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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
Does it let you cheat with Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A?
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
All the kids in my neighborhood spend hours staring at their tiny Nintendo DS and DSi screens and do some amazing things with them, so the tiny screen is going to be no impediment to them. My 10 year old daughter is creating short animations and videos using her DSi, and is learning the principles of storytelling, drawing and editing? Why shouldn't that hardware form factor be adapted to educational software? Better still, why not use the DS/DSi as the platform instead of a cheap knockoff? For the cost of 3 PCs, an entire classroom can be outfitted with these "educational DSis". That is within the reach of most school systems, even in these rough times. That is, assuming that Nintendo allows third party apps.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. ;-)
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.
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?
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.
"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