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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 $1M TED prize this year for his work. He said in an interview, "We spent 7000 years debating this issue of how do we educate everybody. We have never lived in a world where one standard educated everyone. And given that we have failed for over 7000 years, perhaps we will never have one standard. Maybe the right conclusion is that we do away with standard education. Maybe the convergence of technology and curiosity will solve this problem."
We didn't spend 7000 years trying to educate everyone, we've been trying to educate everyone for maybe 400.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
I learned a ton on my own as a kid by reading random articles out of an encyclopedia, and some of those "How Things Work" series of books. I imagine kids in India could do so, too— except that they don't have access to such books. So it seems overall more a matter of access to knowledge, in any form, than of something new and magical about technology-based learning as a specific form.
10 PRINT CHR$(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
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."
Actually, Mitra's point has little to do with computers except inasmuch as they make access to information vastly more available. The point is about how children, given access and motivation, learn quite remarkably well on their own. Think of it as a "Free Market" theory of education.
Our teachers, bless them for their nearly thankless efforts, are as trapped as the students in our out of date education system. Freeing them is every bit as important as freeing the children.
Anyway, the point is to find out how to make learning work better, not to throw out the good things about what we have.
Cheers :)
WALSTIB!