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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."
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
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
I think what this tells us is you don't actually know what working on the line was like. I have to admit I don't either, but I'm willing to bet that it's not something people did because they liked it. Imagine spending 20 or 30 years screwing in the same fastener over and over. And I get testy after having answered the same question 50 or 60 times a day for a few months.
That's not to say that there haven't been serious consequences from phasing out those jobs and shipping them overseas, just that it's not the romantic reasons one might expect.
Before anyone rails on powerpoint here I'm going to say that it is a useful tool. Yes, a lot of kids make completely crap presentations with powerpoint. But it's no easier to make better presentations with poster board. Powerpoint gives you a bunch of blank slides and it's up to you to put the relevant material on them to make a good presentation, exactly the same as blank pieces of poster board.
Powerpoint makes making presentations easier, thus it makes it easier to make a bad presentation. Previously, someone wouldn't bother to even make a presentation, they'd just give a bad speech. Now they give the same speech but have some worthless pictures in the background at the same time. When the majority of users aren't going to put in the necessary amount of effort to make a good presentation, it's no wonder that most powerpoint presentations suck. That's no reason to blame powerpoint though, it's just lazy users.
As for student presentations, it's the fact that teachers don't bother correcting a student when they make a shit presentation. A student making a well thought out presentation with helpful slides usually gets an A. A student that copy and pastes text onto the slides, and then stares at the screen and reads the text to the class also usually gets an A. The teacher doesn't have the time to explain how to use powerpoint well because they're busy teaching the subject that they're supposed to be teaching. (i.e. econ teacher is busy teaching econ and can't take a week out of the curriculum to explain how powerpoint works). So if the teacher were to give the kid an F, then the parents show up bitching about how the teacher didn't explain powerpoint and how dare they give their kid an F, etc.
Summary: When someone builds a shitty house, you don't blame the hammer. Same with shitty presentations and powerpoint.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
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.
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
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'm pretty sure OP meant Near Earth Asteroid.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Believe it or not, there are a lot of people that just want to know how to do something and exactly what to do, and nothing more. I've had to try to train them to use relatively abstract software... "But what button do I click?" "It depends on what data you're looking at" "I just want to know what button to press!"
Get out onto the business floor with people who work on data entry and stuff like that, or just out into other industries and you'll see what I mean.
- Pitabred