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Do Home Computers Help Or Hinder Education?
theodp writes "The NY Times reports on economists' efforts to measure a home computer's educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts. Abroad, researchers found that children in Romanian households who won a $300 voucher to help them buy computers received significantly lower school grades in math, English and Romanian. Stateside, students in a North Carolina study posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband provider showed up in their neighborhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers increased. And a Texas study found that 'there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.'"
What struck me is that kids gained nothing _but_ computer skills. This ought to challenge computer game designers: can you come up with a game that kids will want to play AND increases math and reading scores? I'm not talking about an "educational" game, per se, just a game whose side effect is better reasoning and comprehension. Even kids who read silly novels are learning something that is useful for school. Why not gamers?
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
... why aren't you doing better?
Like anyone can even know that
Kids are spending too much time on those darn newfangled computer thingys and it's rotting their brains. I say we ban them all!
Someone save me from this sanity.
Three groups or cohorts of students were included in this study, with Cohort 1 followed for four years, Cohort 2 for three years, and Cohort 3 for two years (Table 2.2). Cohort 1 (ninth graders) included a total of 5,217 students, with 2,469 treatment students enrolled at high schools and 2,748 control students enrolled at high schools; Cohort 2 (eighth graders) included 5,436 students, with 2,578 at treatment middle schools and 2,858 at control middle schools; and Cohort 3 (seventh graders) included 5,392 students, with 2,547 students at treatment middle schools and 2,845 at control middle schools.
The Romanian study apparently successfully interviewed 858 families in two Romanian counties (Valcea and Covasna). With 1,100 children interviewed and some 1,800 survey sets. Just to put some perspective on how comprehensive each of these reports are. Couldn't get access to the other reports.
Personally I think we're still in a transition period and now that those homes have computers starting when the child is born (and whose parents had computers) we will start to see better parenting skills and regulation with computer usage. It could become just another carrot for the kid or even a method to teach the child proper time management (similar to the classic homework before TV law).
My work here is dung.
It seems on our culture learning is not a process, is a job for theachers. Theres no importance put on teaching people how to learn. About a 50%, maybe a 25% of teaching sould be training people how to learn things.
-Woof woof woof!
The computer is just a tool. I'd think it has no direct effect on education whatsoever. Smart kids with supportive parents will gain a great deal from having a computer. Dumb kids with dumber parents will spend hours on Youtube, twitter etc and learn nothing of consequence.
The UK has just announced a program to get everyone online. However, 20% of school leavers in the UK are functionally illiterate and innumerate. Getting those people online isn't going to benefit anyone, in fact it'll just increase the amount of crap that's already on the Internet.
This was posted last month.
As with anything like this, the answer entirely depends on how it's used.
Like most tools computers, or the internet, can both help or harm education. The problem our generation has is that we've decided we can use technology as a substitute for things which that technology is poorly equipped to substitute. Take for example the "smart whiteboards" - outside of TED I have never once in a teaching context seen one of them used well. The fact that even lecturers within technology still use a whiteboard or blackboard should hint to other subject teachers that these aren't magic bullets for improving education.
The funny thing is that in my experience technology is used the worst the more further removed you are from subjects that really understand that technology. For example, in Science, Engineering, and IT you might actually find less computer usage than some classes in English or History which have no place using computers at all. What we essentially have is teachers swinging the technology magic wand like it is a black box that good grades come out of on their own... Very few people that know technology would believe this "black box" magic bull. But naturally there are companies lined up to sell schools software and hardware that might give students great grades just by the school spending money.
Basically people want to "buy" grades and technology is the latest trend in that vein. The old trend was buying teachers silly short courses on various vodo tricks.
Parents just want someone else to raise their kid and they feel less guilty about a computer than a TV or games console. Bad parenting will result in more time spent on 4chan and worse grades.
it requires instruction and practice. A hammer and a saw do not create the carpenter. A carpenter can create with a hammer and a saw. A computer is just a tool and requires instruction on its use and operation. I don't need a study to tell me this, it's just common sense.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Computers don't hinder education, people do.
Clearly, it's about how you use it. I don't know about kids, but I do all my learning online. Anything I want to know is at my fingertips.
Every modern home has a computer. Those households that didn't have them clearly have parents who don't know how to instruct or guide their child's use of computers. Of course they won't study on it. They're probably surfing p0rn all day. No, seriously.
Yes.
Unsurprising, and for language skills too as children just spend more time doing stuff on the computer, than properly doing their homework.
What surpises me about todays school education (in the Netherlands) is that programmable graphing calculators are allowed everywhere. If I were a teacher I'd only allow those in perhaps 1 test per year. All else to be done on paper, manually.
When I see my niece who's quite intelligent, she's nowhere near as good at calculating stuff on paper or in her head as she should be. For what I consider te be trivial stuff that I do in my head, she picks up a calculator. And those skills of doing it yourself are important, e.g. to make estimates so you don't blindly trust what the calculator spews out. And those results can be wrong, if you say enter a wrong number somewhere...
In my schooldays, I liked to calculate stuff in my head even though I was a programmable calculator nut (remember the great Casio FX-602P? The excellent but slow HP-41CX?). I did the following trick for example: Someone gave me a calculation that I would then try to give a close estimate to. E.g. 14.6 ^ 2.7. Using various methods I usually got within a few percent. Useless? No, those skills are useful to check calculations. If the outcome is completely different from a manual estimate, somewhere there's a problem...
I remember estimating skills being taught in primary school. At that point they didn't make sense to me, because for me they were too easy, e.g. calculate 125*43. I would just calculate the exact answer, quicker than making an estimate. So estimating needs to be explained too which wasn't done properly then. Only many years later did I see the use of it...
Make of all that what you will, I see no suprises in any event, in the results of the article.
Blaming the computer for Internet distraction isn't correct.
I would be interested to see the effects of putting a computer with educational tools in the home, but WITHOUT INTERNET.
If parents were not using these for electronic babysitters this wouldn't happen. Any parent who's paid any attention at all can tell you that children will use anything to keep from the boring old task of "studying". As long as parents think they can shirk their responsibility to force the children to sit down and study, and at least do their homework, children won't study, and they won't learn, and their grades will go down. Thirty years ago I knew young parents who were totally shocked at their younger children's poor performance in kindergarten and first grade. "But, but..." they'd all stammer, "Johnny has watched Sesame Street three times a day since he was six months old!" He can sing the MacDonald's song just fine, but he doesn't even know how to hold a pencil, let alone write any letters or numbers with it.
I remember, back in my elementary/middle school days, computers(Apple IIs, at the time, went very well with the onion on your belt) were just getting cheap enough for the district I was in to get some, with the assistance of the more enthusiastic parents.
There was a great deal of excitement about them; but much of it seemed to be on the part of people who didn't grasp that "information" and "knowledge" are, in fact, distinct things. Since kids are fairly quick on the uptake, we quickly realized that, if we turned down the difficultly level of the "educational" portion of the educational games(RIP MECC), we could get to the "game" part more quickly and easily. I'm assuming that access to youtube and myspace, had they existed at the time, would not have improved our results.
I am, therefore, completely unsurprised to hear that computer access basically just reinforces whatever trajectory the student was already on(which, don't get me wrong, is hardly 100% poor kids screwed, wealthy ones fine. There are some very motivated poor kids, and some monied but heavily slacktastic ones. Trouble is, though, that among children without much internal motivation, wealth almost certainly does strongly correlate with external motivation, supplied by parents/tutors/etc.) . The internet is basically the best thing ever to happen to the self motivated(yes, public libraries were/are good as well; but having easy access to things like software, communication with fellow enthusiasts, and inexpensive supplies of esoteric hardware, in addition to information, arguably make the internet even better). It is slightly less good; but still pretty good, for the externally motivated. However, it also offers untold lifetimes of easily accessible distraction to the unmotivated and/or unsupervised. It probably still beats TV; because you have to be vaguely literate to move from one video to another; but that isn't saying much.
i just moved to a decent elementary school district from a crappy one since my son is a few years away from going to school. in this school the kids are expected to know how to read by the time they go to 1st grade. i know someone who moved to one of the best school districts in the US where parents pay crazy property taxes to pay for two teachers per class etc. same story, kids are expected to know a lot of things that in crappy school districts they would spend time learning since the parents are lazy. in the good public schools the regular classes are like the top classes in the crappy schools.
my kid starts daycare soon and the one he's going to they teach kids to read and write by the time they hit 4. you can buy all the tech you want and pay all your money in taxes, but if the parents ignore the kid and expect everyone else to teach their kid then don't expect any spectacular results. if you buy technology for your kids make sure they use it right. in my day you had to go to the library a mile away to look at an encyclopedia. today it's on a cell phone and organized better than Britannica could ever dream of
Unless all of these computers were bought SPECIFICALLY for educational use, it's a poor/loaded question.
It's like asking whether or not a family's car is hindering or helping education. Yes it gets them to school, but they can also take time off of school and drive to the rocky mountains for vacation.
They have multiple purposes, I don't see how an inanimate object can be seen in pro or anti educational light.
I read a study ages ago about how many fewer words children of lower income households hear spoken in their homes over the course of growing up. (No, I have no link to the study, but I recall it's millions.) Is it any surprise that you put another electronic distraction in a home where there's not a good track record for parent-child interaction that the interaction will decrease further and fewer words be spoken again? I think a lot of people, kids in particular, are already socialized to consume a lot of television, and I doubt that in financially stressed households the parents are going to make a conscious decision to reduce kids' television consumption or at least keep the consumption steady for all electronic devices. If you replace "my kids are LEARNING to use the computer" with "my kids are LEARNING to surf the internet" or "my kids are LEARNING to play their Xbox," the problem becomes obvious.
Make love, not reality television.
I'd say the computer was great for education myself- especially with my parents encouraging me to play educational games, learn word processing , etc.- and my handwriting was (and is) atrocious and slow, so having a computer is a godsend for me. It really helped me out, and the internet is a tremendous resource for research. You'd be surprised at how much you could learn.
At the same time, it's easy for the computer to be more of a distraction. If you just buy the computer and throw the kid on it it's not likely to go well. More likely than not the kid is just going to find all sorts of interesting but ultimately unhelpful stuff (educationally) on the web. I think there are two big reasons for this:
Beyond putting computers in classrooms and slapping on web filters (more for liability than anything else) I think schools are doing less to educate students on how to properly use the computer. I had a computer proficiency class in 6th grade. Everyone hated it, and it was taught by the home economics teacher. We all did Type to Learn, and at the end of that class only one person had bothered to learn how to touch type instead of looking at the keyboard (can you guess who it was)? Additionally, we were taught on how to use the Office Suite, use the library databases, and how to find information on the web.
So I can believe the story is credible instead of an attack on technology. Having a portal to all sorts of wonderful distractions and terrible time wasters is bound to end up well if you have a situation where the kids are less likely to get guidance. Like a scalpel - a surgeon can save your life with it, or end it prematurely if he makes a mistake.
Back in my day i had a Romanian Sinclair Spectrum clone (Cip 03) and a bad russian cassette recorder who could not load any games from my friend's tapes.
So i had to learn to make games myself (in BASIC). I had higher grades in math, as all the graphs on my homework were perfect (plotted with the computer and copied from the tv screen :) )
Other old men here care to share their stories ? :)
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
...and ask yourself if you'd be surprised by these results. Most home computers (like TVs) are entertainment devices that are occasionally educational, rather than educational devices that are occasionally entertaining.
Beyond that, fundamental education (language, math, reasoning, general and specific knowledge) is hard and involves study, memorization, drill, and test. People have been hoping for 40 years or so that computers would somehow magically make that go away. Or to paraphrase South Park:
1) Computers in classrooms and homes
2) ?
3) Smart, well-educated kids!
Sorry, doesn't work that way. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
18 minutes TED talk video Clifford Stoll where he touches on computers in the classrooms (and many many many other things): http://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html
He's a fun watch.
Yes. Computer's aren't magical education transmitters.
It used to be, that if you had a computer you had to work to get it to do anything fun/useful. Constructing a dos bootdisk to play Wing Commander that would load all the necessary modules (HIMEM.SYS!) without going over the limit started me, or at least continued to push me, down the technical career path. That doesn't mean that those computers magically turned me into a computer geek, just that only geeks played computer videogames.
Nowadays, computers can be simple devices no more interactive than a television. After setting up the Internet and a browser you can stop thinking and just veg out on youtube, facebook, flash game sites, etc. The great thing about computers is that they are generic devices, they can do just about anything that you want.
Buying kids art supplies doesn't magically make artists. Buying kids dictionaries doesn't magically confer a large vocabulary. Buying kids TVs doesn't magically transmit every educational documentary into their brains.
I think we have to pretty sure that causation is not correlation here, It seems to be just kind of insinuating rubbish.
BBC coverage of one laptop per child in Uruguay
I think it has to do with the age of the child (NYTimes article describes research experience with teenagers in North Carolina, BBC covers internet give to primary school age children at the schools in Uruguay). The research NYTimes profiles also shows an apparent difference according to the race of the teenager who gets broadband. Could it be that test scores have anything to do with anything else other than computer access? They need a control group, e.g. a country the size of Uruguay where they distribute Nintendo's and "Grand Theft Auto" instead of computers. My theory: prepubescents who get their online access at a public school (Uruguay) spend time accessing different educational websites than teenagers given broadband access in their rooms (NC).
Gently reply
Did they measure how much study time VS myfacespacemessengerchat time, I bet that would of provided useful information.
The level of skills in computing logarithms has fallen dramatically since the introduction of the slide rule.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I am fond of the idea of using computers and modern tools to teach. To this end, I wanted to write an educational film short to help teach children about chemistry. Though I don't necessarily feel that educators should be entertainers, I do feel that "stealth learning" has its benefits. One approach is to use film and modern media to instruct:
In this screenplay, the Starship Voyager is critically low on dilithium crystals. They discover an arctic planet with Tundra-like conditions. Seven-of-Nine is dispatched to fix the extractor in an old mine near an acidic beach that contains tons of dilithium (thought to be a waste product from a previous civilization). There is an explosion and the mine collapses. Racing against time, they rush a small tunnel to Seven-of-Nine to provide air. The soils are highly acidic, however and poses a threat. The good doctor proposes that they use calcium hydroxide to counteract the dangerous acidity in the soils. Janeway demands that, as the Captain, she should do this task. They race against time because the advance welcoming party is starting to fall victim to the frozen conditions. The captain transports down to the surface to begin. One could say that Captain Janeway's on shore, all the greeters are cold, and she's liming the airway to Seven.
It depends on how they are used. A computer with an internet connection can be used just like a huge library, or it can be just a tool for chatting with friends all day long, or play games.
It is up to the parents to make sure their children use the computers for a positive purpose.
So TFA is looking for the sign of the effect of PCs, assuming it's additive. Well, it's not. IF I _want_ to learn, a pc helps me at that. if I _don't want_ to, a pc helps me at that.
We've been throwing money at computing technology in, and in recent years out, of the schools for thirty years. Imagine if even a fraction of that went to more and/or better educators, support staff or repairing aging buildings. My high school had the math 'wing' closed for months while they tore moldy carpets out and sanitized the walls. The library was closed for almost two years because of structural integrity issues.
The math wing contained the "language lab" which was a little over a quarter million dollar computer lab with AV interaction at all stations with the master station. It was supposed to be used for the foreign language department but even before the wing was closed it sat mostly unused. After the mold problem was taken care of, the lab was rebuilt for general purpose.
The library closing wasn't as big a deal. There weren't many articles published after ~1981, no big loss. However, they had just spent near $100k on rebuilding most of the library space as another (fifth) computer lab. Then, installing another $70k worth of gear inside.
It's cool though, they made up for the losses by laying off two art teachers and outright killing the metal/wood shop and drafting programs. Last I heard, the shops have been converted to computer labs.
--- Do you believe in the day?
If computers are bought by the school, they hinder education, because this money (for the purchase of those computers but also their continued maintenance and the training of the teachers) could have spent better (e.g. in laboratory equipment to let pupils experiment first-hand; in books; in an invitation of some outside speakers etc.).
If the question is whether the pure existence of a computer in a household hinders or helps the education, the answer is "doesn't matter".
It's all about limits.
When the kid is on the computer he should be doing his school work or real research. Parents need to block websites for certain hours. Or, here's a way for Linksys to get more revenue, a home router with unlimited URL blocking and a filter that actually filters based upon content - my content filter doesn't work at all.
Have a list for timed access: ex. facebook - 8pm-9pm or what ever the parent sets. I think it's unreasonable and even a bit creepy for the parent to just stand over the kid all night.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Very little about studies like this surprise me. I'm of the age where I went to school before computers - or even calculators - were used in schools. Amazingly enough, somehow I managed to learn to read, write, and do arithmetic (and later on advanced mathematics) without them. Are they handy, and useful? Yes, absolutely. The advent of relatively cheap calculators made my college years a lot easier than it would have been otherwise. Computers have made a lot of what used to be very onerous and time-consuming tasks simpler, easier, and faster. I know that because I had to do them by hand at one time.
That said, what I have noticed is that a lot of people have become totally helpless when the technology fails or isn't available. I've watched people struggle to add a simple column of numbers or make change when a calculator wasn't available. Something I consider trivially simple - even do in my head - they can't without technological help. GPS navigation systems seem to have caused many to have forgotten how to read a map or follow directions. What appears to have happened is that the technology isn't teaching them anything except which buttons to push. It's not teaching them the actual skill.
I started playing computer games back in the mid-80's. I can say with confidence that games like Balance of Power, Pirates!, Europa Universalis, and the Total War series taught me as much if not more about history and/or geography than I learned in school. If they didn't directly teach me, they at least got my interest up in those subjects and inspired me to learn more about the subject through reading/studying. If parents pick the right games their kids can learn without realizing it.
I was even inspired to learn how to make Italian food after playing Mafia. :)
In all cases, the kids in homes with computers improved their ...
One would almost think that the main purposed of giving poor kids access to computers at home should be to increase their computer skills (given that in today's and future society one can pretty much forget about any kind of specialized non-physical work if one doesn't have computer skills).
That said, what these studies seem to indicate is how important some form of supervision is for limiting the negative impact of computers (i.e. increase in time wasted on leisure activities) for kids.
I bet if a study was done involving getting TVs for TV-less poor families with kids, we would get the same negative results without the positive one.
Computing as a field is rife with spectacularly good examples of where solutions keep on being developed without any consideration of how they're going to solve a problem - or indeed if there is a problem, or if the problem lends itself to being solved with a computer.
I can't help but feel this is similar. I'm sure I remember hearing about studies years ago when they first started putting computers in classrooms - if you just put the computer in the classroom it was a distraction, but if you invested in appropriate software and built structured lessons around it it was a very capable tool.
Learning tools can't make up for indifferent, underskilled, and unintelligent parents. No amount of money is going to change the bell curve.
thanks Küçük Srlar
With kids being expected to learn typing in elementary school these days, we did provide a computer (even in the bedroom!), but it was loaded with a locked down version of FreeBSD, and had no Internet/e-mail/etc access. Daily typing drills resulted in a fantastic improvement in typing (according to the technology teacher), and Tux Math, a math drill game, seems to be more attractive than flash cards or printed math sheets, especially since getting a high score involves having to do the work more quickly, and our insistence on home row means that it's effectively also typing drill for the numbers row.
Perhaps the real problem here is that a computer is of limited usefulness, and that if it isn't thoughtfully and carefully deployed and monitored, then the benefits become more questionable. The tech teacher implied that we're very different than most families in that we've not provided Internet access or e-mail, but quite frankly that's going to be delayed for as long as possible precisely because we don't see a huge amount of value in Internet access for kids in elementary school, and "requirements" that homework be "e-mailed" in isn't going to change that.
There are significant negative aspects to uncontrolled access to computers and the Internet, ranging from benign time-wasting to dangerous predators. As a tech-aware parent, it's difficult to find suitable and relevant things to use the computer for, especially without Internet access, and so it comes as no shock to me that placing a computer into a random family's educational mix has limited effectiveness.
The artiicle is The Early Catastrophe
Missing from TFA is any information on what the schools were doing to encourage self-directed learning - by (e.g.) setting interesting homework that could be done on computer, making good use of computers in lessons and possibly (gasp) shifting the curriculum towards understanding subjects rather than memorising bite-size factoids for multiple-choice tests.
When the math curriculum is dominated by learning by rote to perform routine, tedious bits of math gruntwork that anybody not stranded on a desert island would leave to the computer, all a home computer is good for in math is cheating. Throw in a bit of (e.g.) spreadsheet modelling (you'll have to teach them to use formulae - I've even seen *adults* with IT proficiency certificates using a pocket calculator to work out values to type into Excel) and more activities about formulating expressions and equations which can be solved or plotted on computer (rather than laboriously drawing graphs by hand or only ever meeting the tiny subset of equations that can be solved analytically) and maybe things would start to change.
If you just dole out free computers without pro-actively ensuring that they're used for education (just blocking pr0n and Tw@tter doesn't cut it) then the result reported in TFA really is one for the department of Urso-sylvanian scatology.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
OLPC's are made for education and not mindless repetitive head full of zombie gaming. They self report glowing results. So it is highly frustrating that these studies neglected to look at OLPC and made a bunch of over generalizing sensational absolutist statements without specifying which computers were used. etc etc.
What do you expect from Micro$oft Windoze? What did you think children would do, whose parents know less than them, about computers? Also, the very few Windoze software applications that are available, are only at great expense! What can Micro$oft Windoze even offer, for education? Put Linux and BSD into schools! My biggest beef is that the Micro$oft contracts with the 50 State School Boards is for a Micro$oft TAX of $1,000.00 per student, no matter how few computers are in the schools, and that many of those computers are MacIntosh, Linux, BSD systems! In a recession, with school tax collections reduced due to the hight foreclosure rates, parents in my district are tasked to provide all paper, crayons, printer supplies, markers, chalk, and even toilet paper to the schools for the coming year! The MICRO$OFT SCHOOL TAX really SUCK$!!!
Like any tool (TV, books, toys...) it all depends on how it is used. The one most significant factor in a kid's learning is the involvement of his parents, both as motivators and as teaching assistants. Kids need to be helped and motivated all the time, but the payback on all that effort is tremendous. My 4yr old nephew called a tomato "spherical" a while back, that cracked us up big time. I'm a bit at a loss on how to proceed though, it's very hard to figure out when a how, when and what to try and teach kids.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I grew up dirt poor. One of the places we lived in had a dirt floor and no insulation in Great Falls, Montana.
I got to eat meat year round because my father poached deer out of season.
I got to eat bread because my parents bought hogs feed at 5 cents/lb to grind to flour.
I got to eat vegetables because we would gleen the fields of industrial farms of low growing fruit/veggies after the harvester machines passed through.
My parents were to religiously conservative to teach me anything at home that didn't come from the bible.
When we got a computer, it opened up the world for me.
From that point on, I never learned anything in school until I started working on my second college degree.
This was because I had already learned it from exploring on my own by the time school had gotten around to teaching it.
My experience may be far from common, but it was invaluable for me that I had access to a computer.
we're still in a transition period
But we'll always be in a transition. Just because this generation of children are brought up in the presence of desktop computers and laptops doesn't mean that those will be the platforms of choice for the next generation in 20 years time. For them the equivalent of todays PC might be more like an iPad which is used in completely different ways from todays machines.
However, it's more likely that the next generation of children will have access to something as far removed from todays PCs as the current kids are from ZX81s and Tandy boxes. As for what the internet (which is really what it's about - not the PCs themselves) will have become, it's impossible to say
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
A week or two ago the Mayor went on TV to congratulate the teaches for something like the 10th year in a row reading scores have increased in the city, I though to myself Yea, about when the internet took off for lots of folks. God knows it's not the teachers and here they were taking credit. What a shame.
At my daughter's (who is 10 years old) school they strongly recommend no Radio, TV or Computer until 12 years old, yes it's Waldorf. I am a technologist (Linux/Unix administrator), but I have found that my daughter's desire to draw or read or write rather than be on the computer or watching TV very gratifying. I hope they consider this kind of policy in public schools, IMHO t would help children have better relationships (friends, family...etc) and be happier.
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
The unfortunate truth is that the best predictor of your academic performance (statistically speaking, so dealing with large numbers and exceptions) is the academic performance your parents. Why? Smart parents are more likely to have smart kids. The converse is also true (as unpalatable as that may be).
The computer will not, cannot make you smarter, just as with books.
The first comment in the linked previous post:
"Without a computer you have to learn how to think."
This was depressing to read. Apparently we have some amazing programmers, because they've figured out how to write programs that can think for us. If using a computer to do an internet search rather than tediously going to the library, or to perform a calculation rather than doing it out on paper is 'thinking for us', then we must not think of very interesting things at all.
Another post:
"similar to the classic homework before TV law"
Comparisons between computers and TV sets are non-starters. Computers are only interesting to the public at large because they either (1) let them play games, or (2) let them more easily interact with others (i.e., read news, look stuff up, social network, chat). In both cases computers seem to be infinitely healthier for the average kid than a TV set.
Kids naturally adapt to their environment, and today their environment is one where ubiquitous computing is on the rise, and the internet is real and really important. What course in public school grades you on computer/internet literacy? Was it included in the study? We are only seeing one side of the story here.
The conclusion of the study is that kids
--"You are your own God"--
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Congratulations, you're a self-motivated learner. Providing resources to such a person is generally an enabling thing, regardless of what the resource is. The Internet can be a very powerful tool in such hands. However, many people just don't have that sort of drive, and will instead waste time on the Internet doing Facebook, instant messaging, games, and other not-particularly-educational things.
$20 million for 21 laptops and tracking the grades for 42 kids. Now there's some bang for your bucks. ;)
I could have done it for $1 million.
Look, if you don't like the research, then criticize the methods, findings, or logic. What you've got above is just an ad hominem attack on social scientists.
One might as well say girls hinder education for boys. Or TV. Or radio. Or cars. Or outside. Or.... So a computer doesn't HELP their education, but there was no solid conclusive evidence that it hurt, either. Even Texas just stated that "there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork." A kid that isn't interested in school isn't going to raise his grades because he got a fancy new computer. Or TV. Or radio. Or girlfriend. Or car. Or.... Counter study: give a group of kids a fully updated set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and see how it effects their education. No need, the results are above.
Well, it would be that and even the quests could be at least a good reading exercise, if people actually read that stuff any more. But nowadays they just go wherever the little cube points them and then chances are they might not even know where they've been.
I still remember teaching someone to play WoW, and let's leave him unnamed for the moment for the sake of protecting the idi... err... innocent. It went well until he found Quest Helper. Ouch. Then came talks like:
Me: Ok, we'll get the egg first and then for the other quest we'll get the kobolds further south, they have much better drop rate.
Him: Wait, wait, the little cube says there's a kobold there that has it!
Me: Ah, screw those, the drop rate is homeopathic on those.
Him: No, you don't understand! The cube says it has it!
Me: How the heck would it know that? The drops aren't even generated until you kill them? It'll show you the nearest kobold in the area, regardless of drop rate.
Him: No, the little cube says that kobold has it!
Me: *sigh* Ok, let's prove it then.
*Skip a minute of whack-a-kobold, and obviously it didn't drop the quest item*
Me: Did that kobold drop it?
Him: No...
Me: Told ya. Let's go south, as I was saying. Those have better drop rates.
Him: Ok
*Walk 10 ft*
Him: Wait, wait, the little cube says there's another kobold over there and it has the item!
Me: Didn't we just go through this? The "little cube" as you call it, can't possibly know what it will drop.
Him: Well, it just knows. If I mouse over it, it says it's for that quest. You'll see.
Me: *sigh* Ok, go get him, tiger.
*More whack-a-kobold, no drop*
Me: Ok, NOW do you see that it doesn't know that?
Him: Must have been a glitch.
Me: Look, seriously, just follow me, we could have gotten it already from the group down south. Just trust me, ok?
Him: Ok.
*Move another 10 ft*
Him: Wait, wait, the cube says the first kobold just respawned and it has the item!
Me: Not again...
Him: You'll see! If it says kill that one, then that one has it!
Me: Jesus Haploid Christ... Ok, let's prove it again, shall we?
Repeat about a dozen times, after which it dawned upon me that no amount of reasoning or failed tests would shake his religious faith in "the little cube" knowing everything, and just let him lead wherever the cube may point him. Better to spend another hour chasing a 1% drop rate than spend another hour making an enemy.
But, either way, if you asked him afterwards where he's been for that quest or what road to follow there, he'd be as clueless as a baby. He just followed the little cube. Any names, landmarks, etc, didn't even register and really didn't need to register. There was no need to notice stuff like sub-zone name or notice even where the road is or anything. Those were not what told him where to go. The only thing that mattered, the alpha and omega, was just where the little cube was on the minimap.
And just so I don't pick on just WoW, the same thing has been done for EQ2 too, in the form of maps with all quest positions already marked. And if anyone did a game based on RL geography, well, the same would happen. You'd get people who _still_ don't know where Oregon is, even after following the trail to it and back for a quest, because they weren't even noticing where they are or where they're going. The were just following the little cube.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well, books are just 'tools.' Would you expect them to have any effect on education? If so, then why (or why not) computers?
Another quest for the one size that fits all.
Here's the real answer: it helps some, hinders others and is a wash for the rest.
Computers will teach how irrelevant everything they teach at school is.
Does it have a negative impact on their education or their schooling?
Most of the studies I've seen about the impact of NEW technology on kids and education measure OLD skills and come up with statements about what is LOST. "Math skills" is a good example. How many of you were not allowed to use calculators in math class? Raise your hands. I remember when they were thought to imperil "math skills." A few educators saw them as game-changers and recognized that they enabled students even as they called for the development of new skills -- or a shift in the importance of various components of the skill set. It's very hard to see the real impact of new technology just because it's new. The things kids are learning from computers are things we have no words for - yet. I have confidence that there is learning going on, it's just not going to be learning that will enable business-as-usual to continue, so of course it's threatening.
I remember reading this exact thing in Freakonomics (an amazing book, by the way) nearly a year ago.
The trick of it is determining correlation from causation. Just becuase X increases when Y increases doesn't mean X causes Y. It could mean that Y causes X, or both could be caused by Z. Freakonomics went over a similar example- Kids with lots of books in the home seemed to test better than kids without. In testing, the books themselves had little effect on test scores. What caused the increase was the parents. They cared enough to get the kids the books.
computers will try to wash the brain of innocent children!!!! do not use computers for teaching!!! they will turn children into mindless zombies!!!! :)
I'm sick and tired of reading all these stupid news and statistics about computers that lower the grades of children.I'm from Romania and I learned a lot of thing form Wikipedia or The Teaching Company. I can't imagine how people used to learn back in the '80 :) searching each and every word in the dictionary. The computers in low income areas are misused because parents and teachers have no clue about how to use a computer.
then having a computer in the house is not going to magically make it appear. If they do, however, computers are the single most valuable resource available in doing so.
Yes, it was a 'teaching game' but dang it was fun and I would play it today if I had the gumption to set up an apple IIe emulator and find the ROM.
Super Munchers was also good and had more categories than just math.
"...little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts..."
So, they don't do any good, but they ALSO increase the dreaded "digital divide". Doesn't the latter imply the negation of the former?
Perhaps if children were taught at school (gasp) to use computers for tasks besides word processing; some rewards might be reaped. If parents and schools throw machines at children as a replacement for tutoring, then the child will apply the same method and use the machine as a replacement for TV. An introductory IT syllabus (one completed before a child reaches tertiary education) should start with electrical signals and hardware, progress to operating systems and I/O, then finish with multi-level programming and networking. The current widespread syllabus of copy/paste and formatting in MS Word, then finish with further miscellaneous software experience is an insult and injury to modern society.
The reasons people in lower socioeconomic strata do worse (even absent computers) are varied, but the biggest problem is lack of support in the home environment. In fact, last I saw stats, socioeconomic status ("low income") didn't seem to be the driving factor, so much as something covariant with the real driving factor that most tightly correlated with student success -- the parent's level of educational attainment. It's not hard to see how, both in terms of values and moral support and more direct support (homework help, guidance, etc.) this works.
Getting a computer at home could be a powerful tool for improving education, or it could be a distraction. Which it is -- as with anything else -- most likely depends largely on other factors in the home environment, including what your parents are willing and able to support you in doing with it. Clearly, the big disadvantage here rests with the same group that is disadvantaged to start with.
So, yeah, throwing computers at low-income children (and, probably more specifically, those whose parents are themselves poorly educated) with no other support is going to serve mostly as a distraction rather than an educational tool.
Computers, the internet, etc., can be powerful educational tools, but they don't substitute for education, just like giving an infant wood and nails isn't the same as giving it a home.
Hey, I learned about global warming when I was in kindergarten, too. GOOOOOOOOO PLANET!
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Can we get a better study - ie, one conducted in a part of the US that *isn't* an ex-Confederate state? There's something of a problem with "teh stoopid" and "teh crazee" in both Texas and NC - how do we know that the parents didn't just decide the computer was a tool of SATAN (and/or the vast liberal conspiracy to turn kids into gay atheist abortion doctors) and throw it out?
Having also grown up in Great Falls, I'm wondering just what the heck part of town you lived in (and when), cuz outside of maybe some converted garages in Black Eagle, I don't recall ANY part of town being that poor. Do you remember the address??
I graduated from GFHS in 1972, when a computer meant a mainframe. Having since seen many other systems, and their results, I still point to then and there, and say "THAT is how a school system should be run."
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Been a while, so no, I don't recall the address. And it would have been more appropriate to say a rural area near Great Falls rather than in the town itself.
Did they measure real world skills like their trolling skill and porn finding abilities?
As always, this is a oversimplification of a false dichotomy.
First of all, the base value is how interested a child is in learning new stuff anyway. ;)
Normally, a healthy child always wants to learn. Because it is fun.
But we raped learning, and formed it into this dull and horribly wrong thing we call “teaching” and “school”.
For humans, and all intelligent life, the quality of learning is actually hard-wired to the fun it brings. Via the successful growth of you with the challenges of your goals.
So, believe it or not, but games are, how learning is actually supposed to be like. (Just that what current games don’t exactly focus on the right skills, if you know what I mean...
Then it depends on how much there actually is to learn. There is no doubt that nothing can even remotely reach the Internet in that aspect. If you are dedicated, you can go from only knowing your local language, to knowing all the important languages of the world, quantum physics and relativity theory, social sciences and everything without problems, with just having access to the Internet (not just WWW).
And finally it depends on the interface. Is it an actual computer you are using, or just an appliance of colorful pre-digested clickables?
An actual computer interface supports and fosters automating and abstracting your tasks away, and doing experiments/simulations. A appliance conceals details of the system and tries to make everything so “simple”, that you don’t learn anything, and often even have to dumb yourself down, just to use it.
This is why learning how to at least script your stuff in a high-level language, and having a OS that allows you to automate it, is a must for a education computer. From my experience, the only “OS” that fits that, is Linux. (I put OS in quotes, because it’s such a vague term, meaning any combination of kernel, shell, userspace utilities, libraries and “desktop frameworks” [I despise “frameworks” as “libraries minus flexibilities”.])
So give your kid a computer that can run games and runs Linux, and make the learning process
1. relevant to the kid (which often even means: not to you. to the kid!) (Learn what “beauty”, “resonance” and “relevance” actually mean and how they are defined.)
2. a game that is fun! (Learn what “a game”, “fun”, “problem solving“, “a toy”, “curiosity”, “pleasure” “surprises”, “flow” and “(fractal) interest curves” actually mean and how they are defined.)
Then your kid will not only learn. It will WANT to learn! It will protest if it can’t learn. It will be proud of it. It will compete with other kids and brag about it. And it will be much more successful than any “traditionally ‘educated’” kid ever.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
In other news, researchers found that providing students with high-quality pencils had no effect on their education.
I didn't RTFA, but I'd want to know what kind of guidance / instruction was provided to these students after they received their fancy new PC's.
Television can also be educational, but giving a TV to students from low-income homes probably isn't going to have the desired effect...
Very interesting. I was just telling someone up above about how I learned to read from my mom reading to me at a very early age, and (per my own observation and experience) that I'm not sure "learning to read" and "learning to speak" should be considered separate skills.
BTW I see something similar as a pro dog trainer: dogs that are talked to a lot, even just randomly, develop much better "vocabulary skills" than those that are not talked to much. The ones that hear a lot of everyday speech learn to figure stuff out better, even if not as well-trained otherwise. I expect it's the same phenomenon as in your cited article, dogs and young children being VERY much alike.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
As soon as I got the computer, school became uninteresting, and I woul spend most of my time at the machine learning the skills that now I use to pay my bills. School is frankly boring. I think most kids will find a way to learn interesting skills using the computer, just not the skills school teachers are interested in. We don't need no education.
I would like to add that I am a successful Software Engineer and I don't think I would be where I am today if I didn't have a computer in my home from a young age. My mother was poor but made it a priority to buy a computer for the family. I think it was the right decision. Also, as a struggling dyslexic MUDs absolutely improved my reading ability.
Thank you for that inspiring story, Abraham LinkedIn.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
You don't suppose that since those kids were affected by the "shiny new toy" condition do ya? At first you play everyday, then less and less.
Of course if you give a poor kid a shiny new computer they'll be using it to play instead of study! People who've had a computer for a long time have more of a "been there, done that" attitude so they aren't trying to spend as much time gaming as possible.
I'm sure that test scores dipped when the first NES came out but didn't dip as much when the SNES or Genesis came out because those weren't as exciting as the first time they had their hands on technology.
~Syberz
This article really hit a nerve with me. Scores didn't raise, so it's obviously the computer's fault. Let's not hold the kid accountable. A laptop is nothing more than a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. How that tool is used is what makes the difference. If I buy a drill and use it to put holes in the wall, that's a proper use that gets me what I wanted. If I use that drill to hold up my coffee table, is it the drill's fault that I don't have holes in my wall? No. It's *my* fault for not using that tool properly. I spent 7 years working in a K-12 school district. My last couple years there we were rolling out a 1-to-1 laptop initiative to the high school students. Honestly, I don't know how it affected scores there. But I do know that yes, kids goofed off with them. But I also know that most of the teachers had no clue how to really utilize and control this new tool the students had. So...if scores aren't going up, most of the blame falls on the student. Some fault also fall upon the teaching staff though for not helping teach proper usage.
Yeah, okay, it doesn't mesh with your personal experience. So what? People's personal experiences often conflict, but trying to generalize from personal experience is a pretty limited utility approach in developing useful, generally applicable knowledge.
Leveraging statistical methods and the scientific method in structured investigations (such as those reported in TFA) is a much more useful manner of gaining an understanding of how the world works generally than simply extrapolating one person's personal experience.
Growing up I had a pretty mottley bunch of teachers - few of them were very good - computers barely existed and somehow with a bit of work I survived the experience. I can't change that experience, but if I could I think I would have been very happy to have so many sources of information available to me. With some intelligence I think that the multiple sources of information available via both internet and installed software quickly teach the ability to cross-reference and fact check. Using the 'standard textbook' in a disillusioned, bored teacher's classroom often teaches next to nothing. I ended up pretty much memorizing for the exams but not really learning as much as I should. I have had to re-learn stuff and the internet has been a great source of information. I am enthusiastic about the use of computers in education but I think there is a long way to go in implementing their use effectively. I also do not believe that there should be one standard way of doing so. Schools should determine how they implement the use of computers on an individual basis. As I understand it the teachers often have very limited understanding of the computers themselves and the programmes run on them. In that situation there is little point in having them in the classroom. May as well just use the textbook. In the home, I think there is potentially more immediate benefit to a child's education but only if the parents are computer literate and give constructive direction to the child. For good or ill, Wikipedia has pretty much replaced a physical copy of an encyclopedia and is arguably 'more fun' for a child than leafing through a thick tome. And one page of Wikipedia can lead on to a myriad of related topics that can certainly broaden and deepen the knowledge of a subject - probably more so than in the print version. But let's not forget the many things a child can learn using a computer that they might have learned a different way some years ago. Music programmes are really great for teaching basic music theory with the added sense of achievement of being able to compose a complete mixed piece of music - not just hammering out a piece on a piano. Photo-editing and graphic design applications do not replace doing these things with physical materials but as part of the software installed are a really affordable way for a family to give a child a grounding in these creative areas and possibly lead to an interest in a career in a related field of employment. If the child is simply allowed to spend all computer time social networking or watching the tubes there is no educational benefit that I can perceive, but it is up to the parents to see to it that the computer is put to good use - use that can be fun, educational and fulfilling at the same time. Another drawback I have seen with my own child is that the computers at school are usually older models, are poorly maintained, very crash prone - these are Macs running OS X - so there is really no excuse. The reason the computers are in this condition is due to incompetent users - teachers and kids. The kids have an excuse. Theay are kids! To my mind, the teachers do not. Apparently they lack a competent Mac IT guy at the school. Having said all that, good text books and a good teacher (a rare specimen unfortunately) are all that is really needed. Computers may just be an enhancement in the overal scheme of education. If a teacher thinks that a computer is there to reduce their work load, then I think they should just retire and get an office job... Sorry, I don't know how to do paragraphs(!)
http://www.acetonestudio.com
And I would argue that the benefit that I and people like me (even if not nearly as dedicated to learning as I became) would receive far outweighs the minor distractions that a larger number of individuals may "suffer" from.
Congratulations, you're a self-motivated learner. Providing resources to such a person is generally an enabling thing, regardless of what the resource is. The Internet can be a very powerful tool in such hands. However, many people just don't have that sort of drive, and will instead waste time on the Internet doing Facebook, instant messaging, games, and other not-particularly-educational things.
And so what if they do? If 50 kids flap their lives away on Facebook for every one whose closed world is blown open by access to the Internet, that's okay with me. The 50 get an education in consumer mass-media and the 1 gets the opportunity grow up and out in a hurry.
But I hear what you're saying: we should really be structuring digital divide programs so that they target motivated learners who will use computers for information over entertainment, and get the other kids to go outside and play.
We all know that technology in education (primary, secondary and college) quickly became a Microsoft-like snare used by technology companies in the early noughties. McGraw and Pearson have technology products that cost nearly the same insane amount of money as their books. Sales reps browbeat us professors into adopting books and using the tech in our teaching. Why? So I can assign stuff in their online labs, thus making it a REQUIREMENT that students not just buy a book, but must buy a NEW BOOK with the correct pincode. If the student wants to buy their own pincode, it costs nearly as much as the damn book itself ($100+). McGraw and Pearson present themselves as liberal protectors of education when they're really bloodsucking vampires on the college and university system, sucking as much cash as they can out of overextended students. Technology is the way they "lock-in" students and teachers into their content just the same way any good monopolist manipulates the market. And the kicker is that their technology sucks. It's a UI nightmare. Have you seen MyFuckingWhateverLab? Horrendous. Do they support Linux or the Macintosh? Sorta, kinda, if they feel like it. Do they care about mobile devices like Android? Hell no, it destroys their business model of charging obscene amounts of money for a book (now a website and an ebook) and browbeating me into using their crummy lab for assessing my kids so the kids have to buy the damn book. Why doesn't the government go after these guys? Oh, I know why ... money money money money money.
And so what if they do? If 50 kids flap their lives away on Facebook for every one whose closed world is blown open by access to the Internet, that's okay with me. The 50 get an education in consumer mass-media and the 1 gets the opportunity grow up and out in a hurry.
That's a very narrow-minded view. Those 50 kids will eventually grow up and need jobs. These days, that seems to be accomplished by lowering the requirements and expectations to the point where those 50 kids can actually do something productive for a living. I would not want to be the 1 who actually did something in school, as I'd be vastly overqualified for every job on the planet.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
Some kids have INTERESTS, and some are just your average numb-nut rote kid who will grow up to do some menial job and be perfectly happy at it.
Listen, I grew up without computers or tech in the 1970's. I played outside every day, rode my bike, climbed trees, etc. Then by the 80's my parents split, so the family life was me, my brother and my single mom. We didn't have much. No one taught me to like technology. *I* was attracted to it. A friend of mine got a VIC-20. His parents purchased it "to help with homework". Guess what? It didn't help him. I on the other hand was rabidly interested in it and would go over as often as I could and learn to program my own games. My friend however, with the good home, good parents and those parents' good intentions, had pretty much no interest in actually doing anything other than play a couple games. When I was over, he was perfectly content sitting by my side and watching what I could do with the thing.
So fast forward a couple years, *I* saved up paper-route money to buy a C64 and convinced my mom to finance me a small tv to go with it. Later I saved up for a disk drive.
So... my long-winded point here is, it doesn't matter jack-all if the parents are doing anything to stir interest in learning more from the computer than just how to use it and browse Youtube. It has to be in the kid to actually want to create things with it. Either your kid has that "nerd instinct" or he/she doesn't. If he does, help him develope it, but to think that every kid exposed to a computer should greatly benefiting from it is a bit ridiculous, because in the real world, there is a broad range of skills and trades that don't require sitting in front of a keyboard all day.
Really, most kids are not scholars. And scholars are the real reason for building schools. For more usual kids the schools serve as baby sitters and hopefully give them enough education to not be on welfare all their lives or give them enough education not to light a smoke while down in a coal mine laboring.
But for the scholars that we do have a computer is fabulous. Normally a scholar can not be stopped from learning. They tend to find ways to learn. But making it easier allows them to advance further. Getting a computer into the hands of that one in one hundred students is a must. Finding something to do with the other 99% is another problem.
Look at the iTouch/iPhone/iPad. Lots of nice educational games and more coming all the time. I recently purchased an educational Wii game, for ten times the price of a decent iPad educational game, and it was just horrible. It wasn't good at educating and was so difficult to use that I had trouble navigating it. THIS was labeled as being for small children!? My experience with recent PC games has been similar. We tried a Dora the Explorer game recently too and it just wasn't easy to play and the educational value was slim. The best PC edutainment titles I've seen are older stuff that concentrated more on what they're made for and their expected market (kids) instead of stupid features like being 3D. The affordability of iOS apps is a big selling feature too as the games can be simple and when your kid losses interest you can go on to the next game.
I wonder if the edutainment market couldn't learn from the small developers that are developing for iPhone and Android. Of course it's hard to beat the touch screen and accelerometer on these mobile devices. My daughter will use my laptop but mostly she thinks it's just a retarded crippled device. I pretty much agree.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Don't take it personally, but I find it troubling that it's okay with you for kids to flap their lives away on Facebook instead of actually using the resources to learn.
It's probably a good idea to get motivated learners using technology, and it's absolutely a great idea on many levels to get the other kids to go outside and play.
We need to find motivation to innovate and succeed, and Twittering your life away doesn't seem to be a path to that. Now if you're Twittering *and* doing other educational things, that's fine... just as it's fine to play video games now and then, or to watch TV once in a while, etc. However, when these developmentally-meaningless activities take over all your time, then that's unhealthy.
Well, it can happen that way. OTOH, there is a lot of information out there that is compelling and free. Should you want to teach a section in my field (structural biology) there are thousands of structures to download and free programs for looking at them and evaluating how the proteins/enzymes work. I'd have killed for that access in college/medical school (1970's) much less high school. All you need today is a PC/Mac, an Internet connection and some curiosity.
I do the same in my field, create my own course docs and presentations, but it's the assessment solutions that textbook publishers employ like drug dealers. The mindless use of technology is a cancer and only benefits textbook publishers.
"My parents were to religiously conservative"
'too' not 'to'
if you're gonna get all arrogant, at least get teh grammarz ritez.
Look, if your kids only play games, this harms education (and without supervision, that is what they'll do).
if they research stuff on wikipedia or something, this helps education.
you cannot leave them in front of the PC without remorse, because "it helps them"
you cannot block them completely from the internet without destroying career prospects
Kids need supervision, nurturing and attention. Computers don't liberate you from parenting.
If you want absolution for neglecting your kids... no can do!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Let me just mention this:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/CellCraft/cellcraft
Someone needs to make this into an MMORPG and there's Biology 101 done. Next, quantum mechanics.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I mean, honestly. Is anybody surprised that these kids aren't sitting in front of their computer actively learning stuff? Unless they have some assigned computer homework, of course they're only going to use it for entertainment. This is especially true for those kids from so-called 'low-income' families. I imagine they probably didn't have anything to entertain themselves with (no bikes, basketballs, etc.), so a computer is a godsend for them in that regard. Did we really need a study to tell us this?
Stupid ... of course getting a computer doesn't help you get educated. Being given a brain doesn't help either. It's about the software. Seen any decent educational software being developed in the past 15-20 years? See any talk about it anywhere ... development or marketing? Nope; and as a trained educator I would notice. Can't give it away. So: no motivation, no software, no improvement.
Computers can be wonderful educators. But you can't just throw something at kids and say "Here kid, educate yourself." The problem is, nobody gives a rat's ass. So just keep blaming it on the kids. Cuz it's easier than admitting that we all just don't give a shit. And until we do, they'll keep learning to think and spell from their texting buddies.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
OK, so, kids with computers don't do as well as those without computers.
Thats next to meaningless. What is the breakdown in each of those groups?
Lets group the kids in each of those two categories into smaller groupings, taking into account things like:
How much time is spent playing games?
How much time is spent on the internet?
How much on "educational games"?
How much on productivity software (word processing etc)?
Are they doing school work vs games?
Are they being monitored by the parents or left to their own?
I'd like to see all this data and have it analysed.
I am betting you will find the correlation to lower educational results has more to do with how the computer is being used and less to do with simply having one.
With that said, I am a geek, I spend most of my day working on my computer (programming), but I do NOT allow my kids to spend a great deal of time on computers. In fact, very little. They get to play a game now and then, or do research and write reports.
Consequently they score higher than average in school.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
Computers are mind candy for kids. Prepubertal kids just want to play games. Adolescents want to be on Facebook and Myspace and surf free porn. It just distracts them from real education. Computers have almost no place in highschool. Schools that bought into the idea that the more computers available per student the better have no idea of how to teach. A recent report showed that creativity has dropped in America since that advent of video games and home computers. We love computers, but let's be realistic, when a machine can do things for your mind, your mind stops working and gets lazy. Computers are great tools, but they should be for adults and older students who have already proved themselves.
I have two desktops, two laptops and a netbook, not counting broken ones. I can't speak a word of Romanian.
So obviously, the answer is that they hinder.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Giving anyone a pencil and pad of paper doesn't help them learn math either.
The NC study could just show scores went down over time. Time would be the other variable as more ISP's showed up.
The Texas study shows a lot of kids just don't like school. That's a revelation...
Ha. It's been said before that computers won't teach you anything. To an extent that's true. It's the software that counts. I stumbled across Uplink once at a Half-Price books. Great game for teaching you the fundamentals of a computer.
You want kids to learn geography? Go war-games on them.
You detect an incoming ICBM from the capital of Iran. Stike first before their's hits you! Launch Retalitory Nuclear Strike against:
Include cheezy "Three Dee" graphics like every $10 Office Depot game has now days and you have a surefire winner. Better yet, want to teach them math? Get a good ol' USMC Sniper Manual and teach those kids the math behind bullet-drop.
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
I expect it's the same phenomenon as in your cited article, dogs and young children being VERY much alike.
In that both are un-housebroken semi-sentient drooling four-legged mobile disaster areas with a very poor sense of hygiene and a predilection for putting truly disgusting things in their mouths.
Kids. Gotta love 'em. :-)
Can't say the same about dogs, though.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
[laughing] Yeah, I'm always telling clients that a puppy is just like a toddler, except the puppy is a lot more mobile and is armed with a chainsaw. And viewed objectively, both dogs and toddlers are disgusting creatures!! :D
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Pardon for hijacking the thread, but people need to be informed that Gene Simmons never had a personal computer when he was a kid.
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