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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?"
Me too. Those of us born in '56 could only read about computers in sci-fi and Popular Science, and then it was Univac. I don't think IBM built the first EDPM system until the mid-50's.
When I'm in a quiet place and think about the changes brought about by technology in my lifetime, my head spins. Shit, when I was watching Avatar last week, I briefly recalled that when I was born not all movies were even shot in color, yet.
I think I got my first "personal" computer about the same time my now-21 year-old daughter was born. I suppose it's a good thing I didn't have a personal computer before I met my wife and my daughter was born. There's a good chance that neither of those things would have happened, otherwise.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
That's a great reason to support all local business as much as possible. The more local it is, the better.
Just look at all the middlemen involved when you buy from national and international sources. Most of those middlemen are people working far from their homes in order to take jobs from people who are trying to work close to home.
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.