win2k laptop and an XP laptop) are for my wife's office, three are in my studio (OSX laptop, OS9 tower, SuSe "project" machine), my daughter has a desktop (Apple OS9) and a laptop (OSX). She uses them, but not as much as she reads books. she also likes to make books - she has a good head for narrative.
She (Elizabeth Spoilsport) is 7, is bilingual in French and English, writes in cursive, and does her times tables. She can recognise 4/4, 3/4, and 5/4 time signatures. She's my little pride and joy, when she's not acting like a spoiled little snot (which only happens when she's tired or grumpy).
She also feeds the kitties, waters the kitchen herbs, (fresh basil is DIVINE), and when she gets all A's in her work, we give her a small allowance which she then divides up between a savings account, an investment account, a charity account, and a spending account.
And that's how it works in the Spoilsport household.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I'm a highschool teacher. I teach IT and I can absolutely say that, for the most part, the more CBT that is integrated into the class the lower the level of performance by the students as a whole. I'm not saying all of them suffer, but enough do that I try to limit the contact with the machines to that of the task to be done instead of the task to be learned.
I strongly suspect that the only thing that most people learn from machines is how to be lonely..... of couse I'm sitting at one... in a room... alone...scratching.....hmmmmmm.
At any rate, the more time I spend with the students in conversation over the hum of a projector the more the students seem likely to absorb things like IRQ tables and subnetting. The kids really do seem to be more inclined to actively particpate if there is a person leading them.
I think it's way too easy to open up a calculator, spreadsheet, web browser, [insert app here] to do things one should be able to do, or at least know how to do, by hand.
The flaw in your logic is that you still must be able to apply SOME knowledge in order to get the answer that you are looking for. Even if you don't know how the calculations work, you would still need to know why the calculations are important and what they can be applied to.
Sure, you can use a calculator or whatever to perform calculations on some numbers. But, are these just arbitrary calculations you are making? No, they are likely part of some larger problem. And you must know how these calculations fit into the problem, or what calculations to use in the first place. You still need to know the principles behind what you are doing. If you don't, a calculator (or other tool) will be useless to you, except in doing simple arbitrary tasks.
In this way, the tools we have available to us save us a lot of time, energy, and sometimes needless frustration.
I remember some of the more advanced math classes I took in college. A single problem could, at times, take more than 10 minutes of work to solve. And in that time, it was easy to make a small mistake somewhere, even if you were being careful, and ruin the entire thing. Or, you could insert the problem into a computer math program and have the answer in less than a second. Guaranteed correct, if you did not make a typo entering it. As far as I'm concerned, doing such a problem by hand is entirely counter-productive. And you know what? I'm not even sure I want to know HOW it's done. I just want to know why it's useful. I want to know how to apply it to something productive.
Decades ago, the TV was hailed as the next greatest thing in education. Teachers would soon be able to record their own lectures and presentations for a much more efficient, effective educational experience!!!
Hopefully the computer hype will die down soon enough.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."