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Digital Enhancements or Expensive Distractions?
markmcb writes "Berkeley and USC have teamed up to launch a $3.3 million study over 3 years that hopes to shed some light on how today's kids are interacting with technology and the effects that it is having on education. The study aims to determine if digital devices such as computers and cell phones are shaping the way that teenagers obtain and process information. But given the price tag and the goals of the project, how much can this project actually help education? Has anyone out there in the high school level education field seen digital systems improve the classroom to the point that students actually learn more, or do they just tend to be fascinating distractions that detract from the classroom?"
Instead of just seeing how kids interact with technology, why not just study where in the class, or even school, that they use technology, what types of it, and the percentage of students who actually use technology.
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
Seriously, I'm all about technology (I read slashdot) but most technology in elementary and middle school levels is just all flash and no bang. Sure there are programs that help students (Word, Number Munchers) but having all the technology in the world isn't going to help if reading comprehention and memorized math skills are none.
I happen to be, at this very time, reading High-tech Heretic by Cliff Stoll. Much of the book gives a compelling case as to why computers in the class and libraries are sucking vital time, energy, and financial resources. Recommended reading.
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I live in a very well off area in Vancouver, Canada. Technology in my high school is a waste of time. Classes exist so people can learn to use MS Word. We run on Windows 2000. The programming classes learn what a variable is. And the machines available for homework are used mostly for games. All the history/socials/humanities rooms in my high schol have gigantic television screens that are *never* used. And guess what? Somehow, we manage to be short 300 math textbooks because there isn't enough money to buy them. Wow. I'm a geek, but seriously, get the technology OUT of my damn school!
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What we really need is for someone (Bill Gates - you listening?) to set up two identical schools close to one another. Students then get randomized to one school or the other. You could then use this as an experimental system to test which educational programs actually enhance learning. (Note that these are not medical experiments - no need to start getting upset about "experimenting with kids.") I don't think there is any other way we will be able to obtain real data with which improve our education system. If you made sure that these schools had plenty of resources (ie more so than the average surrounding school), then I am sure plenty of parents would agree to allow their kids to participate.
Our school district is replacing over 400 computers next school year. This includes several elementary school labs, computers used for a few simple learning games, word processing, and internet browsing.
Our school board now want to make cuts to the high school music program and eliminate seventh grade athletics. Education priorities need to get into order. We need more teachers over more computers.
This certainly isn't the first time that computer technology use in schools has been studied, so I'm a bit at a loss to see what the fuss is about. Certainly my research group (see www.ikit.org) has been researching just this for 25 years. In general, there are two types of software for education: computer assisted instruction (CAI) which has been found to not have lived up to the hype (yet); and what Jonassen calls thinking tools, software designed to augment human cognitive abilities. The latter have been working very well in the classroom, and students using such systems have shown good results. However, teachers can't just be thrown the system and told to go to work-they need to be trained as to how to use them, something that school boards have been reluctant to do as it costs money.
I should be doing my homework right now: reading Rabbit Proof Fence.
Instead, I'm reading Slashdot.
There you go, no study necessary.
Now if you excuse me I need to go back to my work.
Clifford Stoll is the Berkeley astrophysicist who caught a German hacker breaking into multiple government computer systems; "The Cuckoo's Egg" is his book detailing the fascinating tale of how he caught the hacker. Despite his knowledge and usage of computers on a daily basis, he is a strong advocate of keeping computers out of the classroom. I recommend "High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in Schools" to anyone; it's a thin book and actually won't take more than a couple of hours to breeze through. But, it will make you think.
d00d, c0mpu73rs t33ch u 411 u n33d 2 kn0w! 411 teh sm4r73s7 h4x0rs use c0mpu73rs!!!!!
--Mike Boos
Sadly, there are too few of those 'right hands'.
How technology affects students has more to do with how they use it, in my opinion anyway. I'm a high schooler with high grades, and I use technology a lot. I also know people who use technology, and have bad grades. The difference seems to be in what they use the technology for. I, for example, like to learn new things, and experiment (I installed Linux, and I'm still learning) while the people with worse grades just seem to use it for socialization. Not that that's a bad thing...
A 10-key calculator? Is it binary, does it read your mind, or does it just not do any operations on the numbers you input?
Grad students will do all the work. Profs will take all the credit and most of the money.
The result will be whatever the bias of the profs is. A prof who believes that technology is overused will prove just that. A prof who feels that more tech is good will prove just that.
If you doubt this, I suggest you get into grad school and work as a research assistant kissing your thesis advisors butt for 2 to 6 years, just so you can get your damn degree and get out.
Oh, ya, I've been there and done that.
"Research" Grants are a business and way of life like any other. You survive by getting big grants as often as neccesary, and you provide the answers your sponsers want to hear.
Walmart is practically Mother Teresa by comparison.
I'm currently in my second year at university in England. Before this I attended senior school and a sixth form college.
As I was completing my last year at college I saw the introduction of equipment like digital projectors in classrooms, more computers and those crazy digital whiteboards.
I've never used a digital whiteboard myself but I understand that you can save "lessons" -- this is a truly brilliant feature but I doubt very much that my school/college would make these lessons available online. If this was done I can think of no better revision tool, especially if combined with an audio stream, which is in no way hard to do.
Digital projectors linked up to computers are also good for demonstrating things in certain types of lessons. ICT (I hate that acronym) seems to be the best application -- explaining things like macros in Word/Excel are best learned through demonstration and practice. However, I seriously have to question just how useful a PC and projector would be in, say, an English or Math class.
People might argue that some tailored math software is beneficial but I know very well that as a student a projector with some crazy software will be little more than a relaxing break, as opposed to learning the important things.
My college had a number of computer clusters. One of these was a general-purpose humanities cluster that teachers could book for their lesson. The idea being that they could let the kids search for details specific to their courses or currect projects. In theory this is a good idea but in practice we looked forward to these lessons because it meant we could kick about and do what we might do on the Internet at home (well... some of the things we might do).
We had another lab in the languages centre that were set up with headsets and microphones. Using these machines students could practice their [language] listening by playing pre-recorded scenes. Previously we had a lab where the teacher sat at the front and repeated certain sections when asked. That's not much good if you're a little slower than everybody else or have a specific problem with a given sentence. Using the lab these problems are overcome.
I think if I were to give advice to the teachers/those in charge it would be to lock the machines down. As much as I hate to say that I think it really is the only way to get people to work. Sure, trust is a nice thing but when you're dealing with kids between the ages of 12 and 18 it only takes one person to goof around before everybody joins in.
Well, those are my thoughts. Thinking about the article/question I don't know if it really all that relevant. I've not said yes or no but said yes, in moderation, which I think was fairly obvious from the outset.
At my school (a school near San Jose, CA) my math department will be trying some of what you mention. We currently are ordering all of our textbooks with PDF versions as well as paper (not every student has a computer, even in Silicon Valley). We also have LCD projectors in most of our classrooms. For the students who have the technology at home, we hope that these devices will make a difference. We also hope that by using the LCD projector we can capture our notes (we use a stylus to write) and distibute them electronically to students. While technology will make some difference, and improve some of the education, it does has to be balanced with a more traditional approach. While it would be nice to teach math from a more analytical/creative point of view, we MUST follow the standards created by the state of California. The tests for these standards are very traditional (solve x^2+2x-1=0, for example) with no calculator allowed. If I fail to teach my students how to solve these BY HAND, I will lose my job, regardless of how well my students may know the more interesting parts to quadratics. Unless the laws are changed (unlikely) the technology is almost useless. The best use of technology has been the graphing calculator in Alebra II and higher courses. Mathematica is nice for Calculus, and SPSS would be wonderful for Statistics, but ultimately our students will be assessed without the technology.
The implication that this is a lot of money is just way off base.
u cationlibraryspending.htm). It would not be unreasonable to spend a percent or two of that amount on research directed at understanding and improving the process - which would mean five to ten thousand projects of this magnitude (the annual cost for this project being about 1 million). The idea being that a one percent investment in research will typically yield more than a 1 percent improvment in the process.
A brief Google search suggests that the US spends on the order of 500 billion dollars per year on education (http://www.oclc.org/membership/escan/economic/ed
A 3.3 million dollar project would pay for itself in one year if it improved teaching efficiency by 0.001%.
Taking that money and using it to support schools directly - say for more teachers - is like saying that we should not do any more biomedical research, but instead use that money to pay for more doctors to deliver health care. You might get an overall improvement in the first year, but in the long run you pay a huge price. There needs to be a balance between short term and long term expenses - giving up the long term view because you have short term problems is - well - a short term view.
You might argue with the details of the research - and whether the money is well spent in this particular case. But as a general matter it is if anything a modest amount of money.
Does it matter? Having done my time, I walked away with the impression that after basic math and reading skills, a public education was largely about indoctrinating the masses to sit quietly in straight rows and do what they are told. All my TPS reports do come with the new cover sheet, but I'm still waiting for a client or boss to ask me about the significance of the Council of Trent.
Oh, it was indeed worse than that.
Not until college did I understand the quadratic equation. We were taught it very briefly one day in high school math. After that, the teacher's policy in class was this:
When you have a quadratic equation to solve, punch it into QuadKill (a calculator program someone had made to solve quadratic equations). Before the test, the teacher would erase all programs off the calcular except for QuadKill, because that was OK to use.
Granted, I didn't pay the most attention and had probably glossed into a coma the day they explained it, but not until I got into college did I know that an imaginary number was the square root of negative one, rather than "what you get when there's not a real answer for a quadratic formula. Like when quadkill tells you there's an imaginary result."
Oh, and most of the time my calculator was so full of games that even QuadKill got the boot to make room for Craps (with unrealistic can't-lose odds), Lunar Lander, Tetris, etc.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
We should, however, teach them how to Write TFM in a concise, helpful manner. There are a lot of badly-written FMs out there, and after a while it's quite irritating being told to R them. Better yet, they could be taught to design things in such a way that makes TFM less necessary to R.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
I go to a technology magnet high school where we have 1.6 computers to users. Do we ever use them, fuck no thank you kindly. Sure we whip them out when business scouts come around our town, but other than that hardly. When we do use them, we use word and powerpoint, nothing else. Nothing new or inventive is done, you have a spiral notebook emulator and a flashcard like system which 90% of the students horribly abuse (I swear if I have to fucking watch another slideshow with paragraphs of font one shade off from the background where custom animation and sounds tie it all together, soemthign will die). If we are really lucky we will get to use the intarweb, all 2 sites that aren't blocked.t h_m.html
Technology could be used effectively in schools and learning, but its not. The teachers do not have the training or the inclination. The admins are generally clueless MCSEdroids (not all I know a few very competent admins, but none at my school). We don't even have classes on basic programming. Our servers were going to be switched over to apache, but the admins couldn't figure out how to get it installed (My illiterate friend managed it). There is a longer and better rant at my friends website http://sangxanta.org/archives/2005/02/problems_wi
and the school website (and it was just made to be viewed in alternative browsers by some pissed off students who like firefox, admins couldn't)
http://web.dps.k12.va.us/galileo/