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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).
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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.
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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Personally I think he's right.
Bottom line, when they break schools aren't going to be able to afford to replace them. They'll be out of classrooms in less than 10 years.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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