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Is Early Childhood Education Technology Moving Backwards?
theodp writes "Four decades ago, the NSF-sponsored PLATO Elementary Reading Curriculum Project (pdf) provided Illinois schoolchildren with reading lessons and e-versions of beloved children's books that exploited networked, touch-sensitive 8.5"x8.5" bit-mapped plasma screens, color images, and audio. Last week, the Today Show promoted the TeacherMate — a $100 gadget that's teaching Illinois schoolchildren to read and do math using its 2.5" screen and old-school U-D-L-R cursor keys — as a revolution in education. Has early childhood education managed to defy Moore's Law?"
The latest and greatest techno-glitter is often not what's needed. The simple rugged device shown can get the interactive teaching job done, and probably endure getting dropped, kicked, and getting dumped in Cheerios.
Would you give an iPhone to a kid who is constantly throwing things around and having temper tantrums?
Often, simpler is better.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
Now we plug them into X Interactivodular superintermodular digital box and have them staring at a generic "FUN!!1" learning program that teaches them to rotely memorize whatever miniscule number of factoids it can hold in it's tiny memory. Then we pick them up and shuttle them around all day on a million and one "Structured play-time" events before taking them home and expecting them to go to sleep on command after a hard day of sitting and doing what grownups tell them to.
We used to give them a stack of comic books, a box of legos, and enough kool-aid for them and whatever other kids in the neighborhood weren't grounded at the moment and tell them to figure it out for themselves.
Homework isn't (by default) fun, and "Structured play-time" is not good for kids. Learning is what you do so they're able to have options as an adult, and fun is anything they do voluntarily after they do the things they need to do but don't want to.
Let the little shiats skin their knees, scream their heads off, run around with their pants on their head, dig in the mud, and punch someone in their new best friend in the nose now and then. They'll thank you for it later.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
The technology is moving forward if you can give (or charge) every single student a gadget like this and use it in every class.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
I would honestly think a screen larger then 2.5" would be easier on kids learning to read and do math. And besides, from what I have read and heard about how bad funding is for a lot of schools in the USA, chances are this will likely not be seen anytime soon to replace ancient text books.
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
IAAKT (I Am A Kindergarten Teacher) and I would not say that I'm going backwards by having my students use crayons, pencils, markers instead of plasma, touch sensitive displays. Nor am I going backwards by using chalk and a blackboard instead of powerpoint and multimedia displays to teach your children how to read and write.
Sometimes I often wonder if people push technology on children for the sake of making themselves look good ("Look, I introduced a bunch of 6yr olds to powerpoint and the web!").
Btw: Chalk/pencils/paper never run out of batteries, never get badly damaged when dropped. Never need an "IT Guy" on staff to fix/train/repair/upgrade. Also, I spend quite a bit of my own money on school supplies for the students. It's much easier to go to walmart and buy a box of pencils than it is to go to the school board and ask them to appropriate more funding so we can have more ebook readers so that every child gets one.
I wasn't aware there was a corollary dealing with childhood education. Or are you claiming, looking inside the old and new products, the transistor or storage density hasn't increased?
#DeleteChrome
today show = nbc = comcast/ge = best interests in moving consumer education backwards
Does it let you cheat with Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A?
I think that claiming that if most people wont be white then it will be a catastrophe, is simply racism
http://www.innovationsforlearning.org/about_teachermate.php
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
The biggest mistake I see in education is trying to provide the coolest and latest tech, instead of thinking what is best for concept development. Especially at lower levels teaching specific tech is not so useful. The tech will change in 10 years. When I left school was the time when we moved from command line to GUI. Fortunately I knew concepts,so it mattered little.
The $100 price point is also a major benefit. Like calculators, all classroms could have a class set. Quite a change from the time when we had a single PLATO terminal.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Ok, what in the world does the NEA (either National Endowment of the Arts or National Educators Association) have to do with this story, or the thing you just posted?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
In 1972 the PLATO IV terminals (the kind described in the summary) cost $12,000. Adjusting for inflation, that would be over $60,000 today. Moore's Law has worked some miracles, but as the OLPC project showed, creating a child-oriented, large screen portable computer for $100 is still out of reach.
The better question is whether throwing technology at the problem is going to actually help children learn. Of course, the experiment has to be done, but I wouldn't be surprised if, once again, teacher quality and home life quality are by far the dominant factors in student success.
I am a "computer guy" for a fairly affleunt K-12 district, and for years I have been saying that for K, 1 & 2 there shouldn't even be computers or other "gadgets". As Clifford Stoll asked in his book "Silicon Snake Oil", "Where are the sand tables?" and other hands-on, tactile, open ended learning stations. Most teachers, even Principals I bring it up to more or less agree... but... everyone says the parents won't stand for it.
Only on slashdot will you find a comparison where a 1970's terminal is declared superior to a modern gameboy-like product. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)
Computers don't emit "smartness radiation."
Computers in the class room have been around at least 25 years. There was an Apple ][ in every classroom when I was a kid. We used it to die of dysentery on the Oregon Trail. Did we learn anything about history? No. We learned to that all that settlers needed was a 99 rounds of ammunition.
Computers in the classroom are just the latest incarnation of the whiz-bang technology that would magically make improve education and test scores, without requiring any more work on the child's, parent's, or teacher's part. Just like television, movies, and filmstrips were hailed as an educator's silver bullet generations before. (Stoll wrote about this 14 years ago, and it stills holds true.)
Anyone that has attended class in any "e-learning" classroom, can attest that of the regular occurrences of projectors that don't work. Video and audio links that fail. Overly sensitive microphones and the like. The amount of time wasted trying to just set things up before instruction can begin is non-trivial, and easily can accumulate to entire missed days of instruction. No thank you.
Watching passively, and just clicking "next" is not education. The reason why it's used for occupational training, is that because no one wants to acutally teach, nor learn. It's indemnification.
If you really want to improve education, how about removing the distractions, and actually teaching out of the book?
I've studied a fair bit of education theory and what struck me was the overwrought theoretical justifications for being with young kids. Technologizing the kindergarten is just one more meaningless pseudorational intervention that frames childhood in terms of efficiency. What little kids need: friendly people around them, hugs and kisses, some things to play with, friends.
All other races look out for themselves, and yet Whites are supposed to accept their demographic decline with cheers and exuberance. The day will come when Whites stop caring what's "racist" or not - and people like you will be up against a wall.
National Education Association (teachers unions)
--- You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad- Neal (not Cowboy) Boortz
The article submitter must be trolling. Decades ago there existed a one-off prototype, which was never widely deployed, that was hugely expensive. Now there exists an inexpensive learning gadget that might actually be in the hands of actual kids, and this is "moving backwards"?
Next up: is the phone industry moving backwards? At a world's fair, AT&T demonstrated a working two-way color video phone, yet I don't have a video phone in my house yet. Of course, millions of people have full-color Internet on their phones, and can do things like view a photo of their home taken from orbit. And millions of people have practical teleconferencing via WebEx et al. But never mind that. The phone company doesn't have video phones in every house; we're moving backwards!
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I was an Illinois school child four decades ago, and neither I nor anybody I knew had even heard of PLATO until we got to the university level. From the article, it looks like it was deployed on a trial basis in a couple of classrooms in near the UIUC. However, the terminals were extremely expensive and required dedicated links to the mainframe. I doubt that the money and/or technology to widely deploy this in grade schools across the state would have been be practical until the 1990s. So bottom line: early childhood education was not more advanced back then, since only a tiny fraction of 1% of kids even had access to this experiment.
PLATO was amazing. It had many or most of the technologies used in the current web/email/chat/etc, but it somehow managed to support 400 people interactively sharing a single CPU that had about the same horsepower as an 80286. However, most of the people who had access to it were in university computer labs.
IIRC, the plasma display PLATO terminals (with slide projector and audio disk player for "color images, and audio") were upwards of $10,000 in 1974. That is close to $50,000 in 2009 dollars. If we compare $100 to $50,000 I think we can safely say Moore's Law is in operation even considering the smaller screen.
The real problem isn't regression in Moore's Law -- its regression in areas like software resulting from a loosening of the discipline allowed by exponentiating hardware capability. This is one reason the Russians are so damn hot as programmers: They had to make their software work correctly on ridiculous hardware developed by the commies.
Seastead this.
If you bring children up in an environment where adults do not value education, don't be surprised when the children don't value it either. And when they do not value it, they aren't going to learn much.
I am not familiar with an effective rating scale, but I think one adult saying "Eeew, looks like Brain Work to me. No thanks!" within earshot of a child is probably -100 units whereas reading one children's book to the child is +1 unit. Similarly, suggesting that by learning the child is trying to "put on airs" is probably -500.
Today most of the people you meet on the street are suffering with a lifetime score of -50,000. If you are especially lucky the people you work with have only -1000 and somehow, dispite major obstacles managed to learn something.
In most schools getting good grades is utterly unacceptable to the peer social group. So the child can be an outcast with no friends or not - easy to choose, isn't it? This is the culture in the US today. A good part of it comes from the inner city "majorities" that have pretty much taken over there. Because of "white flight" to the suburbs where their children aren't exposed to an anti-education culture.
I recently saw a television program concerning a black educator trying to stir up some interest in children being educated and going on to college. Gasp, they might be successful! Biggest problem seemed to be that they had to pick and choose the children because so many were already infected by a culture that told them being educated was socially unacceptable.
If this problem isn't solved, no matter what technology is put into the classroom the situation is just going to get worse and worse. Cheap Chinese-made toys aren't going to fix anything. Expensive PLATO terminals aren't going to fix anything. Changing the culture is the only way.
I looked at that article, about how we need to start focusing on blacks and latinos before it's too late.
What bullshit.
How about we drop the race nonsense and start focusing on educating kids, hmm? Kinda solves the problem right there, doesn't it? Man I'm a genius, I should be running the NEA!
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I've never seen a "PLATO", so "touch-sensitive 8.5"x8.5" bit-mapped plasma screens" gave me visions of a tablet PC/laptop, maybe even like the Apple tablet that's supposed to come out soon.
Not even close!
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Technologies are only part of the solution - not at all the entirety!
However, to avoid digressing from the topic of your question, my answers are several:
First, there is simply not the same incentive to create educational technologies as there is to create faster processors or larger hard drives. The benefit of a faster computer is clear and immediately actionable. The results of improved educational opportunities don't become clear for quite some time - 20 years or more.
Second, and more importantly, the comparison of Moore's law to education is inherently incorrect. Would your supposition be that the human cognition must double its... processing capability?... every few years, guided by increasingly powerful educational technologies?
If there is an opportunity, it's the opportunity that we're trying to capitalize upon: that armed with an understanding of how people learn, and coupled with the low costs of producing high-quality educational technologies, we can begin to make a difference.
The most important thing, in making that difference, is that technologies are used in such a way that they add something valuable to the experience of learning - whether it be visualizations with an explanation beyond what a teacher can reasonably provide; or equity; etc. Otherwise, the time required to set computers up, train teachers to use, develop lessons, etc., simply detracts from the educational potential of schools.
If anyone here - LAMP volunteers, especially - would like to become involved in making that happen, please let us know! But, in the meantime, please don't use Moore's law as a point of comparison.
Cheers,
--Dave
During the summer I work around many education majors, and I can tell you that teachers are not being taught anything about technology in teaching programs. Most times they have less technical skills than your average college students. They can't work their ipods or simple digital cameras and they often have trouble using basic web sites to fill in web forms. It's all anecdotal, but I see the same thing year after year and I've seen it even going back to my own teachers in the 1980s.
Anyway, I am apt to agree with other comments in this thread. I am for tech in the classroom, but it's not going to do any good with the teachers we are putting out in the field. The best and brightest don't go into elementary education, and right now the jobs aren't there. We need tech education for our kids to succeed, but there will have to be some other fundamental fixes made before that curriculum is even possible.
What is the most recent genuinely useful educational technology? Word processing, maybe? That's a good generation old, now.
It seems like technologists are very keen to apply the latest and greatest to education, when plain-old pencil and paper mostly work fine.
Assume the average age of the Apollo program engineers was 40 in 1969.
That means they were in elementary school in the late 30s and early 40s -- what kind of "technology" were they taught with? Chalk, pencils and books -- maybe even slide rules and a compass. And those guys figured out how to put men on the moon!
I do work with schools occasionally and am appalled at the money pissed away on worthless shit like smartboards and computers & software that go obsolete faster than the districts can implement them. And after that I hear the ridiculous appeals from administrators who claim they don't have enough money to fix broken windows, paint the walls or other basic maintenance, because they pissed it all away on technology that is useless in 4 years and literally junk in 8. I want to cry when they say they need to raise my taxes for it.
Technology probably has more of a place in junior and senior high schools, but even then at a fraction of the level they try to implement it at.
You mention "help people become more than physical laborers". The problem with society today is there are easily two groups of people that can easily be recognized: those that can manipulate abstract symbols and those that cannot. This is purely a mental capability - education has no role in it. If a person doesn't have the ability, you might be able to train them sufficiently to put on a pretty good show and fake it but they aren't going to be successful or happy about it.
Today we are quickly reaching the point where working on an assembly line is no longer an option in the Western world. If someone can be a computer programmer, great - but what about all of those people that would have been happy and productive being an assembly line worker ca. 1950? There are few jobs remaining for these people. The educational system doesn't seem to understand this division either - you simply aren't going to be able to manage a classroom of 10 children that can do abstract symbol manipulation and anther 10 that cannot. The result of trying is often the Lowest Common Denominator or some kind of group effort where half the children are helping (or trying to help) the other half. End result is a lot of frustrated kids because they are either being held back or pushed to do things they can't do.
We need to recognize this and deal with it on a societal level, and pretty soon. Building the world so that only people that can do higher math, program computers and other things that involve abstract symbols will fit in is a disaster in the works.
... kids spend the rest of their waking hours texting each other on tiny cellphone screens.
Have gnu, will travel.
I was the IT guy in a K-12 school district for 7 years. I've seen the good and bad of technology in a classroom. The biggest thing is to remember that technology is just a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. That classroom PC (and other electronics) should be used to *enhance* the education and reinforce the lessons, not replace the teacher. And that tool is only as useful as the user makes it. I can buy a $100 hammer, but it won't put that nail in the wall by itself. If I want a hole in the wall, I can't go to WalMart and buy a hole. I buy a drill to make my hole. Same with a PC. It can't teach the kids by itself, it has to be used properly.
However, too often I saw teachers dump kids in front of a PC as little more than a babysitter. The kids would play an outdated math game and knew exactly how to "cheat" the game. (ex. - Doing basic math the kids had to input the answer to 8 + 7, they'd start at 12 and just keep increasing the answer by 1 until getting it right.)
So, is the technology moving backwards? No, I don't think so. The tech has advanced so much since I was in school! (Grad high school in 1992.) But if it's not used right, it may as well not be there at all.
This is a further example of the obsession with gadgets, which is so prevalent today. What you need are BOOKS for the age of the child, 3-4 lots of pictures, 7-8 less so, 10+ none, the better the books and teacher is the quicker it goes so long as they keep trendy teaching methods.
Grammar and spelling are important, especially at the beginning before the start recognizing longer words as Gestalt.
Once they can read feed them all the interesting, to them, books you can. Done right it can be amazingly fast, my 10 year old daughter taught her 2.75 year sister to read English in about 6 months to a reading age of ~ 7. Then she started teaching basic French but by the time she was 5 she could read, and talk simply in French.
Keep away from computers, the fonts and resolution are poor, and most width is too wide to read quickley, and if you make the lines narrower they are too short.
Finally they are not intelligently reactive to the student's needs and progress.
Wait, but if we ignore race, then what will lazy blacks and Latinos use to justify their failures as individuals?
Surely they can't take responsibility for their own lack of initiative. It just has to be the "White Man" keeping them down, yet again.
Oh, and totally ignore all those blacks and Latinos who chose to work hard, got an education, and became successful.
e-mail is useful but PowerPoint is, in most hands, a work of the Devil.
"Fun" is not the means to an education it is the primary function of it.
I use my education to do a lot of fun things. I do not use fun to get an education.
Work Safe Porn
This same problem happened on the Macintosh. Back under MacOS 9 and before there was a great deal of wonderful children's educational software. The companies consolidated and died off. Much of the software does not work in Classic under MacOS X. Now with Classic being abandoned by Apple even that which did work in Classic is no longer available. It's still great software, just no hardware and operating system to run it. I maintain an older computer for this. I used to have four. I'm down to one. Eventually there will be none. Very sad to lose this resource. Apple should have supported the older software on the newer hardware. Minor cost, minor emulation, major benefit to millions of children.
Let's generalize from a anecdotal sample of one - shall we?
Why did this get posted anyway? I have submitted far more interesting things than this and they got ignored...
Sheez.
Children do not need electronics to learn. Wasting money on gadgets will not make children learn faster or be smarter. It's an utter waste of educational funds to start k-3 on computers. Even with 4th & 5th graders, the best thing to start them on is typing, which means a cheap, old hand-me-down-computer is sufficient. That's assuming the 4th grader's hands are big enough to start touch typing. We still have far too many adults that can't touch type. Kids will learn all other aspects of computers fast enough on their own.
The main reason I see for having ocmputers at home, especially for the kids, is mainly for playing games. Education is and has always been a minor part of that equation. Kids have enough toys these days and need to get off their rear and go play outside. We've got more than enough unhealthy fat adults and we're getting too many unhealthy fat children these days.
The problem is that school administrations are all run by baby boomers. They're still too technologically naive (/.ers excluded) to consider the problems of abandoning traditional teaching methods for shiny bling. I had the displeasure of going through some computer based education in the 80's (Chelsea Clinton was in the same program just to name drop) and I vastly preferred regular classroom instruction. With regards to reading, there's nothing wrong with a regular book. It's important to teach children how to use those too. There isn't much value in getting kids to cram their faces into a glorified VTech toy.
Those in the position to make decisions about these things love to feel that they're doing something to help the poor and disadvantaged by sneaking some technological contrivance into the curriculum wherever they can. Books are a pretty advanced technology all their own. They are far more reliable, dependable, and cheaper than any gizmo based solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Even more importantly, it is necessary to instill some degree of self-sufficiency in the kids growing up today. Teaching them that they just need to rely on the machine to do everything for them and rely on it unquestioningly isn't the best way to prepare children for a productive life in our society. The mass deployment of electronic calculators in elementary school classrooms has led to the creation of generations of innumerate people. Certainly children should be encouraged to learn about the use of computers and information technology but that should not be used as an excuse to set them up into accepting computers as magic.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I certainly hope this post is a joke, as there is absolutely no reason while bigger, faster, shinier more energy intensive devices are going to be necessarily better than a simpler device.
My early child hood technology consisted mainly of books, Play-doh, LEGOs, magnifying glasses, hammers, nails and scrap blocks of wood from a paint brush handle factory down the street. And I fail to see how that early education "tech" could have been improved by an e-version of anything.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
The US education system is troubled in such a way that devices may not help at all. Teachers are under serious pressure to aim their teaching at the middle and lower achievers which causes better students to be neglected. It is the only way to meet compulsory testing goals. After all the brighter students will do well on such tests despite being neglected whereas the mediocre middle and down right lousy students will score poorly. These days those scores can cost a teacher their job.
Really we need to aim our teaching at the brightest students and get the lesser students into work training programs and out of the way of the better students. Parents are the real problem in this regard. They bombard every official when their kid does poorly. And elected types tend to think in terms of the number of votes a position on an issue will get them.
England actually had a form of the draft that sent many young men into the coal mines. Others were directed into the armed forces. These were people not deemed able to succeed at higher callings due to poor school performance. It kept coal cheap and the armed forces populated. Other European nations weeded out lesser students after sixth grade and subjected them to real training as cooks or industrial workers.
If school courses are designed to strain the straight A students a bit the quality of school graduates is excellent. Try to redeem the mediocre middle and the schools fall apart.
[i]No, I'm not Black, Asian, Latino - I'm a mongrel mixed breed. I can badmouth ALL the ignorant bastids, 'cause I'm related to them.[/i]
No, you're just an ignorant asshole diverting a good discussion into your filth.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Today I would like to be educated as to the meaning of "peter puffing".
I have no idea how this nonsense got modded as "funny." It's nothing but flamebait at best.
It is, at least, on-topic flamebait - seeing as how it nicely demonstrates an utter failure of our education system.
-B-
Not only talking the talk, but actually walking the walk.
Expect a donation after tax time, since I don't have useful skills to contribute.
Admirable, truly admirable!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
It's about the Education, not the Technology. If technology furthers education, use it. If it doesn't, don't. Carry out studies to determine what is effective and what isn't. Implement what is found. Rinse, repeat. It won't ever be perfect, just keep trying to make it better. I don't care if they're using supercomputers or abacuses, are they learning how to add numbers or aren't they?
It's not technology that's needed; quite the contrary: it's intimate human contact. READ to them, tell stories, interact. That's what children need because it's how children learn: listening, interacting, being HUMAN. The technology is a boondoggle in this. Love your kids, play with them, READ to them, be real people. For some slashdot folks that might be challenge enough.
I just showed her this video and she is very interested.
Let me tell you why. What I hear from her is that the biggest problem is the kids who sit through the lessons and the material just goes in one ear and out the other. It's not necessarily that they're stupid or that they don't care, it's that they aren't engaged. What you need for those students is either massive support from the parent(s), or you need to interact with them on a one-to-one basis. My wife doesn't have the bandwidth as a teacher to provide that one-on-one interactivity while still teaching the material to the rest of the children who are on track and are learning in the traditional model.
This sort of technology can provide that one-on-one interactivity. What it needs, and what she's looking into, is whether it also provides some way that she as a teacher can monitor progress live while the children are using the devices.
To put things in perspective, a circa-1972 Xerox Alto workstation would be about $388,000 in 2009 dollars, but I can't imagine anyone preferring one to today's $399 laptops (about $77 in 1972 dollars)! :-)
FYI-The PLATO IV Terminal you've linked to includes a projector that could be used to back-project program-selectable microfiche images - a 1975 patent application notes that the panel itself was only about a 1/4 inch thick.
Touch screens are ok for older students, but tactile reinforcement of buttons is good for younger kids.
Both my 3 year old daughter and my 5 year old son have used my iPhone for about 18 months now. They fly through the thing. I never even had to teach my son how to use it - he knew how to unlock it from the first time he saw me do it.
Touch screens are just natural to use.
I'm a big tall mofo.
There was an Apple ][ in every classroom when I was a kid. We used it to die of dysentery on the Oregon Trail. Did we learn anything about history? No.
I was class of 1990, so I'm thinking that we are probably the same age. When I was in 5th grade, I was exposed for the first time to a Commodore Vic-20 in the classroom which caused my parents to buy me a Commodore 64 when I was 10. I got my first modem (Mitey Mo 300 baud) when I was 13. Started my own bulletin board when I was 14. Started a computer company when I was 20. Bought my first house when I was 21. Sold my computer company when I was 25. Got a job in corporate America. Became the CTO at the 3000+ publicly traded company I've worked at for the last 12 years.
Despite being extremely intelligent, I did not do well in school and never spent a minute in college. Never had a career interest outside of computers. If it weren't for that Vic-20 and the occasional Apple IIe I was exposed to in school, I very likely would be homeless right now. Instead, I am very financially successful, married with 3 fantastic kids.
Playing with crayons and chalk and playing outside are important, but so is exposure to the machines that run the world today. As with anything, it's the balance that's important.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Nothing funnier than a dumb, inbred redneck saying people of other races are inherently inferior. Incidentally, where are multi-racial people in that racist piece of trash article you cited?
Similar to the upcoming US election results
As an educator, reading the literature, don't freak if he kind of levels off later. Humans learn at highly individual rates and in pretty individual orders, and this is why a home-schooled kid with smart/well-read/well-educated parents will always kick the crap out of assembly-line-educated kids. Personal attention to individual differences. It also helps that your kid probably learns/thinks a lot like you and his mother do, so it's easier to relate.
My wife and I probably can't have kids (too old!), but if an unexpected package were to arrive, as an educator (my wife's a teacher, too) with a decent salary (university), yeah, that kid is gonna be home-schooled. I had way too much of my time wasted in K-12 to foist that upon my own progeny.
The US system has a lot of problems, but I think one of them that is important in this case is the idea of "grades" instead of "proficiency levels." It's very socially difficult to hold a kid back or skip him/her forward already, but if he/she is only different in one subject, what do you do about the other subjects? The kid will either be bored in everything while he catches up in math or whatever, or he will be in the right place for math and be struggling in reading... This idea that everything should come in a big package is crazy.
Anyway, keep on it, but don't worry if he ends up "just" above average. ;-)
Picking arbitrary dates around 1962:
1962 Life expectancy at birth: 66.9 years
2005 Life expectancy at birth: 74.89
source http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_lif_exp_at_bir_mal_yea-life-expectancy-birth-male-years&date=1962
1970 cost of food as percentage of income: 14%
2005 cost of food as percentage of income: 9.3%
source http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=429074
1960 home ownership rate: 61.9%
2000 home ownership rate: 66.2%
source http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/owner.html
1960 Percent of the Population 25 Years and Over with a High School Diploma or More: 41.1%
2000 Percent of the Population 25 Years and Over with a High School Diploma or More: 80.4%
source http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/education/phct41/US.pdf
1960 percent of the Population 25 Years and Over with a Bachelor’s Degree or More: 7.7%
2000 percent of the Population 25 Years and Over with a Bachelor’s Degree or More: 24.4%
source http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/education/phct41/US.pdf
Parents will be the downfall of the U.S. in terms of tech education and performance. Most parents have simply given up on learning and in doing so doom their children to educational mediocrity. They think if they didn't have to learn number systems and formal logic, then their children don't need that either, then wonder why all the technology jobs are shipping overseas or why we're taking jobs away from their kids and giving them to foreigners with H1-B visas. Furthermore, the public school system routinely resorts to teaching the use of simple gadgetry and office apps as "technical" education, watering down the education kids do receive and inflating grades in the process to make parents happy -- because without grade inflation all the parents do is email the teachers complaining that "their kids are A students!".
Actually I would go as far as to say that parents willfully hold their kids back in most cases because if their kids did manage to beat them in terms of logic and general common-sense, that would be a real burden on their egos, right? Anyway, in a country where academic performance is continuously watered down and sports make you more popular than learning real skills, it's no wonder we can't provide a good technical education. I had to re-learn all the math I ever learned in my life when I got to college, and I hope at some point kids don't have to suffer that any longer.
My PLATO terminal cost me $200:
Used Lenovo X41 Tablet off Criagslist: $120
Restore CDs from Lenovo (pure vanity): $66
Open Source Pterm: $0
Total Cost: $186.
And it does other stuff also.
Any of the current crop of netbooks would run Pterm. You could mash up a decent distro to run the Linux version and make it reasonably simple for kids, and even give an out button to the older one so they could run a browser and all that.
Of course, building a real PLATo terminal would be pointless, but I suspect it could be done for not a lot of money. A bit more if you wished to use the color enhancements.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I gave my old 1g iPhone to my 3 year old daughter. She's been using one for a year now to play games and take photos and listen to music. it no longer has a sim card and is set up with just apps and content for her now.
I sincerely hope the schools she attends can do better than what I'm hearing or she is gonig to have a tough time adjusting to the low fidelity expectations.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Ask and ye shall receive!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=peter-puffing
What else can I Google for you today, feepness?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
How about this?
I'm pretty sure OP meant Near Earth Asteroid.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
diverting a good discussion into your filth
At what point was this thread - started by a troll and riddled with mindless replies - a "good discussion?"
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
People often falsely apply ideas and concepts from other areas to education. Human education and development is UNLIKE EVERYTHING; therefore, one should avoid inter-discipline thinking. Psychology and education should be the fields upon which to base changes. Even then, we are talking about a topic which will never be fully understood (by humans.) This uncertainty somehow seems to give people license to spout off opinions like they know something merely because they were school children themselves. I'm no dentist simply because I've been to the dentist for much of my life; furthermore, my understanding is from a totally different perspective.
I'm often against technology which surprises people given that I'm an expert. After the shock has worn off, people go back to irrationally believing technology makes everything better in and I'm dismissed like some faith healer preaching against antibiotics.
Metrics: Any measurement system of intangible things is going to have a lot of errors, especially in the ream of hacking the system to fake better results. There are plenty of political motives that distract from the goals already; the metrics only add to this problem. Most metrics should be gone; I'm not saying there should be nothing, there should be something that works around inherent problems; something quite different from what exists today.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Btw: Chalk/pencils/paper never run out of batteries, never get badly damaged when dropped.
I call shenanigans. If you were really a teacher, you would have dropped chalk before and known this statement to be FALSE!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
That good old little sand box thingy will likely be better and provide more educational value than any battery powered gadget.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The long and the short of it is that technology has about as much impact on education as an electron does on a nucleus.
Education is a bloody mess. It is a co-opted quagmire of politizised bullshit that's so deep that you'd need a chunnel mole to get to the bottom of it. It's all about rules and protecting everyone's ass, not about the kids. (This is not meant as a slag on teachers, it's the way the system is implemented that's the problem.)
If you really want to change the speed and ability with which children learn, here's what you do: focus very intently on the various pedagogic methodologies. Make each school an autonomous unit with the principal in complete control of every aspect of school life. Implement pedagogic triage every three years to determine the most efective way that each student learns. Apply targeted learning materials in a broad spectrum of subjects. Swirl in a minimum of one hour of excersize per day. Make sure that each student consumes no junk food whatsoever and is fed balanced, healthy meals.
Oh, and get BOTH parents involved with their children on a daily basis.
If you manage all that, then, and only then should you swirl in computers. The rest of the world had better step back because our super brained children will take over the world.
*** Don't be dull.***
Would you give an iPhone to a kid who is constantly throwing things around and having temper tantrums?
No, but I wouldn't give them a book either. I speak from experience. My one year old son has torn several "plastic coated" books, and likes to make puddles with his sippy cup at the moment. Last one, on the weekend was on our Guitar Hero Drum Kit, which thankfully survived.
The bottom line is you have to teach the child that destructive behaviour is undesirable and won't be tolerated. Of course they have to be old enough that you're sure they'll understand. You also have to recognise that infants aren't going to have much in the way of common sense or dependability. By the time they're in primary school though, if they're still throwing tantrums and destroying things often, the parent's done something wrong.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
1960 Percent of the Population 25 Years and Over with a High School Diploma or More: 41.1%
2000 Percent of the Population 25 Years and Over with a High School Diploma or More: 80.4%
1960 percent of the Population 25 Years and Over with a Bachelors Degree or More: 7.7%
2000 percent of the Population 25 Years and Over with a Bachelors Degree or More: 24.4%
Bachelor's, it's the new High School Diploma.
Learn to love Alaska
My early child hood technology consisted mainly of books, Play-doh, LEGOs, [...]
You say LEGOs, but you don't say Play-dohs?
I think that claiming that if most people wont be white then it will be a catastrophe, is simply racism
Rated -1 flamebait. Wow. Simply wow. One can only assume that the mod agrees that if most people aren't white then it is a catastrophe. Glad to see that racists and/or juvenile trolls are represented in the mod community.
Of course, if history is any guide, "White America," will just redefine "white" and regain the majority. :P
2010 marks the 50th Anniversary of the PLATO system.
There is going to be a 2-day conference celebrating the history of PLATO at the Computer History Museum on June 2-3, 2010.
For details, see:
http://platohistory.org
or
http://events.linkedin.com/50th-Anniversary-PLATO-Conference/pub/163992
When I went to school calculators had only been out for a couple of years. I think the big thing was a TI-59(I think it was a 59). Anyway, if any student had taken a calculator into a lesson it would have been a very serious matter. if it had been taken into a test it would have been immediate expulsion. I was recently flipping through some up to date math textbooks and though I do not have my old books to compare against I suspect that the math they are doing now is not as difficult as the math we used to do. I also met someone a few months ago who had managed a good pass in their HSC(year 12 leaving certificate in NSW, Australia) and had very little grasp on how to do math without a calculator(their multiplication and long division where totally abysmal). When I queried them on this they told me that being able to do long division on paper wasn't really very important as that's why they have calculators.
You really have to wonder what would happen to most people with a modern education if they suddenly had to rely on their own abilities rather than the gadget-enhanced abilities that they take for granted.
Then again I also think that computers have a time and a place and that place isn't the classroom. In an IT class is OK but IMHO that is about the only time is should be necessary(note to smarties don;t talk about disabilities as i am purposefully excluding them for the sake of brevity)
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Why don't we just say it and get it over with? The "educated" intelligencia "go to collage" path is sexier. All those people doing "assembly line" work are an anachronism.
Have you seen the stuff they teach in general mathematics for the HSC, i remember flipping through my sisters text books a few years ago and thinking that most of the content was stuff children could be taught at around the age 13-14...
The three and four unit courses are still pretty decent though, i found after doing four unit math in high school the first six months of university mathematics was basically repetition, and it was probably about 25% of the math needed for my engineering course. All of the kids i tutored in four unit while i was studying at university where pretty bright kids.
What makes me sad is that i personally believe that most people are a lot more capable than what they come across as, just through laziness, bad parents, bad teachers, scared of making mistakes etc somehow they turn out bad which reinforced their view that they don't need that particular topic. Personally i feel like i was a moron all the way through high school, how i managed to get good marks i will never know!!
If you really want to get upset about a course that has been dumbed down, HSC Physics is where you should direct your anger. They have basically turned it into a 2 year course on how to remember formulas by rote and write essays on physics history....
Clay and clay-like substances are non-count. Moron.
"I have no idea how this nonsense got modded as "funny." It's nothing but flamebait at best."
Depends on the audience, dude. Where men are men, and sheep know it, my post would be hilarious - the guys would be rolling around the pasture.
Where men are men and the women know it, I'd be modded insightful.
Where men aren't men, and no one's sure, I'll be modded flamebait or troll.
Where men aren't men, and everyone is willing to admit it, I'll be funny again.
The moderations are insightful, in and of themselves. You can learn what "culture" the moderators share, or hope to share, or wish they shared.
Hope that helps.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Be nice parents (just be, don't "try to be"), have a real interest in your children. Send them to school but never forget: it's also YOUR thing to educate your children. If you put them in front of a XB360 or a TV or a PC connected to the net because the education is taken care of in school, epic fail. Grow some confidence, try to teach your children what YOU know, what you think is interesting or worth knowing. See what I did there?
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
As is Lego.
P.S. It isn't an acronym, either.
Calculators are useless for maths. Pretty good for arithmetic, though.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Lego is already plural (like "cattle"). The individual parts are called "lego bricks" (like "cows").
What is the point of being quick (rather than merely capable) at long division? If you want useful skills for life, teaching about calculating compound interest, sales tax / VAT, proportions (do I buy the 1L or the 750ml when the prices are X and Y), measurement, etc is important. If you want to teach maths then long division isn't needed.
I much prefer Bob the Builder knowing how to use his calculator reliably to work out quantities then making mistakes with long division, or making a guess. And I'd like to see Becky the Bimbo use hers, before she signs up for a £35/month 24-month contract for a phone. If they aren't taught how to use a calculator in school but instead have to spend loads of time working through sums they're going to get pissed off with "maths" and not learn anything useful.
You lucky bastard! When I were a lad we didn't have anything as posh as factories. Or streets. We had to make our own entertainment out of stones and twigs.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'm mixed too I'm anglo and saxon
I would've been better off being home-schooled. You see, while I have always tried to socialise, I've always been treated like the class' nerd. (And since I was in private school, I don't want to know how they survive in public)
Furthermore, being taught a standard curriculum, my math skills (except geometry) aren't too good - because "the deficiencies of the few are irrelevant to the progress of the many". OTOH, my language skills are above average.
All in all, personally, I say I had been better off being home-schooled; but that's just me.
Non-supporter of Online Activation and any other draconian DRM
I'm pretty sure that stories about evil witch and gorgerous king make as good example for role model, as story of Brave Linus & Richard vs. Hordes of Greedy. Or even better, give them both. Let kids choose environmental preference.
It's not technology that's needed; quite the contrary: it's intimate human contact. READ to them, tell stories, interact. That's what children need because it's how children learn: listening, interacting, being HUMAN. The technology is a boondoggle in this. Love your kids, play with them, READ to them, be real people. For some slashdot folks that might be challenge enough.
Children need contact with other children not just adults. That is the main problem with home schooling. Furthermore its far more important to have good math and English capability at the age of 25 than 5.
Maybe its no coincidence that we have a really poor lower level school system together with the best university system in the world. Perhaps this is a reasonable resource trade-off.
I'm surprised that lots of comments here focus on the uselessness of technology in the classroom, instead of how technology does actually improve classroom instruction - on Slashdot no less.
Technology is not the "magic-bullet" for educating our youth. There is no "magic-bullet". The realization that is being generally accepted is that all students learn differently. Some more so than others. Our school teaches kids with dyslexia and mild Asperger's syndrome, and these kids, without a doubt, learn much differently than you or I. Technology helps tailor the instruction to the individual student's needs.
Many people here are extolling the virtues of pencil and paper - that's great if you can read and write, but there are tons of kids out there who have encoding/decoding language difficulties. Should these different students not learn science, math, or history due to their language problems?
Computers are an outstanding tool for these kids. They can write papers, even though they can not "hand-write" papers. They can learn mathematics without the frustration of attempting to read a math text.
The other argument for technology in the classroom: Many instructional materials, and "new knowledge" never make it to print. There are tons of videos made by REALLY GOOD teachers that can help less skilled teachers in a classroom. Sure, it would be nice to have teaching perfection in every classroom, but I can tell you first hand, there aren't enough of these perfect teachers to go around. Online video distribution does maximize the impact of these stellar teachers, and exposes kids to varying teaching styles.
Ultimately, the student, the parent, and the teacher are responsible for getting that student an education. Technology can only assist, it can't do the work.
-ted
Some ideas here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006250.html
In two to three years or so, the current generation of smart phones just coming out like the Google Droid will be discarded for something new, and those might make terrific cheap education platforms.
So, Droid is a more tempting platform to me for educational software than the OLPC and Sugar in that sense of a big market. :-)
Imagine, Google and Verizon could even make a promise now to customers -- buy your Droid through Verizon, and in two years, if you continue your cell phone plan, we will give you the latest Droid version and if you return the old one to a Verizon store, we'll send it to materially poor kids loaded with educational software that teaches them how to read, write, and do math. And with bluetooth, and WiFi, the Droid could even have some software that works along the lines that Sugar aspired to do, with kids collaborating together. What a deal -- and it might greatly boost current sales. :-) Maybe someone should forward this note to someone they know at Google or Verizon? :-) Seriously, what US teacher would not buy a Droid over an iPhone knowing it was going to teach some poor kid to read in two years? (Of course, Apple might eventually have to follow suit. :-) And that gives me and the rest of the free software developer world two years to write all that free software for those kids. :-) Of course, it might be nice if Google or Verizon helped some of those free software developers to write lots of cool stuff (millions of dollars in support for education software could just be considered part of their advertising budget). But it might happen even if they did not directly provide support, because a lot of developers might see the potential, as I did. And it might help Droid sales even now, for parents to hand their Droid to their kid who was learning to read or write or do arithmetic, and it would help the kid. Parents might even buy a Droid for all their kids, and think that in two years, those Droids would also go to materially poor nations. This project might even help boost the economic recovery in the USA. And of course, there are many Android devices beside the Droid, so all of those might benefit as well from educational software. And, the Android platform already runs well under almost any PC OS in emulation. So, any free software made for the Android will also run right now on any desktop or laptop, and likely that integration could be improved even more over time.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
... was inflicted on us by a foreign power, it would be considered an act of war!
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Yes and no. First the no. Your farm kid can learn the basics of farming from his dad. But he also needs to learn about integrated pest management, different forms of crop rotation, and how to use a spread sheet well enough to plan and analyze a fertilizer trial. Your bricklayer's kid will learn how to lay bricks, but if he wants to design and build a field stone fireplace, he needs to understand some basics about foundations, and strength of materials. The welder's kid is fine for routine shop welding. And then he hits some weird allow and wonders why it doesn't work. Here in Alberta we have an apprenticeship program for many professions. It's run out of our "Institutes of Technology" They are 'diploma' programs -- considered a cut below a 'college' degree. But increasingly college grads are going back to school an NAIT and SAIT to get a ticket that will allow them to make a living. Now the yes. Kids respond to enthusiasm. If I go in to my math class and am pumped up about some abstract concept, I can infect a good half my class with that enthusiasm. Teaching "The Tempest" is easy -- once you recognize that there has been a vocabulary shift in the last 400 years. It's not a "read Act II for tomorrow." It's acting it out, and discussing the meaning, and paraphrasing big chunks of it into modern English. I had a teacher who took us through one of the comedies, "As you Like it" and then we went to the matinee that the Winnipeg theatre was putting on. Our class knew all the dirty jokes, and understood the situtation behind the funny looks, and the expressions. We howled. ROTFL. Of course none of the other classes there had our good teacher. Every kid should come out of school: * Being able to compute and have good enough numeracy to recognize when the minus sign was hit instead of the plus sign in using a calculator. * Being able to read, summarize and understand any reasonable text. * Be able to express his thoughts and feelings in writing. * Know enough history to realize that our present situations have parallels in the past -- but are still unique. * Understand how society functions, and how to effect social changes using the mail box, the soap box and the ballot box. * Have a few basic skills: How to buy food, cook, keep house, keep track of money, sew a button, fix a leak, plant a garden, and know how to find out about the ones s/he doesn't.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Just in case you missed it, in the 80's this thing called a GUI started to become popular. It stands for "Graphic User Interface". One of the neat things about it is that it can use little pictures, also known as 'icons', to represent programs. Using a device called a mouse, you can point at these so called 'icons' and click a button which will launch a program. I know that this is difficult for you to understand, and it scares you that children as young as 1 can easily grasp scary concepts that you struggle to absorb, but they really do exist. An interesting side effect of using this 'GUI' is that one does not need to know how to read to proficient at using their computer.
Anyone who can read and write minimally and push buttons can look something up on Google.
Absolutely. Now, how man can read at 3. Many to be sure, but percentage wise, a very small number. How many can write at 5? A little more than can read at 3, but still a very small percentage. Maybe I am delusional by thinking that being smart is good. No doubt the vast majority of the population is like you and think that ignorance is bliss, but the world needs people like my family. It just needs fewer smart people than it needs dumb ones. So, don't worry. There will be a place for your child in the world too. Somebody needs to change the oil in cars, and it is a perfectly respectable job.
I had (okay, my dad had) an IBM PC and an Atari 2600. My son plays WoW and Wii. He also has all of my old Legos (I know, but I'll call them Legos anyway!) plus about the same amount again new. I had Robotix, he has Lego Mindstorms. I had Erector... Hmm, I guess I'll have to get him something like that.
Quite true. According to periodicals like Harper's Weekly in the 19th century, the Irish were as bad (and Non-White) as African slaves. Now, they are considered as white as Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. Maybe in the future the law will go so far that the "One Drop Rule" will mean that anyone with *any* White blood will be considered White. For example, my daughter is not even half White, but the state I live in put "white" in the "race" column of her birth certificate, just because of how she looked when she was born.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
You think it's clever to quote things out of context? Is that really the best you can do? Is this an example of your above average intelligence?
I called you a moron and a snob after you demonstrated traits that well and truly earnt it. Thumbing your nose at people who do jobs you consider menial is just plain snobbery. YOU rely on that grease monkey to fix your brakes correctly. You put your life in the man's hands. The guy that cleans your toilets and empties your bins at work also deserves respect. What you said was disgraceful. You absolutely are a snob. And I find such snobbery moronic.
Yes, being a genius is hard. It usually means not being understood and being ridiculed until and unless people realise what you've said makes sense. Do you think Einstein was a celebrated genius when he came up with relativity? He had trouble getting a job at all. If you are recognised, you wind up being used by others to advance their own goals. Classic case is Beethoven. You really don't get it do you? The life of a "genius" isn't usually a happy one. That isn't anti-intellectual - it's a simple statement of truth. Obviously one that you can't accept.
I'm all for intellectual pursuit. I think children are talked down to way too much. Once they've gotten a grasp on the general idea, they should be shown more specifics. They have to learn what a bird is before they learn what a lark or crow is, but the progression shouldn't wait 5 or 6 years. There's a big wonderful universe out there to explore that most people literally pay no attention to. But if a person wants to earn their living as a mechanic instead of a doctor there's nothing wrong with that. Science, mathematics music, history, language. All good pursuits to fill a lifetime with. Wake up and get a clue before you make your kid's life a living hell.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
scenario: You are on an uncharted desert isle. You have a radio with thirty seconds talk time in which to announce where you are. There isn't enough charge for them to get a fix on your position using the radio's signal. All you have is a protractor, a frayed towel(never travel without a towel), pebbles on the beach, and a working wind up wristwatch. You don't have your calculator and you also have a sub-standard knowledge of how to do math/arithmetic without a modern device to do the hard yards for you. I know I would be found. What would calculator kids chances be?
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
. Maybe in the future the law will go so far that the "One Drop Rule" will mean that anyone with *any* White blood will be considered White. Maybe in the future the law will go so far that the "One Drop Rule" will mean that anyone with *any* White blood will be considered White.
Arguably, redefinition has begun.
Personally, I liked the Cat-vs-Dog Adult Swim election parody of talking heads a la Hannity and Colmes. Cat said something like, "Obama is going to be our first black president," and Dog retorted, "Why do you do that? Oh, he's 'black.' He's equally white. But you want to call him black. You racist." And you know what, Dog is right. He is equally white. So while some might hail Obama as our first black president, to me he's just the 44th cracker in a row. ;)
--
120 characters ought to be enough for anybody. - Cmdr Taco
95% of all Slashdot .sig quotes are incorrect or completely fabricated.
-- Benjamin Franklin