Slashdot Mirror
Do E-Readers Spell the Demise Of Traditional Schooling?
Attila Dimedici writes "I came across a an article this morning that suggests that the Nook and the Kindle have changed things in such a way that schools are becoming obsolete. His premise is that the ideal way to teach children is by a tutor ..., [and] the Nook and the Kindle have allowed large amounts of written material on many different subjects to become accessible enough that parents can tutor their children at a price that just about everyone can afford."
The author is a bit off-base on the nature of the public schooling,
but easy access to resources like Project Gutenberg and Wikibooks certainly removes some
barriers to self-study and the limitations of the 20+ child classroom.
Yea this will replace tutors just like books have replaced tutors since days of yore. EReaders are great, they may replace books someday but when it comes to education, the biggest barrier is getting kids to pickup a book/e-reader not how much space they occupy.
or maybe No.
I Love How Complex Problems Always Have Simple Yes/No Answers.
Is free day care included with an E-Reader?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
A lot of parents just want to dump their kids off at school and let them do the parenting. Unless there's some type of supervision, I don't see how this could work well.
Of course, you couldn't do this previously using the Internet, only e-readers make this feasible. Before that, the distance to the library clearly made this entirely impossible.
No, new shiny technology of the day has not changed everything. Parents who may have struggled to build a teaching plan yesterday will still struggle even if you give them a Kindle. Most families will still need both parents to work these days, anyway.
Who exactly is going to be doing this tutoring? Parents with nothing better to do all day, perhaps? Maybe one of the private tutors currently working, of which I'm sure there are plenty to meet demand. What about letting the kids just teach themselves? It's not as if they'll just spend their time screwing around instead of working.
Schools aren't just there because we want to give kids a sub-standard education, they're there because they're the only practical way to provide education to large numbers of children.
If "traditional schooling" means burying your desk/shelf/whatever in a lot of physical, printed books, yes. Otherwise, no. Physical books are the only thing e-book readers might replace, and while they may do that, that alone is not going to change education as we know it.
It's having to live on one income that stops most families home educating, not the cost of educational materials. I've never heard anyone say they would home school but don't because they can't access educational material.
That and the fact that most people don't want to home school. I predict that the nook and kindle will have negligible impact on home schooling numbers. My kids are home schooled without a nook or kindle.
TFA is flamebait, an anti-school piece, not a technology piece. Not really news for nerds.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
It's the Internet that changed the way we access information for our own betterment. In most companies no one cares anymore about your credentials as long as you're capable of performing the required tasks. The school - college - university system that was the means to get started in a career in the 20th century has been eroded from the top: It's universities and colleges that are losing relevance. School is still somewhat relevant, but I wonder how long will that last. More unconventional ways of learning that leverage technological advances like the Internet, ereaders, tablets, and possible future advances as well, will surely come to erode more of the current practices in education.
Intellectual property must be rendered obsolete for the Internet can reach its full potential, and for these advances in learning and education to materialize.
Agreed; soon there will be absolutely no need for a an education!
While at university, in the Discrete Mathematics course, I had this professor who made this strange type of maths easy and fun to learn.
It is what introduced me to what computer science is all about, and how to analyze problems. This type of course cannot be properly delivered via 10" screens. Nothing can replace that face to face human touch.
A teacher can teach twenty children simultaneously. A parent will, in most cases, teach only one. A family obviously can have multiple children but in most cases they will be of different age. This will slow down the older children if taught simultaneously.
But since most jobs are outsourced anyway, parents have nothing better to do.
On second thought. Maybe these e-reading devices will make it possible to outsource teaching as well. If I understand the article correctly no real teaching skills are necessary anymore with this technology.
I don't think it will or should change things as much as the article seems to imply. Different people learn differently, and for some, lecturing works. Personally, lecturing did practically nothing for me, I just need the time set aside and the goal to work toward because I'm not very good at setting those for myself. Nothing irked me more than comp sci professors who insisted on having computers turned off while lecturing.
For e-readers, while they may contribute, I just don't think there is enough of a difference in tech for them to cause that large of a shift in method. Also, for several (myself included), some things are just easier to do with a physical book.
This assumption goes wrong in a number of places, of which some obvious are:
1. Parents have the time to school their children
2. Parents have the inclination to do it
3. Parents have the capability to do it. (How many know parents whose maths is non-existent or whose spelling is beyond comprehension?)
4. The parent/child relationship works towards learning and not against it. (Think obstinate teenager here.)
I am sure there would be many other problems too, like very few parents have learned the tips and tricks a teacher has.
So in my humble opinion, it will not work!
The decline in the quality of posts on Slashdot is socking.
See if you had your kindle handy you would have known put an h in there.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The author is a bit off-base
yes
The "education" community has long forsaken their responsibility to teach and educate. Putting electronic devices in the hands of the uneducated is easy. To actually educate the uneducated is very difficult. What form the book takes is of no consequence. Relying on the book alone to educate the uneducated leads only to a very naive, uneducated, and easy to control population.
Because the teachers will fight this like everything after Gutenberg, with teeth and claws.
Tools like the Kindle are great to assist learning; but let's face it: the weakness/strength to learning is always the teacher. These are great as a substitute for the books/paper in the classroom, but not as a substitute for human instruction. Yes, there are a few who are able to learn from Khan Academy or from e-books alone. The vast majority, however, need that human to get them through the rough patches. Most home-schooling relies on mom and dad for that, and they tend to not be the greatest of instructors, as a whole. It's the reason most states are considering requiring parents have the same qualifications as teachers. It also eliminates the social factor for these kids. Where I am, I've seen more than a few "veal" being home-schooled. If they associate, it's with others who are home schooled. They will never be required to deal with social interactions of differing social groups until they go to college, unless they happen to be lucky enough to have a parent that forces them into these situations.
I'm all for the elimination of the textbook industry that makes millions each year off changing a few sentences and claiming a "new edition" for which you have to pay $50-$200. Unless you have a certain physical or mental handicap, however, homeschooling offers no advantages other than raising your little baby sheltered from having to face the real world.
Figure that one out and you can answer the question. e-readers (I have a non-nook, non-kindle one here) improve mobility, but amazon already let you order books to your heart's content, and before that there already existed bookshops and libraries that allowed orders, reservations, remote fetches, and so on.
What none of these things have changed is how we learn. What's changed even less is that as a parent you're at your day job by day and your kids still need watching over. Hence, schools. Even if you'd replace teachers with telepresence robots then that still wouldn't necessarily spell the end of classrooms. As such, this like the previous question is hopelessly myopic and looking at the wrong thing.
It is of course not wrong to revisit why we do what we do from time to time. But the methods shouldn't be taken as more important than the goal. The goal is to impart knowledge as much as to keep an eye on the kids. Look at that first. If technology might help there, sure, try. But don't take the technology solution and go shoehorn in or even invent a problem that your imagined solution might solve.
Also: You need a haircut. The points are sticking out.
How many parents do you know that can afford to stay home and tutor their children in place of going to school? The author of TFA also fails to understand that children learn in different ways and book learning alone is not the best way for everyone. E-readers might be a good way to supplement learning but I can't see how it could replace a teacher in a classroom setting.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
Can anyone work out what language this was automatically translated from?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Give them those digital books from that new cyber textbook company, Finkle-McGraw Hill.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Does this notion sound a lot like the paperless office to anyone? I reckon ereaders and tablets are just a fad at the moment.
Sure the analogy isn't a really good one, but i went in to a departments store today, and there was an ipad display with functioning units, and it was surrounded by kids playing on them, so i think they're popular with kids, all this talk about them being used for education is probably more a marketing excercise to make parents think that these things will turn their kids into prodigies.
Really? Journalism is going downhill with the standards hitting all-time lows, I fear.
No, schooling will not be replaced by Kindles. There is a lot more to education than making the kids read stuff, or reading it to them. There's a reason we have a whole field of science dedicated to teaching - educational science.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What has happened is the erosion of education standards to the point where everyone appears to be doing better, and an enlarging of higher education to make people feel that a degree is available for everyone, as a right, not a privilege. Teachers become minders and entertainers, exams become minor bumps in a student's progress and the student arrives age 21 spectacularly ill prepared for the reality of the 21st century jobs market.
At best e-learning helps from the sidelines, but there is no way you can replace small class sizes, good teachers and motivated parents who have a desire for their children to learn something. A Kindle cannot teach a student, just by virtue of being a Kindle, in just the same way as a book won't teach you how to be a brain surgeon.
I'm not going to take away from the positives of iPads or Kindles though: they're fabulously convenient form factors for certain types of media consumption. There is however a problem: people are attempting to use the iPad and the Kindle as a solution to every problem out there, rather than decent media consumption platforms.
I am bored to tears with all the "Does XXX mean the death of YYY" articles these technologist wankers drool out. It's always the same: "do computers mean the end of TV?" "Does the internet mean the end to commuting to work in your car?" "Does the Wii mean the end of Computer gaming?" and so on.
In EVERY case, the new technology has had an impact, sometimes even a limited one, but failed to do away with the previous. And anyone that thinks a technology for displaying information (and that's all an ebook is) will do away with a fundamental societal need like formal education is a fool, a wanker, or both.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
He should swap places with GMGruman. They could hardly be worse informed about each other's pet subject than their own.
P.S. the linked site wants to do a free scan on my PC because it's at risk. How kind!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I have tried to read a couple of science-type books on my Kindle. I find when you have to back-reference a previous page containing an equation or diagram that's important to what follows in the book, you often need to refer back to a previous page. On a Kindle this process is complex, irksome, disruptive and slow. There is nothing (yet?) on a Kindle that will replace little slips of paper (or - horrors - dog-ears) used as bookmarks for important predecessor material.
See? If you had your kindle handy you would have known to put an h in there.
FTFY ;)
I like the idea of tutors, but the idea that a Kindle is something that "just about everyone can afford" is wildly innaccurate. I got one as a gift, but I am the only person I know who has one. A hundred dollars may not seem like much to many readers, but for a lot of people it's food for a week, not an e-reader.
It is difficult to use e-learning to learn how to read an essay. Someone has to correct it and talk to the student about it.
It is difficult to use e-learning to learn to how discuss whether a mathematical model can be applied to a given dataset.. Someone has to understand the arguments and talk to the student about it.
The students learn a lot from discussing a problem with eachother. And e-learning does not facilitate that.
Games and A.Is which teach kids best according to their abilities using the most effective teaching strategies, backed up by human teachers.
Motivation is a problem, but it's a problem with kids sitting at desks in schools.
http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/polovina/learnpyramid/about.htm
I'm not sure I'd call what we have just now as "providing education".
Deleted
The author is stupid. Libraries have been around as long as I have lived. One can get a library access pass far cheaper than a Nook. One can lend a lot of books to learn from, yes children's teaching books too. A digital ereader ain't that different.
E readers cant replace "traditional schooling" it can replace "traditional textbooks" though. Tablets Could with interactivity and specialized software certainly can.
But unfortunately e-reader cant play video, cant display color, etc... only a small subset like the ipad and the high end android tablets can do this, and those are not e-readers but tablets.
I'm thinking the author does not know what he is talking about, or is confused, his comment about libraries is also incredibly misinformed. His point on "e learning" is also very misguided.
The biggest problem I see is that schools will have a significantly increased cost because greedy publishers will make sure the math textbooks the school buys will have to be "renewed" every year or even every semester. so the "beginning algebra" books from the 1980's a school will use today and costs them $0.00 to store for the year will now cost them $21.95 each student per semester for "licensing fees"
Publishers are drooling all over themselves with the idea of raping the school systems with book licensing fees they can have with digital editions.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Each parent has two days off each week. If employers were more willing to move those around, two parents have four days off work each week. Most grandparents would love to participate in their grandchildren's education, so that's four more people with eight free days a week, for a total of twelve days a week. If only one person is needed to watch all the kids, then each only needs to move Saturday, with Sunday being off for everybody. This way you have enough time to school your kids six days a week and they'll actually get to spend time with you and to like you.
Meanwhile, in a public school other people choose what your kids get to learn and how they get to learn it, other kids get to teach yours social skills, and you get to, well, basically nothing. Is it any wonder that kids end up as ignorant sociopaths who can't stand their parents?
"the ideal way to teach children is by a tutor" Every child learns somewhat differently from others. Some learn best in a large group lecture/suck-in-the-information model, some learn best by experimentation, and yes, some learn best with one-on-one tutor-style interaction. There is no such thing as the ideal way to teach children, there is only an ideal way to teach this singular child and that will never be exactly the same between two different children.
It's true that e-readers are coming down in price. However, homeschooling a child incurs another considerable expense that the lower price of e-readers cannot defray: namely, requiring a parent to stay home. Far fewer people can afford that than can afford a Kindle or others of its ilk.
Asinine.
The author has a serious problem with public school teachers that borders on the obsessive, and clouds all reasonable discussion with him on this subject, it would seem.
The problem in schooling isn't teacher salaries, administrative overhead, the cost of school construction, etc. it really has to do with the basics (and while I'm no fan of public school teachers, they are but one piece of a much bigger puzzle).
We've had free lending libraries since the time of Franklin, and to imagine that by somehow taking books off a shelf and injecting them into a shiny electronic device will somehow get kids to read and read and read for 5-10 years is just silly.
Homeschooling is not a new phenomenon, it's how people used to learn things. People homeschool their children for many reasons, teacher salaries isn't typically the main reason - either because the parents want a faith-based education for their children, or they feel the public schools wouldn't benefit their child, OR the parents simply think they "know better", which may or may not be true.
There are many, many subjects that require more than simply "reading a book, writing an essay" to impart mastery. I'm reminded of the scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin William's character dresses down Matt Damon's character and explains "living a life" as opposed to reading about other people's lives in books.
Ken
If the title of the article is a question, the answer is probably "no".
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Mom, I could have sworn that I had 1984 on my Kindle! How am I supposed to do my homework now?
Back when I was in school, if you had a book in your house when you went to sleep, it was still there when you woke up.
Palm trees and 8
Be it for economic or selfish reasons, most parents I know spend very little time with their kids. Not counting school time, the kids are with babysitters, nannies or in day care.
This is just as silly as suggesting that kids need tablets because they will use them for educational purposes.
Go to the Khan Academy site. It has 1000's of short lessons in many subject areas. It has student monitoring/testing and feedback. It is free. I use my nook color to view it. I think it complements classroom learning
My kids are taught by several different people (various classes, working out a deal with a local vet clinic for a kind of 'job shadow' every week, etc) My kids gets lots of stimulus from their peers - they have friends inside and outside the classes they take, and other activities they do throughout the week with other kids. They sure could turn out different - good thing the alternative isn't locking them in a basement all day or homeschoolers would sure be in trouble! I'm not on the fence - I can do a better job of providing my child's education when possible and coordinating it when necessary - I'm convinced most parents could do the same. Money is the only legitimate barrier for most people, but based on my own experience and the experience of people I've met I think most couples can afford to have a parent stay home even if they don't think they can. For most people, it's a question of how much importance they place on being able to have a parent stay home with the children. 'Learning' isn't something that has to happen in a class room, and the idea that 30 kids listening to one adult who may or may not be qualified in the subject read from a text and ask questions is the optimal way to provide education is severely lacking in credibility. Sending the kids to school is the path of least resistance and it's 'what's done'. There are arguments for doing that but 'that's the best possible option' is a hard one to defend. School takes the form it does in our culture because of the day care aspect of it - if that weren't a factor we'd all have education that combined real experience, specialised tutors and classes, and was targeted at the learning style and interests of the child.
I think that is not so simple. In fact that sistem was used during years to educated the elites. The public school sistem is an advance that allows popular education.
He is right, but it's youtube not readers that's doing the killing.
Think about our system right now, we put a bunch of kids together, tell them to shut up and listen to the teacher, then go home and work after a day of this.
Instead, people can watch a lesson at their own pace (the value of rewinding >> asking questions which are often "could you repeat that"), then come into school for group assignments, tutoring and testing. It lets kid watch things at home which they prefer, work together like they want, and the teachers give students the personalized attention they know they need.
The present rules of teaching, learning, pedagogy ... have proven to be restrictive, hierarchical, religious/cultural biased ... a failure.
School systems and universities in the USA are hierarchical and oppressive. Fitting the student in to the curriculum is a waste of time. Mentoring and allowing a student to evolve a curriculum, their learning pedagogy, and share/collaborate with others nationally/globally is best. Yes, some common math and language requirements are essential. I suspect, my 160+ SemHrs, no degree, personal experience, $100K+ Gross ... supports at least a possibility.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
If you really think the author is off with regards to public schooling, I highly advice you to listen 'a weekend with John Taylor Gatto' aka the ultimate history lesson at peacerevolution dot org. Your view on the public school system will never be the same. It's a fact that the public school system is designed to dumb down but don't take my word for it, you can research it easily for yourself.
There's not even a need for fancy technology to get a solid non-traditional education.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school
http://www.sudval.org/07_othe_01.html
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
It was never about price. Parents don't have TIME to tutor their own children. That's what school is for, and that's why reinventing how books are accessed won't change diddly squat.
2. Teaching takes a lot of time.
3. Teaching takes intelligence. The smarter you are, the better you do. There is a reason why colleges try to get the smartest, most published people to teach.
4. The more you teach, the better you get. You learn things from your students, so you get better at your job.
5. Some of those things students teach you? THey have been written down. You can go to school and learn them.
So, even if you are willing to do the hard work to teach, have the time, are smart enough to do it, you still won't do as good a job as someone that has a degree in teaching and has been doing it for years.
Will no one teach? No. Some will home school. Some of them will do it because they are too stupid to realize how bad at teaching they are. You can detect these people because they fall for major anti-education cons such as intelligent-design.
Others will home school because they are unemployed, very smart, and their schools are bad. If I lived in a slum, I would home school kids.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Unless you live in a small city or elite suburb, the quality of public schools is so bad that you're better off homeschooling.
The obstacle here is not the cost of the books, but the cost of the time. You need to have one spouse stay at home to do that. It doesn't matter which spouse, but the most stable kids seem to come from homes like this.
At our local public school, kids receive more political/social education than actual knowledge.
Futurist Traditionalism
We used to home school our kids and while it's true that you can certainly spend a lot of money on materials, I'd say that's about the last thing anyone worries about when deciding whether or not to homeschool their kids. As someone else said, the biggest financial factor is having to get by on a single income.
We're not rich and neither were most of the people I met that did home school. The driving force is the feeling that their kids weren't getting what they needed from the other education options available. Or, in many cases, the parents were worried about their kids getting exposed to things they felt weren't good for the them and which contributed nothing to their education.
That doesn't mean that kindles and the like aren't a boon to home educators, I think they can be. But I don't think their existence will affect the number of people that decide to go down that road.
I could debate the pros and cons of homeschooling all day long. I will only say this: For some kids and families, it's a great option. It does not, however, replace the need for a strong public education system.
I have thought about the role of computers in education since the first mainframe "drill" programs (i.e., _before_ home computers existed).
Here's my opinion: computers can be very effective for some parts of learning. If it is teaching arithmetic, it can tell if the child is taking a long time to answer or getting too many wrong answers. It can then _adapt_ to the child and provide more drill on the hard problems, while also not spending too much time on things the child has mastered. But it has limits; it can't determine _why_ the child is having trouble.
I want children to learn to _think_. Schools should train their brains, not their fingers. Computers could revolutionize learning, but not the way we currently use them in the US. An ereader full of books is no substitute for training in rhetoric and logical fallacies. The _important_ part of education requires two brains interacting. We should off-load teachers from the drudgery of supervising arithmetic drills and vocabulary tests, and allow them to teach what no computer can.
College for all does not work under the Traditional system in more ways then just cost.
General Education and filler classes are getting out of hand in some cases it takes 5 years to do what used to take 4 years.
Some classes like Tech ones are all over the place in terms of how much theory they have while other have more hands on.
Also the naming is a mess as you can look at 2 schools both with a track called CS and have each one be very different.
There is also a mix MIS, IT, System Integration, system design, and so on and it's to the point where Interviewers can mix it up. http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/More-Limitin,-Wrong-Major,-and-Parallel-Universe-Replacement.aspx
On other sides we have tech schools, on line schools, Community Colleges, people like Steve jobs who where drop in's and they all cover differnt needs and different students. But what give and what HR and others think of them is very far apart.
Now tech / IT could use some kind of mixed tech school / apprenticeships system. That takes the good parts of tech schools and or on line schools / learning Mixing it with real work skills.
Even after that we still can use tech schools, on line schools and Community Colleges for continuing education in the tech field this is need from time to time and Traditional college is not setup to handle it as good as other places can do it.
Also we have different students and some of them can't do a Traditional college but can do a tech school / apprenticeships system and do a good job. Now do you want people like that to have a good job or do you want them to sit on disability as they are not cut out for Traditional college and can't get a real job do HR not likeing tech schools? Ok now the disability part is kind of on the extreme end of things but there are lot's of other who fall in the middle.
You know the people who work on cars, plumbers and so on they did not have to go 4 years of mostly theory based school. Now tech / IT is kind of the same way and there is a BIG gap from a Theory based CS school and real IT skills at a tech school.
"So.. why DO so many families need two full-time incomes just to make ends meet, or even to live in a modest amount of comfort?"
Its really very simple. When women entered the workplace it resulted in higher incomes in many or most families overnight. The short term result is everyone has lots of income. But when everyone has lots of income it means they can afford to pay more for the same goods. The result is that industry equalizes the buying power of the double worker home to what was previously the equivalent standard of living for a single worker home of the same socioeconomic status.
That creates the same initial boom for industry that it initially created for the families. However the same effect happens to them and so on. Eventually the only ones left with a benefit are the top less than 1%. The great thing about having more money than you need is that you can just leave it in corporate investments. As long as the company continues reinvesting its gains before the end of the year it grows year on year tax free. It's like the IRA the poor and middle class use but with no early withdraw fees and no investment limits.
What's up with iThis, eThat and whatnot? Nothing beats the way we are taught (or, better, it's not iThis and eCrap that will significantly change it), at least here where I live. No need for fancy technology. If someone wants to learn, they do, and we've spun our share of geniuses. It's ridiculous to think that 50 to 70 year old teachers will actually learn to use this technology to teach. it's equally as pathetic to think that it will substantially change the way the pupils learn. This is strong and pathetic fad. I'm all for computers, but I've had enough of this ridiculous idea that they can help teachers teach in every possible way. Sure, I can learn through a computer, but it's not the same when it's enforced on us.
I'm really fed up with this stupid fad.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
With the creation of the Dept. of Education to legislate education from as far from the classroom as possible, traditional schooling died. It used to be that children were taught to think critically and be agile-minded problem-solvers. But, agile thinking leads to the discovery that some students are better at it than others.
That all changed with the Dept. of Ed's mission to make everyone the same and abolish the differences between individual students - institutionalized denial that some kids are just smarter than others.
Teaching switched from education to rote memorization of answers to be filled in on bubble-ridden answer sheets. No longer were kids to be expressive in their problem solving ability. Everyone was forced to solve a problem the same way, using the same tired methods, and come to the same answer, or else.
Even as young as 7th grade, I recall arriving at correct answers on math tests, only to be marked "incorrect" for using the "wrong" method to get there, despite being clever in my approach. My cleverness and mental agility were punished by the system, so I was in effect forced to "dumb myself down" to fit the mold of homogenized "education," which was really indoctrination.
By the time I was a senior in high school, ALL tests were "fill in the bubble." Instead of being taught the material, we were taught how to recognize and eliminate the two most obviously wrong answers, leaving a 50/50 shot to guess the correct answer. Figuring out which one was correct was a matter of applying some quick "tricks" to determine which of the remaining answers was "most likely" to be correct.
Instead of learning material, we were learning test-taking strategy.
Modern American education is a joke - an absolute joke.
> The early days of TV were full of hope for its widespread educational potential, too.
Same thing: depends on how you use it. TV can be tremendously educational if you use it for that purpose, and it's only gotten more so with the plethora of cable channels and the convenience of DVRs. I just watched a bunch of excellent PBS documentaries about Roman, Egyptian, and Japanese history on YouTube.
As for iPads in the classroom, that's the equivalent of letting kids watch sit-coms in school. The Khan Academy is all about e-learning, but they do NOT recommend computers in the classroom. On the contrary, students are given e-lectures as homework assignments. (In his TED talk, Khan calls this "flipping" the classroom.) Students absorb the lecture at home, at their own pace, then the next day they go through the "work" part at school where they can interact with the teacher and other students. In this way, the teacher can focus his/her energy on individual students' needs, without the headaches of trying to lecture at a pace that doesn't either bore the smart kids or lose the "challenged" kids. Students get the benefit of "on-demand" lectures... they can pause and replay any parts they don't understand, without the embarrassment of holding up the class with a "dumb" question.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Replacing teaching and learning functions of schools with computer tools is easier than replacing babysitting functions with computer tools.
How is this different than $300 desktops/laptops that you've been able to buy for the past 15 years? I think that the author is trying to make a valid point, but attaching the buzzword of "ereader" and "kindle" to make the article get more attention.
What is really puzzling to me is that some people seem to think that "education = books", considering that they were talking about high school/primary school level. A good teacher does not just cite books and teaches well enough for the students not to need books at all. From what I remember from my school time, the better the teacher was, the less often I had to even open the textbook. Some teachers even completely disregarded the fact that textbooks even existed and instead taught students way better any textbook could ever have suggested.
E-readers can make self-study a bit more convenient when the materials are readily available. Even then, in my subjective opinion, real books are way better to use than e-books unless you have to search something from them.
It's national bankruptcy and high cost teachers that are going to reduce actual 3rd party instruction capacity. Free E-books broaden reference capability outside of being in a good library. I wouldn't say Ebooks are a desirable substitute for books yet. Some distance learning (video) courses are outstanding instruction modules, like AP Physics through Kentucky Educational TV. The future educated person may well be someone who has the interest to learn independently or had the parents interested enough to teach them. The rest may be knuckleheads mostly programmed by internet (TV+) entertainment. Oh.
You can be a brilliant programmer. Try developing a large, complex C++ project using vi. Then try it with an IDE, say, Eclipse. Your productivity skyrockets with the IDE. That's because you can stop focusing on the maintenance details and focus on the code and solving problems and adding functionality with the code. Minor spelling errors jump out at you in the IDE. You make a change, you can immediately find the functions which need updating.
With learning technology, there's always going to be effort required to learn. But if you can reduce the "aerodynamic drag" somehow - the little details that can cause headaches, like being forced to lug books and the like - that will lose less processor cycles on ancillary non-academic details and allow kids to focus more on the learning.
A better educated society benefits all of us. There will always be a strata, with the slowheads at the bottom and the smartypants at the top. But the entire strata could be lifted up, and that's only going to improve society.
In terms of Text books, the notes in the margin and the underlines and highlights are the most important feature of a text book, that you can go back to and get instance context and emphasis and memory of that topic. EReaders, until they have that feature (which they could) will be like distant memories.
There is a comfort to having a book shelf and you know where that book is and can go to it directly (hashed retrieval by the same algorithm used to store it). With EBooks, you loose that memory tagging and the internal memory tagging and can only see a page at a time of any book. I have that same problem with a screen that can only show one thing at a time (so I have two monitors, and another at work has 4). That 2 dimentionality is a heavy restriction to viewing data.
The US spends more per child than other countries, yet test scores are far lower. The problem is not the money, the problem is how the money is being used. The fix to education is to fix where the current money is being spent. Not to throw more money at the problem.
http://mat.usc.edu/u-s-education-versus-the-world-infographic/
Yea this will replace tutors just like books have replaced tutors since days of yore. EReaders are great, they may replace books someday but when it comes to education, the biggest barrier is getting kids to pickup a book/e-reader not how much space they occupy.
In the classical era tutors also applied discipline to students. Perhaps an ereader/tablet will be a useful educational tool when it tells the student it can't play the games because the lessons and homework are not complete yet. An ereader/tablet is not magic, it is just another type of computer, a far more compact and portable computer. Desktop computers in school have been tried, laptops for students have been tried, readers/tablet will have comparable results.
I submit for your consideration "The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" as the future target, and evidence of this direction may be found in V-Readers and similar devices (of which my nieces refuse to put down in spite the need for food and sleep, or attempts of bribery).
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Concisely? It's 46 minutes of which the first two (which is as far as I got) seem to consist mainly of people saying "ummm". I hope to any deity who's listening that their lectures are more professional.
It'd take perhaps ten minutes to read a transcript of it. Before making a video, people should ask two questions:
1) does this need to be a video?
2) is a video better at conveying this topic than olde-fashionèd writing?
I suspect they didn't, because here at least the answers are both "no".
The point about making the best of the limited amount of interaction time is valid, but it's nothing new; for example it's one of the key USPs of Oxford & Cambridge universities. As for remote learning at your own pace, the Open University was founded in 1969.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Okay, in 3rd and 4th grades, my Dad's Wife at the time had me & my sister (story is NOT about her) go to a private school, where we were given things called P.A.C.E. I forget what it stood for, and did a small search for them, didn't find shit.
Anyways, these were books that we read ourselves, did the questions ourselves, and were supposed to be some sort of education. Sure, we had a teacher and a helper that we could ask questions for, but all in all, we had to do like 12 books of each subject to pass the year.
Anyways, fast forward to my 5th grade year, were I went back to a public school. Oddly enough, all the kids could write in cursive (not me), they knew how to do division (not me!) and were better schooled in the use of swear words (nothing to do with PACE, but more to do with being in private school).
Basicly, doing the PACE didn't teach me shit. I fell behind. I don't see much of a difference between this & using ebook readers, even if ebooks readers can actually read outload to you. Can they answer questions? FUCK NO. Are they good replacements for teachers? FUCK NO.
Tech is great, i mean, look at calculators. Guess what? We still get taught math, even though we have fucking calculators. Quick trying to put teaching children off on technology and do it like we been doing it for thousands of years. Hands on.
We need teachers. We need a lot of teachers. Sure, they can give out ebook readers for reading, a lot of cheaper then giving out text books, but to replace teachers.? Oh hell no.
Be seeing you...
In the future predicted by this article, humans will be picking up strange electronic devices that show changing symbols on one of its surfaces... If only we had some sort of institution that could teach us how to interpret these symbols!
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Public schools reuse books each year and ban you from marking them up. They even go out of the way to make sure the covers stay nice an pretty.
The paperless office was a fad? I haven't used paper in my office in the 6 years I worked there. We have entire conference rooms that used to be storage for filing cabnets.
Speaking as the dad of a kid homeschooled through 8th grade, (now in her final year of art school and doing fine) I can't see where this will make a great deal of difference. You still need direct, engaged involvement from a knowledgeable adult (which is one of the reasons we pulled her out of school initially -- "direct" "engaged" "knowledgeable" pick two...) and a mere e-reader isn't going to make much difference. It's a nice fantasy to think that you can hand a kid a device and they'll get a quality education on their own while you catch up on Jersey Shore, but it really doesn't work like that.
TFA's example of involvement (teaching a kid to read with a newspaper and sharpie) is a good one (I've used it) but doesn't adapt that well to an e-reader. (You ruin more screens that way...) What *has* helped is a laptop with one of the better text readers installed. Daughter could highlight the text and hear the word read to her.
Moreover... if you don't homeschool your kid, you may not understand this... A lot of homeschooled kids are home because of various afflictions that the school doesn't handle well. In my daughter's case, it's severe dyslexia, which the local district chooses not to recognize as an affliction. (The school independently diagnosed her as ADD and prescribed Ritalin, completely ignoring the thick report I had sent them from a summer of testing and diagnosis from professionals.) A kid with special needs may not be in a position to do a lot of reading. I did all her reading for her in the early days, and continued to read to her even after she got the computer to talk to her. (Parenthetically, her early reliance on computers as a tool has resulted in a high amount of technical ability in that area. She now wears a T-shirt at school that says "no, I won't fix your computer".)
In her senior year of high school, daughter still reads at a 3rd grade level, and that is probably the best she'll ever do. You can see where she wouldn't look forward to a Nook for Christmas. Nor would it do that much good for her. Mind you, she copes with devices -- she has special dispensation to carry her cell phone in class, use it for audio and video recordings and to photograph the whiteboard. (I'm thinking about writing a paper about it.) She uses her laptop in the resource room to do homework (it has all her tools on it) and has gotten very adept at sharing content between her phone, laptop, desktop at home, and members of her team for group assignments. The recent breakthroughs in affordable (or even free) text-to-voice and voice-to-text has helped considerably. But I don't see a place in her life for an e-reader.
Now, when she was homeschooled, we belonged to a homeschool co-op, (non-denominational and non-political, because regular people sometimes need to homeschool too) and got our materials through them. (Supplemented by Amazon.) I suppose some of those documents could have been delivered via e-reader, but you couldn't scribble on them. We did use the computer for research, but lessons were still in physical lesson books, for a number of reasons.
So, yeah, although there are a few good examples in TFA, the general message that e-readers will make schools redundant sounds like one of those "year of the linux desktop" and "apple branded televisions" threads. Wishful thinking at best.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I could not get past the first paragraph of the article. The author has some serious issues to work out. Technology is accelerating learning in ways we can't predict. Schools are adapting, albeit slowly, to the new technology. But the real revolution is not in technology, but in technique. Legacy pedagogy is showing its age. Teachers are going to move from being dispensers of information to being facilitators of knowledge acquisition.
Only a true Idiot can come up with this. I bet the person suggesting this has never ever seen a classroom from the other side (teachers POV).
A teacher and a 20+ Student classroom is not going to be obsolete in a VERY long time. Everybody knows that selfstudy often does not yield results. A teacher provides Expertise and is a source of encouragement to study. The other students provide a necessary level of competition while giving the student equal peers.
The world does NOT need more iPad classrooms, all the world needs is more teachers. less restrictions and politics in the classroom and that worldwide. Africa doesnt need an OLPC. Look at china, and you see a succesfull example. They got 15+ years ago foreign teachers in without much restrictions. They got them in put them in a classroom and let them do their OWN thing. It worked pretty well out for china if you ask me. Simple solution big effect.
To put it in a nutshell. We need no Hightec all we need is less restrictions let anyone teach and soon you weed out the good from the bad and are left with excellence.
I am suspicious of the term "traditional". I believe it was an ancient Greek philosopher who said that the golden age for any people was their grandfather's generation - so for a 20 year old this might mean education in the 1960s, for a 40 year old, perhaps the 1940's. When do you define "traditional" education as having started, and finished? My little research into the education of the 19th century doesn't suggest "critical" and "agile", more like basic literacy and numeracy backed up by physical punishment. Or did you mean the 17th century? In the early colonial period in the USA, education meant basic literacy, learning the Scriptures by rote, and some maths basic knowledge. Or perhaps you meant another period in time?
Not sure what you mean by "traditional" - perhaps you could give some examples?
I'd rather my kids learn by themselves on the internet alone at home without parental supervision than to trust the public school system. It's such a failure and so much so that it's worth sending them to a private school and hiring private tutors even with limited income. I guarantee you that a big chunk of teachers would get fired for not being qualified enough to teach should all schools be converted into private schools. It's also a dated system that needs to change drastically and I don't mean just by changing a curriculum or two. I see parents picking up multiple jobs just to afford to send their kids to a private school and getting tutored, and some of them I even question their legal status as a citizen. But if you want to fix something, stop giving out free education to illegals.
nothing new about this idea..To make schools obsolete, to improve education, and to convert to a tutorial society
we need only standardize and administer national "level qualifying" academic examinations. Then each person can learn at his or her best rate and the mess called schools will disappear.
Of course, the big problem them is the problem not yet solved, how to keep government from
corrupting the grading system with the dollar for a degree programs baited by the promise of a job?
Ah gee just think all those useless at the department of education would be out of work, and the
textbook ponzi schemes would disappear.
Are not places of learning as much as places of certification.
Industry loves the latter, as they can claim that events was not because of personal screw ups (the person(s) were after all certified in their field). This then makes for a "airtight" insurance claim.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm