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Can Students Have Too Much Tech?
theodp writes: In a NY Times Op Ed, developmental psychologist Susan Pinker goes against the conventional White House wisdom about the importance of Internet connectivity for schoolchildren and instead argues that students can have too much tech. "More technology in the classroom has long been a policy-making panacea," Pinker writes. "But mounting evidence shows that showering students, especially those from struggling families, with networked devices will not shrink the class divide in education. If anything, it will widen it." Tech can help the progress of children, Pinker acknowledges, but proper use is the rub. As a cautionary tale, Pinker cites a study by Duke economists that tracked the academic progress of nearly one million disadvantaged middle-school students against the dates they were given networked computers. The news was not good. "Students who gain access to a home computer between the 5th and 8th grades tend to witness a persistent decline in reading and math scores," the economists wrote, adding that license to surf the Internet was also linked to lower grades in younger children.
Every serious (read "non-vendor-sponsored") study for the last 20 years has shown that computers in school hinder education.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
At the college level though I see a different kind of problem. Many of the people from 3rd world countries I have encountered do VERY well at rote memorization tasks and can often solve engineering problems that are almost exactly what they have done before but when you step outside of that they quickly run into problems. I find that american and canadian engineers are more likely to rely on a computer to solve the hard math part but they are much better at figuring out how to define the problem and what should be done to solve it.
I am not sure why but most european countries still seem to do rote memorization for many disciplines and base all grades on a single 2 hour exam. It is all pretty silly. Maybe some day education won't be confused with memorization.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
This is a very shortsighted way to look at the situation. There are a number of problems with it.
It doesn't take into account that the third world students you talk about aren't the average students in their home nation. They're typically the children of the local elite, and enrolled in private schools. But the American students they're compared against are usually average students from within the public education system.
Of course the 0.001% of the best and brightest Pakistani or Nigerian youth put through expensive private school programs will be able to do better than the average students of a public school in the Bronx. Something would be terribly wrong if the opposite were true!
Another thing to consider is that the rote memorization that is useful for doing well on tests that check one's ability to regurgitate information rarely helps in the real world, where innovative thought and problem solving is far more valuable.
I have to hire software developers periodically. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that while candidates trained in India can regurgitate information, they rarely have acquired the skills necessary to solve novel and unique problems. If it isn't described in the Javadocs, then they have no idea how to do it, and they even have no idea about how to go about finding out how to do it.
I'll gladly hire somebody who maybe can't spew out Java class or method names on demand, but who can instead think for themselves and work through problems. I do not want to hire somebody who can vomit up easily researchable information, but who can't figure out what to do when a real world oddity or quirk ends up making a problem somewhat harder to solve.
I'll take American- or European-trained students over third world-trained students any day.
Buying stuff is easy.
Teaching is hard.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!