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
The problem with kids with computers is that they are used both for entertainment and work at the same time. Writing a paper with IM on browsing the internet for sources and to keep tabs your favorite pop star. Sure kids with 24 access to computers they basically give themselves an information overload thus they split there educational learning. While children with more limited access to computers are more forced to get there work done and get off so Mom and Dad, brother and sister can use the computer so they just get the work done especially with a little brat ready to go to mom and Dad that you are using the computer for fun while she needs to use the computer to finish her homework also. It is worse then doing homework with the TV on because they are actively engaged in many activities. As a parent one should make sure the computer enhances ones life but doesn't replace it. When they have to do home work make sure they are doing homework and not on IM or doing an other things that the computer is good at.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Sigs cause cancer.
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?
*ducks*
Let's be honest. How many of us sit down to "just check e-mail" and find that nearly an hour has passed without really doing anything productive?
If usage goes up but productive usage doesn't go up, then time is wasted.
Learning and multitasking have never mixed well.
Multitasking also doesnt mix well with research, creativity, or anything really worth doing well for that matter.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
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.
How exactly do you get from "found a correlation between frequent computer usage and poor academic performance" to "Too Many Computers Hurt Learning"?
--
grep "xercist"
It's like TV. If you let your kids watch TV all night rather than doing their homework or studying, they're going to do very poorly in school even if they've been watching PBS or The Learning Channel. More TVs makes it easier for them to go unmonitored and unchecked. In the same sense, if you don't monitor how much your kids use the net, you're going to have academic problems. And, much like having more than one TV, multiple computers means that kids can more easily spend all night surfing the web and talking to their friends (especially if they've got a box in their room). In both cases, parents who take an interest in their kids' activities will have less of a problem.
The kid who spends his time reading "Monster Truck Mash-azine" does poorer than the kid who reads "Scientific American". Therefore, magazines are bad for all children.
But isn't that a good thing. AS we progress humans should have to memorize less things and use our tools to do more. That is the trend in history after all. I don't think that we should cripple ourselves just because that is how things used to be done. Kids nowadays need to learn how to evaluate sources and find information more than they need to memorize it.
Philosophy.
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!
Back the the Apple II/ IBM DOS area. When you used a computer you used 1 program at a time. You used a word processor you were usually in the word processor until you were done. If you were in Lotus 123 you were in Lotus 123 until you were done. Multitasking was near unheard of. So when you used you Word Perfect you were doing your work. Now with multitasking and windowing environment kids can now have there paper open while chatting with there friends. Playing some game in yahoo.com checking up there favorite pop star. Most kids don't naturally have a since of focus if they have the chance they will do other things that are more enjoyable then homework. They will do there work to avoid being yelled at by there parents/teachers but not for the point of learning the information, so with modern computers they can get the work done without learning the information because there mind is split on many tasks.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm a code monkey and a moderately smart.
Things I used to know by heart I've purged from my mind (mostly unintentionally) over the years. Although, I did purge my computer architecture class - MUXes, flip-flops, etc. on purpose. ugh.
Partly because I don't use that knowledge as much and partly because it's WAY too easy to jump on *.google.com and look something up. Heck, in a lot of cases, just typing a query and pounding the enter key is enough. I can usually find that nugget of information or trivia fact I'm looking for in the short description that shows up on the results screen without ever having to follow any links. Google dumbs me down.
I've turned to reading more books to combat the problem. I try to read a variety of topics that interest me such as physics, math, biology, and economics and even fiction novels too. I find that the variety of information and learning new things helps keep me "fresh" and sharp in spite of google and kcalc.
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.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
I didn't see mentioned anywhere in the article what types of software these kids were running. If they spend all their time playing "educational" software (by which I mean those counting programs/nick jr. type games which serve more to keep the kids out of parents hair than teach the kids anything useful)in place of learning from a teacher, of course grades will decline. All a computer can do is teach a kid basic functions related to specific areas of study. It can't answer questions or provide more insight into "why" rather than "how."
The flip side would be what they actually get to do on the computer. If the parents limit them to games and programs they set up for the kids, that's almost as bad as spoonfeeding an 8 year old. The technically oriented/geek parents (or, were I one, this is what I would do), make a ghost/dd/carbon copy/backup of your hard drive, and let the kid loose for a few hours to do whatever he wants. If you're a true geek, the kid would have his/her own dedicated computer to play with, to let him find his own way around. Show the kid how to use the mouse, and how to click. Teach them the basics of how to use the computer, and let them learn their own way. That's how I was brought up, and I'm more capable of using/building/working on/maintaining computers than 99.9999% of all the people I know. Plop me in front of a foreign interface I've never seen before and I'll figure out the basics of how to use it within a few minutes (or if in another language, hours).
Computers can be extremely powerful tools for learning, but only if used in proper context. Parents who use the computer as an electronic baby-sitter will find their kid's grades slumping, while a kid who figures out the basics of the bash shell by the age of 5 could probably graduate high school at the age of 10. Give kids the tools to foster deductive reasoning, and they'll blossom into students with an insatiable appetite to learn and figure stuff out.
There have been numerous reports released in Australia recently on how literacy and numeracy standards have been slipping in recent years. There was even an article yesterday commenting on how illeteracy is now being 'diagnosed' as ADHD, with children being taken to emergency rooms for treatment when what they really need is to be taught how to read.
The computer is simply a tool, it has no moral value, if the children are taught how to use it effectively as an educational aid, and are taught to value learning, the unfettered access to a computer will be beneficial. IF the children are taught to treat education as something to be endured and that computers are toys - then that is how they will treat them.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
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.
You're question presupposes that us Slashdot nerds actually have enough of a life to:
1) Turn off the computer(s)
2) Date (or more accurately, find a girl desperate enough to go out with us)
3) Turn off the computer(s) and go out long enough to have a serious relationship
4) Marry (nowadays optional)
5) Turn off the computer(s)and actually make kids
6) Give up control of one or more of *your* computer(s) so that the aforementioned hypothetical kids can get on the computer(s) so that later, as you realize there is more to parenting than sitting them in front of a computer screen the entire day, you can kick them off
Sounds like a long shot to me.
...that are certain to get worse with my girlfriend and her four year old daughter. The only applications available to the little girl are a couple of Reader Rabbit games, but rather severe tantrums occur when she is denied playing the games or asked to stop for the night. I was reminded of my own behavior, though on a slightly different scale when I was fifteen or so and Warcraft II, Quake, and Grand Theft Auto were what dominated my non-schoolwork hours. I flat out had behavioral problems, wanting to do nothing beyond playing the games, and throwing teenager level tantrums when I was denied such.
Fortunately I was in marching band, jazz band, electric car club, and some other structured things for me to redirect myself to when my parents forced the issue and wouldn't let me use the family computer for games, but it definitely wasn't easy, and probably would have been even harder if I hadn't had other activities that I liked to turn to. Consequently I'm paying close attention to what happens in what I'm seeing now, because I know from experience what can happen if things get out of hand.
The moral of my own story: Have something else to do besides computers. Read. Play sports. Play a musical instrument. Work with your hands on something, like cars, or woodworking, or jewelery. Find a passion to compete with the one operating at 1024x768. It's definitely a lot more healthy that way.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
some people don't have to study to get good grades. I can count the number of times I did homework in K-12 on both hands. I wasn't valedictorian, but that was because on the classes that did have the "homework requirement", I just ate the 10% loss and got an 85 instead of a 95 because I couldn't be bothered to spend that much time doing shit I already knew.
Still got a full scholarship for college too.
Course, I never learned to do homework, so I flunked out my first year. So I would suggest doing homework just for the practice of self discipline to others, not necessarily for its educational value. Or if you aren't going to do homework, spend X amount of your free time learning SOMETHING instead of fucking off.
Some possible causalities here:
I could keep coming up with reasons all day. The article seems to assume #1 is the explanation, but the study provides no evidence to suggest that #1 is any more plausible than the others.
I don't know why but for some reason I just can't work any other way but under the gun; without urgency I tend to just lose intrest. With literature on subjects I really want to learn about just a click away it becomes even more difficult.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
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.
My daughter is 8-years-old. She has been using the computer (mostly for games) for several years. I used to sit with her and play the Jumpstart Toddler series with her when she was 2. Most of what she plays is educational, but I also let her play video games on the computer, including games on the GameCube, her GameBoy and our old N64.
So, the verdict? She's consistently ahead in school, reading and math skills are 1-2 grades ahead. She has no weak areas, no areas of concern and no behavior issues; she has a creative mind and is a whiz at problem solving and her verbal skills are remarkable at times. I couldn't ask for better. Her teachers are always happy to have conferences with my wife and me, and they have always spent the half-hour praising her and quizzing us on what we're doing at home.
I think it has less to do with the amount of time a child spends on the computer and more to do with what they're doing on it specifically. My daughter does educational stuff along with the occasional video games with no graphic violence. I also monitor what she does and help her get the most out of it. I just recently showed her the basics of how to create web pages and she's been coding her own pages by hand. No report anywhere will convince me that those kinds of activities are hurting her learning abilities.
It's just like TV. You can do it right or wrong. I don't think you can blame the computer itself.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
You totally had me on the casual nature of chat being part of chat. Abbreviations, flexibility, ... work for that medium.
But your generalization to "Language isn't meant to be a set of laws" is not supported by your earlier arguments.
The reason that language IS represented by a set of laws as if it weren't then there'd be no way to teach it in geographically disparate locations where folks may not be in contact with native speakers of that language. How can I learn Samoan if I live in SmallTown, KS? I need to refer to the laws of that language. No laws --> loss of structure --> lack of ability to communicate clearly and effectively. The laws are not there to be punitive; they are there to make the system work.
What do you mean by language evolving exactly?
...
If you mean adding in new words (e.g. "blog"), then of course that's already built in and happens.
If you mean changing the way that basic grammar rules work, I'd think that'd be a mistake.
If you've read any Shakespeare (which I'm sure you have), you'd see that the English language has adapted since then (mostly in common word choice -- we see fewer of these: doth, 'tis, o'er, hath, etc.).
But that leads us to one of the reasons that it's important that we don't change the structure too much: all of the English written works developed for the past 800 years or so are more or less accessible to those who know proper English. If we changed dramatically the structure, either newbies would have to learn BOTH structures OR those works would be less accessible to them than they are to people trained in standard English.
It's no different than one router deciding that it wanted to do TCP a little bit differently; he can't do that. Not really anyway. Not if he's connected to all X other routers who understand the standard implementation of BGP, TCP, IP,
It seems very likely that at age 7 when children are still looking to their parents for nearly everything that such rules work I highly doubt that as she grows older and more aware of the world around her that your methodology will be as effective.
More than likely she might rebel against your admittedly stern authority as she grows older. Also as she grows older and is exposed to more things she will realize that the lifestyle that she has been exposed to is radical different than others. At the very least she might begin to question why you chose to raise her in that fashion or more likely use it as a further excuse to rebel.
I'm going to stop here with my little dime store analysis of what I see you doing but I hope you take some time to realize that your raising a human being, not something for you to try and pour into what you see as the perfect mold.
As a freshman computer science major in a required writing class, I wrote an essay suggesting that premature introduction of computer technology could lead to severe developmental progress. One of my primary arguments was that the development of fine motor skills and handwriting was stumped when children are allowed to type and use the mouse rather than write, paint, etc.
Further, (and granted, this was prior to the widespread advent of the WWW) the 'curiosity driven' learning experience is interrupted by the immediacy of technology provided information. Case in point, Online Encyclopedia vs. Book Encyclopedia. With one, I type in my topic and immediately receive a specific article. With the other, I have to learn how to look the topic up, and in that process am inevitably exposed to other topics which may catch my attention and allow me to learn a bit more.
My suggestion at that time, and one I would probably stand by today, is that computer technology in the classroom should be delayed until the Junior High (7th or 8th grade) level. In America at least, we see quite an opposite trend, where children are exposed to technology at younger and younger ages.
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.
We're not learning "less" we're learning differently. By the reasons given we might as well go back to abacuses because even slide-rules are evil technology blah blah blah.
Yes, you could blame the computers, but realistically I think a lot has to be said about the deterioration of the teaching system. I would know, I work in schools and see daily how bad they've gotten. Kids have no respect... yes they didn't have respect when I was in school (and hey, I'm 23), but now they're much more open about doing everything short of (and sometimes beyond) telling their profs to f*** off.
br As for the profs, well, it's rather discouraging trying to teach kids that don't want to learn, somewhat like watching the coding project you babied for the last year get tanked by management in the final stages.
But as to the kids that do want to learn, and make use of computers as a tool... they're going to do more than the previous generation did with a set of fancy calculators. Realistic simulations, architectural tools... computers expand in other areas.
Of course, I suppose I could look at myself. Grandiose projects planned, but after a day of work I'm often sacked and just end up playing games to relax. If I had to sit through some of the classes that students do today, I'd probably do the same...
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."
Having two kids myself, both using their computers a lot, my main concern is not academic performance (in fact they are both top of their class despite playing counter-strike and other games for hours each day). I am a lot more worried about them not getting enough exercise, which in the long term will have fatal consequences. The discussion on parental control or kids self-control is uninteresting. What is interesting is making them interested in and getting an understanding of what is good for them. That takes a lot more than just telling them "You cant play any more today".