Slashdot Mirror
A School in the Cloud
gurps_npc writes "Recently there was a poorly designed study that claimed computers don't help teaching. Here with the opposing viewpoint is Sugata Mitra in his recent TED talk. He went to a tiny village in India and put a computer there with software about DNA replication (in English, even though they did not speak or read English). When he came back months later, a group of young children said, 'We don't understand anything — except that mistakes in DNA replication cause diseases.' At heart, his argument is that the old style of teaching derives from Victorian England's need for bureaucrats, so it creates minimally competent people that know how to read, write, and do math in their head. He wants to update our teaching methods with more creative and technological solutions."
One of Mitra's main points is that given resources and a question to ponder, children will learn on their own. Interference and too much direction gets in the way of that. Mitra won the $1M TED prize this year for his work. He said in an interview, "We spent 7000 years debating this issue of how do we educate everybody. We have never lived in a world where one standard educated everyone. And given that we have failed for over 7000 years, perhaps we will never have one standard. Maybe the right conclusion is that we do away with standard education. Maybe the convergence of technology and curiosity will solve this problem."
We didn't spend 7000 years trying to educate everyone, we've been trying to educate everyone for maybe 400.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Without context this is utterly meaningless drabble and serves no place in any summary.
I learned a ton on my own as a kid by reading random articles out of an encyclopedia, and some of those "How Things Work" series of books. I imagine kids in India could do so, too— except that they don't have access to such books. So it seems overall more a matter of access to knowledge, in any form, than of something new and magical about technology-based learning as a specific form.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
A computer is a very versatile tool. Used correctly it will help with an amazing array of tasks, including education. Used incorrectly they are either worthless or counterproductive. And, like many other tools, if you let kids play with it, they will learn something (which might or might not be what you wanted them to learn).
Asking if computers help education is too broad of a question. A better question is "'When do computers help education and when do they hurt?" You can find good examples of each.
-WolvesOfTheNight
There is a diminishing return to providing people with books and computers.
The first few books and blackboards are what really matters. As does a teacher that can fill the gaps, drive students in the right direction, and raise thought-provoking points.
But at some point, additional technology just distracts. Instead of learning, the kids end up spending their time on Facebook, browsing prOn, and updating/re-installing/fixing the computer instead of actually learning.
and porn
I thoroughly enjoyed the talk, and especially appreciated Mitra's open minded approach to educational possibilities.
I am the parent of a child who is pursuing her education outside of a physical school setting, and I certainly recognized correlations with our experiences.
Mitra is asking for people to expand the research, and materials are available to participate.
I'll be fascinated to see how this develops.
WALSTIB!
and porn
Think of it as sex ed
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
There are times I cringe when "educate" is used as a substitute to "learning"
Did someone educate you on how to walk on your two feet, or did you do that by your own, learning through trials and errors?
Did someone educate you on how to speak whatever language that you are using, or did you somehow learn it by listening to the sound made by the adults?
It's mindboggling nowadays when people forget the most basic thing that makes each and every one of us who we are - that we are "learning machine", that "education" in itself a flawed concept
You do not educate students - you share with whoever you want to "teach" what you know, show them (if it's possible) the process, and they pick up on that, just like they pick up, by themselves, how to walk, how to talk, et cetera
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I hope his study wasn't as terrible as the slashdot summary makes it sound. Or are we really suppose to believe that a computer disconnected from the internet with ONLY information on DNA replication is equivalent to a computer on the internet with a wide variety of educational and non-educational material easily accessible in seconds. Or maybe we're suppose to believe kids would choose to read information on DNA in a language they don't speak instead of playing angry birds?
Computers will not magically make a poor teacher a better teacher. They are a tool to augment teaching but will not make a poor teacher gifted. To improve teaching, we need to start with teacher education without the bells and whistles. Once the teacher learns and becomes proficient, he or she will understand how to use technology to reinforce the material. I had a very poor chemistry teacher that made frequent use of computers because he was unable to explain much of the material to a high school level. He had a masters degree in Chemical Engineering and was brilliant but knowing how to teach is a skill to be learned. It does not necessarily come innately.
What to do? In my humble opinion, gaming is the answer. Not the gaming we're used to, but real-world, immersive, progressive gaming where students go into virtual grocery stores and learn to shop on a budget. Where trucks are loaded with goods and students have to figure out the optimal route to transport the goods to market. Where students are confronted with tax forms and have to figure them out (and be scored on them). Where a grandparent takes ill and they have to figure out what to do to care for them. Where they are given a virtual puppy/horse/ox and learn to train it. Lastly, they need a program which takes them through numerous scenarios of wealth creation. This last is probably what is most lacking from our present educational system.
We are doing little if anything like this and yet, this is the world that we live in. If every school board on the planet put 0.05% of their budget towards the development of true AI-based educational gaming, our students would learn at a prodigious rate. Granted, we would have to adjust for region and language, but the essence of education is the same the world over.
*** Don't be dull.***
It always annoys me when people claim to have discovered something new when all they're really doing is reverting to a past method that was recently discarded in the name of "new" and under the pretense of "better". It shows both ignorance and arrogance.
For thousands of years, people learned through apprenticeship. People learned their trade from one person, and when they gained mastery over their craft, taught some small number of individuals who would hopefully go on to do the same, to varying degrees of success.
Schools, where twenty to thirty students sit in a classroom and learn from some books and a teacher can only provide a baseline. The system is designed not at all to educate, but to make literate. And because of this, they tend to race to the bottom, especially if managed poorly.
Today, the only place anything even remotely similar to a master-apprentice relationship could be found is at the doctorate level. One advisor, several candidates, and then they get their degree and become journeymen. Eventually, they may or may not become masters. This is the system that needs to be propogated back down to primary education.
Yes, today's needs are different. There's a much greater emphasis on working with abstractions (oblig. xkcd) than on developing skills. There are also a far greater amount of knowledge needed in far more disciplines to be considered marginally competent. But I'm certain that the tried and true model of master and apprentice can be adapted to today's quantity, quality, and societal requirements of knowledge.
The only hindrance is the attitude towards school (especially teachers' attitudes towards school), and towards teachers. People go into teaching because they like working with children. This is already a failure. Parents see teachers as their daytime (or full time, in the case of boarding schools) babysitters. This is also another failure. If the parent does not respect the teacher, then the children will not. If the teacher does not have anything worth respecting, then there's no reason for the parent or even the children to respect the teacher.
The teacher needs to be the third parent. This is the core of the master-apprentice relationship. At home, the child has parents. When in a place of learning, the teacher is the parent. Children actually want to see their teacher as a parent. But there are social elements that discourage this thinking. Changing teachers every year, for example (mostly because teachers competent at teaching first grade may not be so good at teaching sixth grade) is instability, and children are most comfortable when things are stable.
Testing, especially paper-based, multiple-choice, sit-at-your-desk-and-don't-cheat testing, is also very bad. Current testing separates students from each other. If the teacher is a third parent, then students in the same class are siblings. But if they are separated from each other during a test, then they cannot form the sibling relationship properly. Tests also do not show competency. They merely show interest in taking the test and perhaps patience. Yes, abstractions comprise mostly what is taught today. But comeptency can only be shown in the doing. That is why to get a doctorate, the candidate must further the field.
Technology plays very little role in education--in fact, the same one as a calculator would play. It does not solve the education problem. Culture does.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
If that insight is so trivial, why hasn't most of the western world realized this, why do we still cling to our ways of sending kids to jail-factories to cram their brains with data in a carefully planned industrial process?
When he talks about the "SOLE"s he put in classrooms, specifically when he mentions that the teacher just stands back and says "it just happens all by itself", you immediately see that all of those great ideas will be extremely hard to adopt on a mainstream level, almost impossible I fear.
As he said, the British model of education is so well-designed and so firmly embedded into society, protected by political capital, laws, teacher unions, social norms, etc. that I don't see this happening in my lifetime, or the lifetime of the generation after me.
Yes, we should be driven to learn instead of legally obligated to be educated. Yes, learning should be motivated by fun and curiosity and desire to learn. Yes, Maths should be visualized, intuitized, computerized, and made fun. Yes, History should be a bunch of stories and not a table of dates and events. Yes to all of his and Khan's calls to modern learning that bets on creativity and individuality.
But none of this will happen, and for that reason, I won't bring another human being into this world to suffer through our schools and education system.
It's pretty shitty sex ed. It's mostly biased to what men want, and not so much about what women want (although I'm sure there is stuff catering to women, it is just far less common than the stuff catering to men), also most porn I see the men aren't using a condom which sets a bad example, most porn doesn't teach anything relating to sexual health, like the dangers of STDs or the importance of contraception. Yes, you can use porn as part of sex ed, but it shouldn't be used as the only sex ed someone gets.
There's no telling what innocent young minds might stumble across out there. I mean, everyone knows that diseases are caused by the Wrath Of God, not DNA replication errors.
That's why we have to maintain control of the curriculum.
Have gnu, will travel.
He left some reading material lying around, and the kids read it, and it left an impression.
Why is this suddenly an OMG COMPUTERS FIXED EVERYTHING article? You could get the same effect by dropping a satchel of illustrated books off in the same village. Oh, wait, no audio? No video? No multimedia? Okay, how about some film reels, and 8-tracks?
Presto! The same exact effect, but no computers!
But wait! None of that is "interactive"... Guess what, you don't need complex electronics to design and enforce interaction. And by the way, clicking on a button isn't necessarily more complex than turning the page of a book, and sure, books present data in a paginated order, but they're also flexible enough for random access.
So what's the take away here? The novelty of electronic devices is the cookie that "encourages" a "more efficient learning"? Hmmm... I'm not convinced.
Instead of asking how to educate people, I think we need to come to grips with what people want when they say they want education.
At a personal level, although there is a vague notion that somehow education is important, it's likely that the thing most important to individual people about an education is not the fact or skills that are obtained, but certification that is conveyed and the value of that certification in societal status. If this is indeed true, the root desire for most folks in obtaining an education is differentiation (presumably from the "uneducated" masses). Could this differentiation be achieved by simply learning a set of facts and/or skills? Or does much of the value come in the form of the certification?
At a societal level, there are some economic benefits to having masses know enough facts and learn enough skills to create value in the economy and to allow the citizenry at large to reap the benefits of a relatively better economy (even those that don't know the facts or nor learned the skills).
So to this end, governments often invest in elements of a certified education to assist in the efficiency of the economy (e.g., allow more optimal allocation of workers to enterprises, and a more learned workforce in general). But to whom specifically does it confer most of the value of this investment? Bestowing rewards to the "smart", and "motivated" are perhaps easy calls for the highest levels of certification, but what about the masses? Or the motivated parents (wealthy or not) that wish to buy status for their children? Things get a bit dicey and politically incorrect from there since it is not possible to grant differentiation to everyone (by definition of differentiation).
For the masses, the conventional wisdom is to create a process we call education where the people can be taught the facts and skills and be certified for their accomplishment. This has the unspoken assumption that most anyone can be taught and that the certification has value.
Hopefully we can all see the flaw in this. If everyone can be taught, there is little to no differentiation and the certification has little value (other than the recipient has already been taught). You can see this today in the mainstream job market: HS diplomas are almost meaningless. Does that mean everyone can be taught, or does it mean the certification of the facts and skills indicated by a HS diploma are non-differentiating. Does improving teaching improve this situation in either case? Probably not.
The real value in improving teaching is not to help us individual students learn, but at a societal level to improve the economy. How do you measure this? Probably this is only measured in aggregate which is an evaluation mechanism that students, teachers, and people who study the education processes tend to discount as they concentrate on the achievement of the individual.
So do we do away with the notion of a certified education? My feeling is that will reduce the efficiency in the economy. All enterprises would need to develop their own training and evaluation criteria and job seekers will probably be less likely to present meaningful credentials to prospective new employers.
If we stick with the concept of a certified education, what are we certifying? If you believe in "tests" as a sole means of evaluation, that might be easy to answer, but if you believe (as I do) that learning is more than the sum of facts and skills, it's hard to say that you can successfully replace teachers with ipads and present a meaningful certification result.
For example, when I interview a college graduate that didn't drop out, I know that at least they could put up with a hierarchical institutional environment for 4 years and were able to do sufficient amount of learning to make academic progress. Since I desire them to stay in my company and contribute for more than a few years if I hire them and spend the resources to train them, that's an important nugget of information right there independent o
I love the concept but the problem is the implementation.
Also, I disagree that the current teaching style is a result of "... Victorian England's need for bureaucrats...". IMO, broadcast teaching of standardized curricula came about to allow:
1). Fewer teachers can teach more children. The main cost of education at primary and secondary levels is in the teachers so the system optimizes for this;
2). Children get a known, baseline set of knowledge;
3). Unmotivated children can be motivated coercively. Not pleasant but true.
In my "forget the practicalities, let's blue-sky an idealized system", here's what I'd like to see. Children are allowed to follow their interests and learn connected areas of knowledge, following the logical connections. This should increase their interest and motivation. Eventually their interests reveal to them an important truth: All knowledge is connected.
Eventually they will tackle subjects not of initial interest to them precisely because they come to understand that, even more difficult topics (to them) connect and support the things they love. They cannot fully understand their main interest without knowing something about many secondary topics.
I view it as a revisiting of the old Socratic teaching method, assisted by technology. Just a dream.
You sound as if you've read: Weapons of Mass Instruction
I haven't read it, but my wife did - and we recently just pulled our kids out of school and started home-schooling all three of them (pre-school, K, and 2nd grade) It has been a challenge, but has also been very rewarding. The computer does help, but a lot of the learning at this stage is pretty basic. But they really get excited about learning and aren't exhausted by the end of the day due to all of the non-learning they used to have to endure around school. School isn't bad, and their school was really good. But now we are more involved with them, and we are hoping it really works out for the best. I know home-schooling has a stigma attached to it, but we are doing it for all the right reasons.
"He went to a tiny village in India and put a computer there with software about DNA replication (in English, even though they did not speak or read English). When he came back months later, a group of young children said, 'We don't understand anything — except that mistakes in DNA replication cause diseases.'"
And this is supposed to prove WHAT, exactly? Am I supposed to be impressed by the depth of knowledge that the Indian children achieved?
But college level apprentices are still the wrong way to go for lot's of fields that can be better off with more or tech / trades school apprentice system.
College level has to much theory and lot's of filler and fluff.
From the summary: "One of Mitra's main points is that given resources and a question to ponder, children will learn on their own. Interference and too much direction gets in the way of that."
Well, great. Nobody explained that to the inner-city teenagers I deal with in my clinic. Just about all of them have access to the full resources of the Internet, either at home or down the street at the library. And they are wonderfully free from the evils of "interference and too much direction".
Their general fund of knowledge is shockingly limited. Many of them can't find Europe on a map. A remarkable number of them can't name a single city outside of the United States/Mexico. They struggle with basic arithmetic and reading comprehension.
If you want to see how well-educated a child becomes when you give him "resources" and no direction, just look around you.
I'm making money with my education, so is most everyone I know (whether traditional schooling, appreticeship, trade school, etc.)
He went to a tiny village in India and put a computer there with software about DNA replication (in English, even though they did not speak or read English). When he came back months later, a group of young children said, 'We don't understand anything — except that mistakes in DNA replication cause diseases.'
I don't believe it. Young children can't understand DNA -- or even molecules. I particularly don't believe that young children from a rural village in India could understand anything meaningful about DNA. You might be able to teach them to parrot phrases like "mistakes in DNA replication cause diseases" if you repeated it to them a lot. But they won't understand what they're talking about. You could just as easily teach them to say, "Disobeying God causes diseases." It certainly has nothing to do with teaching science.
I did some research into elementary and high school science education, and read what the teachers with hands-on experience said. A friend of mine had lots of stories about how he taught science in the Peace Corps in Africa.
Surprisingly, even high school kids have a difficult time with science concepts that seem to be simple and basic -- for example, molecules.
Think about it. Science is hands-on. The main lesson of science is that you make a hypothesis, and then test the hypothesis against the real world to see if your hypothesis actually works. How can you demonstrate to a high school student that molecules exist? I read in my history of science books the saga of how chemists finally figured out and proved what molecules and atoms were, starting in about the 18th century. It's a great story. It would be very difficult for high school students to replicate those experiments, and even more difficult to understand what they were doing. We don't have mercury barometers any more. How do you prove that atoms and molecules really exist? In my niece's middle school science class, it was an appeal to authority -- the book says so.
I was particularly interested in the efforts to teach elementary school students about DNA. What's the point? You're not demonstrating the existence of DNA or genes to them. You're not showing them anything in the real, testable world. You're just showing them pictures and animations. The Harry Potter movies also have animations. Why should they believe your animations any more than Harry Potter movies? Or creationist Bible movies? The American Museum of Natural History had a show on DNA. They had exhibits for children demonstrating DNA. I asked the kids to explain it -- and they couldn't do it. They had a big, colorful, impressive exhibit for kids on DNA, and none of the kids understood it. Although you could get a grant for it.
In the world of pundits and foundation grants, there are lots of people who make extravagant claims about what their thing can do, their technical trick or their computers.
There are lots of things about science that you can teach kids, hands-on, starting as young as 3 years old. Seymour Simon http://www.seymoursimon.com/ had books for 4-year-olds that taught them how to discover for themselves principles of engineering using paper and clay to build arches. Science teachers take their kids out into the woods -- or a vacant lot -- and show them what you can find there.
But teaching rural Indian children to understand anything about DNA? With materials in a language they don't understand? I don't believe it.
Out with the poorly designed studies, in with the anecdotes!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
1852 saw the first compulsory education law introduced in the US, the last US state would follow in 1917. England got its in 1870.
So... where do you get 400 years from? 2013 - 400 = 1613 that is still in the middle of the reformation.
And considering a girl recently got a bullet in her head for wanting to go to school, I would say that we have NOT been trying to educate everyone for 400 years or whatever but more that for thousands of years people have been actively trying to NOT educate all.
The danger of education is that people start to think for themselves. Disease caused by mutations in the genes? My my, what heresy is this, everyone knows it is god that cures disease if you listen to your local cleric and don't question why the pope sits on a throne of gold while millions starve, I read about Jesus Christ, I fail to see how he could ever approve of Catholicism.
And modern education is not really about creating anything but more in trying to prevent the kind of people who burn witches (last case happened very recently) or shoot girls in the face because they want to be able to read and write. It is not about making people smart, it is about making them slightly less stupid and maybe if you are lucky allowing a few bright ones to climb their way out of the cesspool that is humanity and improve all our lives. But make no mistake, school is NOT efficient or productive, it is a sausage factor that relies on random chance for a fine steak to get through at times.
And other systems have been tried. They never ever worked.
Lock kids in a building, force them to sit up right and 50% will come out a bit less stupid, 45% will remain as stupid as ever and vote Republican and 5% go on to shape the world for everyone else. Statistics pulled entire out of my ass but we don't need millions of Einsteins. It would be nice but we managed to do with just one. The rest of you? Like me? By-product. Just try not to stench the place up to much with your wasted life and let the smart people do their stuff.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Indeed yes, education is about making people literate and numerate. AND THAT IS IT AND THAT IS ALL IT SHOULD DO.
Nobody can make you smart or interested in learning. THAT is something you got to do yourself. Developing a questioning mind "why is it so" is impossible to enforce.
Your parents can make you learn to ride a bicycle but only YOU can win the Tour de France.
Your father can teach you how to weld but only YOU can build the Eiffel tower.
Your mother can teach you how to read but only YOU can write the next great American novel.
Modern compulsory education is about forcing everyone to be given a chance to at least develop the basics from which maybe the individual him or herself can take off. But it is NOT designed, cannot be designed to make everyone into a scientist. THAT is what is wrong with American and Western education, the idea that we can press all kids into a school factory and produce insurance salesmen and ad-women.
Individuals themselves make this mistake too. I work in web-development PHP, which is the ass end of IT, 1st line tech support kids look down on us. But as easy as it is, you STILL can see who is not going to make it very simply. They are the ones who ask "what must I do". "What course should I take" "What book should I read".
Those who do make it just DO IT! There are two ways to complete a long march and that is by YOU yourself taking the first step, not asking someone else to tell you how to march. The basics "reading/math" you should have picked up in school. The skills, you have to master on your own AND ESPECIALLY on your OWN initiative.
If you, given the tools of reading and the internet can't learn PHP on your own, you will NEVER ever become any good at it because it is that DRIVE to learn, to examine, to explore, to experiment. If you ask, you are to lazy AND HERE IS WHY!
THE QUESTION HAS ALREADY BEEN ANSWERED: with google, you can easily find the question you are asking, that has already been answered. REMEMBER that if you want to see furthest, you should stand on the shoulders of giants. No great scientist worked in a vacuum, they STARTED by seeing the world, asking themselves a question and the finding an answer at least in PART by reading what others had written about it.
So asking on say yahoo what is a good PHP book shows that you lack even the basic skills of finding the answers to a previous question: you basically want knowledge to magically enter your brain and that just doesn't work (says a guy who has bought way to many language course books and still can't write a proper sentence because apparently you actually need to read the books not just buy them).
It is amazing we think of education as we do. Most schools in Holland teach swimming but we don't magically expect all kids to become olympic swimmers. Why do we expect all kids thought basic reading to be great writers then?
School swimming is there to make you slightly less likely to drown. The rest is up to you.
School education is there to stop you chewing the books, reading them, understanding what is inside, is up to you.
I can make you read say "Anne Frank's diary" or listen to MLK speeches but I cannot make you understand them. And frankly for all those who wish for schools to be MORE then literacy factories... do you REALLY want your school system to tell people what to think? What to understand?
Our school system might seem like a waste and horribly inefficient but I for one am more afraid of what an efficient school system would look like. Remember that in say Public Transport, if a train is filled to capacity, it is efficient. Factory farming is efficient, I do not wish to be a factory animal thank you very much.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I thought we didn't need schools.
For two decades now in the easy-money IT industry, young entrepeneurs have been chanting again and again that schools only dull the mind and since THEY didn't need schools to succeed, nobody else does.
So do we suddenly need schools again now that someone has something to sell?
You ever used a condom man? Those little latex bastards suck. I won't wear them, that's also why I'm monogamous, I don't want my swizzle stick to rot off.
-s
Because it serves the purposes of the rulers who inflict it, obviously.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Who gives a *FUCK* about India!!!!? They smell like shit and are taking over our country. It was "cute" when they had Apu in Simpsons episodes over 20 years ago but we didn't have the Indian problem we do now. That shit is EVERYWHERE!