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Bill Gates Says Tablets Aren't Much Help In Education
An anonymous reader writes "In a detailed interview on the future of education, Bill Gates was surprisingly down on tablets in education — considering that Microsoft just released Surface. He said low-cost PCs are the thing for students, and he dismissed the idea that simply giving gadgets to students will bring change. Quoting: 'Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input. Students aren't there just to read things. They're actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it's going to be more in the PC realm—it's going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive.'"
I completely agree with his assessment
Yeah. His prognostications have been pretty much a joke. People should go back and read "The Road Ahead" and see how good that was.
Pencil. Paper. Calculator. The keyboard gets in the way of doing anything useful, especially if you're trying to do things involving symbols (like math).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I've wondered the same thing as I've seen ads that pretty much every major school district in my area are touting iPads for every student next year. I love new shiny tech, but I feel like 'get of my lawn' curmudgeon being skeptical on the benefits of outfitting every kid with a free-to-use tablet. It's especially frustrating when in the same article about the local district offering iPads to everyone (via a technology-specific millage) that same district is still 500k in the hole after cutting $1 million by way of faculty layoffs.
I haven't looked, but is there research showing that giving every student an iPad improves something?
Bill Gates has been at the forefront of preventing innovation in computing and holding on to old ways of doing things for decades. It stands to reason the he wouldn't be able to understand that computing is possible without a keyboard.
That said, he is right that the equipment and the curriculum must work together. You can't just buy a fancy new toy and expect it to change much. But in the case of tablets, they could easily replace textbooks and printed materials with more interactive alternatives, and of course there'd be no benefit in having a keyboard if that's what you're trying to accomplish.
you dont have to like gates to see what he is saying is not wrong, at least in the short term. a tablet can only do so much, people are always talking about how it is a complementary device. Now gates says as much, and I will bet a lot on /. will be talking shit about how hes wrong. Tablets are great at replacing 40 pounts of textbooks however, as a tablet (with not easy input) is still slightly better than a textbook (no input), low cost desktops (or laptops) are better for students overall.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
'Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher.
That's right, I've seen this go horribly wrong before.
And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input.
I'm going to disagree here though. It worked for pencil/paper for decades, no keyboard input there!
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Oh, really? Last I heard, nobody had actually been able to use one for even 15 seconds. Why, even MS executives on stage were not able to demo one for 15 seconds without it locking up.
Seriously though dumbass, learn the difference between "pre-announce" and "release".
Preface: I am an apple fanboy ... but ...
iBook for text books has the best damn demo I've ever seen as to why exactly tablets would make freaking AWESOME textbook replacements.
http://www.apple.com/education/
The current flash on that page displays a demo of someone using a textbook. THAT is HOW text books SHOULD BE DONE. It doesn't have to be iBooks or an iPad, but that general concept is freaking awesome and just goes to show how Billy and the Gates foundation in general aren't about helping the world so much as finding another way to rip it off.
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This doesn't sound down on Surface at all. This reads like a shameless plug FOR Surface.
Inexpensive, interactive, "more in the PC realm", and with "keyboard type" input? I feel like I recently watched someone not shut up about those features for a solid half hour, BUT WHERE?
Perhaps because his philanthropic work is focused in part on education, and understanding which kinds of philanthropic investment produces positive results.
Within very specific environments computers and the like are indeed beneficial. But for education in general all these devices do is distract. Kids want toys, teachers mistakenly believe it will ease the burden of teaching and administrators are easily suckered by anything they think will make them look progressive.
Even in college, in a course which required computer use I had to be vigilant about my students dicking around on instead of paying attention. The temptation to partake in other activities is far too strong. And the question is if, even when they're used for their intended purpose, do they actually enhance learning over a printed book and a good teacher? Do they actually aid in the retention of knowledge? I think these questions need to be answered first. But I suspect no one wants them answered because it will reveal all this as the gimmick it is.
What's interesting here is that Bill agrees with Steve Jobs on the tablet issue. Both Bill and Steve advocating against just dropping technology in to improve education. Steve was more direct, but Bill says the same thing, that it's the Teachers that matter, a good teacher can improve students with less technology far more effectively than a mediocre/poor teacher can with lots of technology.
Just having access to books when you need it is reason enough to have tablets or netbooks in schools. Instead of talking about Adam Smith, you can just read his books. Instead of handing out 20-30 thousand page books to all the pupils in the class, all you need is have them download a 1-2MB file. Fully searchable. And that's just one example.
A single tablet can fit all books you'll ever need in school instantly accessible at any time.
Even if tablets do absolutely nothing in the way of improving education in any other way, that's reason enough.
Q. Tablet computers are big these days. The Surface tablet was just released by Microsoft last week, and iPads are all over campuses, but it doesn't sound like your approach has been to give devices to students and hope things change that way. What do you think needs to happen for factors like tablets to really make a difference? Or is that not even part of the equation?
A. Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input. Students aren't there just to read things. They're actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it's going to be more in the PC realm—it's going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive.
And he's RIGHT. We've seen this time and time again: some school gets some tech grant and goes on a tech spending spree on crap that in the end do nothing to aid in education. When I was in school, we had initiatives like smart boards, which were expensive and broke so much, teachers ended up using them as expensive whiteboards. Then we had laptop carts, where you trucked around this 10 ton cart to classrooms where none of the laptops were charged all the way and they never worked. And when they did work, they added nothing that a trip to the computer lab would have done.
So just giving students tablets isn't going to work. They'll be fun little novel gadgets, but students need to do real work which includes writing, typing, and other things you cannot do with your fingers. I used a tablet PC throughout college, and it was the best technology investment I made. It was one of those convertible tablets that switched from keyboard mode to laptop mode, and a had a stylus for writing notes. Classmates were constantly begging me for copies of my notes, since I was able to annotate book excerpts and capture chalboard derivations easier than they were able to with traditional PnP. Then the iPad came out and everyone said it was a godsend. I bought one in the hopes of replacing my tablet PC, but I was sorely disappointed at its capabilities. From a student's perspective, it was nothing more than a toy compared to my tablet PC, and I think that's what Bill Gates is getting at.
The submitter seems to think that Bill's words contradict Microsoft's efforts with the Surface, but the Surface is everything I wanted the iPad to be. It can run serious note taking software like One Note. It can *truly* multi task applications. It has digital pen input. It has a slim attachable keyboard. And when I'm at a desk I can connect it to a monitor and keyboard and use Office, Matlab, etc. as many students need to.
It's early tech, they're going to get thinner, lighter, they're going to accept touch and pen input,... couple that with the development on technologies like E-Ink and Foldable displays and in some 10 years they'll be ubiquitous, not just in education but pretty much everywhere.
More importantly the work in UX design that companies like Apple, Palm and Google have been doing has allowed users who are not entirely comfortable with the desktop paradign to stop thinking of these devices less as computers and more as standard household items, like TVs or VCRs.
Do you want to students to create content or consume content? That's the bottom line, tablets are great for consuming content but suck in a not good way for creating anything more than a brief email. Personally I'd rather have students that can create things than consume things.
He has probably already wasted money that way and saw no results. I think he has spent money on gadgets for schools in the past.
Well no, he's been keeping up with the latest research. It's not a matter of opinion. We have the track record to show just throwing tablets into classrooms just doesn't work, in the same way throwing a gallon of paint at a wall doesn't paint the wall.
Just to keep the kids from lugging around books.
I am an education professional with a graduate degree in Education Technology. Based on my review of the literature, and my own research, Bill Gates is absolutely correct in saying:
Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher.
This part, however, is 100% opinion, and lacks the data to back his assertion:
And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input.
He's applying old paradigms from his comfort zone to modern learning. "Never" is a long time, Bill.
10 WAYS THE IPAD WILL FOREVER CHANGE EDUCATION
Every single one of those points, except the point that the iPad has limited multitasking capabilities (and that's somehow a good thing in the classroom), applies to laptops.
SD Unified Purchases 26,000 iPads For District Students:
At 30 kids a classroom, they could have afforded to give 866 teachers a much needed $17k raise with the money they spent on this technology push that will end up abandoned in 3 years. Better yet they could hire new teachers. Watch as those iPads become outdated and can't run the latest OS with the latest and greatest educational apps in 3 years time. Oh, and that's another $260,000 in a couple years to replace the batteries as they go. How often do you have to replace the batteries on a textbook?
The longer he's away from Microsoft, the more I like him.
Bill Gates is following on in the tradition of the Robber Barons of the Industrial Revolution - win big in the capitalist game, then spend the rest of his life making an actual lasting legacy that does real, actual good for folks outside the boardroom and the stock exchanges.
Of course, I'm referring to his charitable works, but I see that he's also gaining some perspective that isn't colored by the need to maximize profits.
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Input speed can always be adapted to.
If my brain is thinking at 80 words per minute, but I can key things in at only 20, then text entry is the bottleneck keeping me from working at my full capability.
I would put money on the fact that my 15 year old daughter can T9 text on her phone faster than you can type.
I type at least 80 words per minute. Good luck entering text with T9 at more than 80 words per minute, including disambiguation of textonyms (such as home/gone/good or he/if) and punctuation.
I can produce documents with equal speed on a PC as I can with a 'docked' ipad
My mileage does vary regarding software stacks. Some of the documents that I produce include tables, charts, and graphs based on the output of programs that I wrote for the purpose of making the document. The walled garden approach of the iPad makes this impossible without using the iPad as a VNC terminal to run the software on a PC, which requires an expensive data plan if I'll be doing it during the bus commute. Yeah, I'm probably an outlier, but that's part of why I stick with a 10" laptop instead of an iPad.
T9 is a dictionary-based input acceleration method.
It's only good for quickly typing common words and phrases (and given all the example of mis-corrected/mis-typed message, it is even bad at that).
It's not designed at all to input complex unusual inputs.
And usually, activities in a school tend to be on the morte complex side than the simple "Sorry mom, I'm going to be late for supper, I'll be first going to the library with a friend" sentences for which T9 is designed.
Usually, the more functionnality is directly available at the push of a button (a hardware on, which can be found blindly through tactile feed-back), the faster you can command a device.
That's why no matter what fancy ribbon with icon is the latest trend, it won't beat the speed of someone knowing and using proper short-cuts.
The same way, no matter how fast your 15yo can use T9, she won't be able to type in complex formulas or academic texts, simply because her typing method requires a lot of button pushing for unusual words, whereas I have direct access to any symbol I might need to type.
The only equivalent would be a docked tablet with a full fledged keyboard. But then the advantages when compared to a netbook start to diminish.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'm impressed with Bill Gates' statement with regards to tablets. He is actually correct - a tablet will neither magically make a struggling student excel nor make a poor teacher miraculously stellar. A tablet is simply a tool and when utilized by a teacher skilled in teaching to various learning styles helps augment said teacher. A tablet can help a motivated, organized student succeed at an even higher level. Our educational system needs to do a better job at motivating students and teaching teachers how to teach. Teacher education is critical yet the colleges and universities are churning out poor teachers. Furthermore, funding has been cut to schools and teacher's salaries making the career much less attractive resulting in a downward spiral.
Many states could self publish.
Or states could even pool their resources and collaborate on a Wikibook.
The problem is not the prediction, the problem is the artificial limits which cripple most tablets models.
Tablets are designed as consumption device only.
They do have limited creation input devices. (Artist need to purchase additionnal stylus with better/higher resolution writing capabilities. Other people need to dock the tablet to a keyboard).
Also, the most popular devices, Apple's iPads tend to be a locked down. For example, it could be beneficial to have the student hack around the device and try to experiment with some basic coding writing stuff. But script interpretation is explicitely forbiden by Apple's App policies. There's a lot to be learned by poking around a device. With an iPad that's simply not possible.
A raspberry pi would be a much better suited device. It's slightly less portable (it needs to be plugged into a monitor or a HDMI TV set) but it can be experimented on.
Yes tablets are cool devices. But there only so much that you can do on a device designed mainly for browsing web and watching youtube, specially when compared to netbooks, OLPC, Raspberry Pi, etc.
You can use them as supplement/replacement to textbooks (use a tablet to display kahn's academy in addition of a textbook) maybe as some glorified form of clicker (for electronic quizzes) but that much about it.
I mean smartphone were really nice when they started to appear, but that doesn't mean that they were necessary in a classroom. As upscaled equivalent tablets won't bring much more.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You know, the input device missing from 99% of "tablets" these days.
That's because the technology of the screen has changed.
Stylus use resistive screen. They have a really fine resolution (and fast response), but only track 1 point at a time.
Modern tablet and smartphone (and trackpads, for that matter) use capacitive screens. They can track several fingers at the same time. But are really imprecise. Still they do all the cool gestures, and can be operated with a hand, so they seem nice during a demo, so that's the current preferred way. (Don't mind that you can't use them to draw precisely or take note with a stylus. Don't mind you can operated them in cold weather while wearing gloves).
You can't simply add a stylus to a modern tablet.
Either you use one of the capacitive stylus, but it just sucks from a precision point of view (its just a fat thing serving as a substitude for a finger).
Or you have to use a special technology to increase the precision: some artist's stylus for tablets add a infrared sensor. There are also special screen which feature a resistive detector in addition to the capacitive one for higher precision stylus work).
I had a Tablet PC all the way through college, and I used it for every class. Still have all of my notes, and still reference them in my PhD work, which is easy since they're completely digitized and search able.
Same here: used Palm PDA's with a stylus (for drawing and quick on the go graffiti input) and a foldable full sized keyboard (for fast note taking).
Can't do that with Pen and paper. Can't do that with iPad either.
Well with pen and paper that would be possible, I mean using a specal pen and special paper. But in that case it all boils again down to having a high resolution digitizing solution coupled with enough software.
With an iPad: well, you would need to replace the input method (buy an expensive stylus which use its own high resolution detector), buy more apps. Probably even jailbreak the device as better note-taking applications would probably violate the "don't duplicate function" policy of apple... Well at that point better just to use some less locked in device with better input capabilities.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"At some point in recent American history, we started assuming that if people are rich enough, they must be experts in all things. That's why we trust Mark Zuckerberg to save Newark schools and Bill Gates to rid the world of malaria. Expertise is so 20th century". link
'Bill Gates has certainly proven that he can make a pile of money, but does founding Microsoft make him an expert or even an authority on education?', bowl_haircut
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