Microsoft To Teachers: Using Pens and Paper Not Fair To Students

Freshly Exhumed writes: Pens and paper have no place in the modern classroom, according to Lia De Cicco Remu, director of Partners in Learning at Microsoft Canada. "When was the last time you used a piece of chalk to express yourself?" De Cicco Remu, a former teacher, asked the Georgia Straight by phone from Toronto. "Kids don't express themselves with chalk or in cursive. Kids text." Given the Microsoft Study Finds Technology Hurting Attention Spans story posted to Slashdot in the last few days it would seem that Redmond's Marketing and R&D people are at cross-purposes.

Comments

Stupid

[Karmashock]

chalkboards and whiteboards are entirely reasonable in lectures and are still used in modern settings in business all the time.

Go into a lot of meeting rooms and you're gong to find a whiteboard which is basically the same thing as a chalkboard.

This notion that you have to use technology for everything is goofy.. and frankly I suspect they might be trying to sell us something rather than giving good advice.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

No doubt, at my office, close to 100% of architectural design is done on whiteboards and later transferred to a digital document. Having just finished my time going back to school, all my homework had to be typed up to be handed in, so I always did it all with pen and paper and then again, transferred it to digital form after finishing. Computers are too structured to allow the free flow thinking needed to solve a problem. The only thing close to good enough is digital paper, where you have a stylus and a canvas that lets you write on it just like a piece of paper with a pen. But paying $500 to be a digital replacement for something the costs $1.50 doesn't really make much sense.

Just the latest iteration

[paiute]

Hammer salesman: See that problem? That's a nail. Over there? Another nail. Got a question? Nail.

Re:Salespeople making salespitch

[geekmux]

I've never considered the sales and marketing people to be the smartest part of any organisation. They have a limited scope of action and limited deliverables. Calling this out is right. I wonder if they also think children should stop learning maths as we all have calculators - or more likely that we all have calc.exe.

Might as well cull out arts and humanities too. Those have no place in the modern workforce because you know, Picasso painted with a real brush, and Shakespeare wrote on actual paper. No one expresses themselves with that shit anymore...

Probably better off

[Guy From V]

At least the lumber, plastic and ink industry don't collude with each other and the state or have a capitalist billionaire visionary with a crypto-communist penchant. As far as I know anyway.

Fair to whom?

[Required Snark]

Microsoft: "Spending money on paper, pencils, whiteboards, and physical books diverts an important revenue stream away from our bottom line. It's not fair."

To be even handed, Apple takes exactly the same position. To view a real clusterf--k, check out the FBI criminal investigation into iPad purchasing at the LA Unified School District.

Arrogance about a job you don't understand

[sjbe]

I've never considered the sales and marketing people to be the smartest part of any organisation.

Then you haven't actually tried to do what they do and certainly don't understand it. My guess is that you'd fail rather badly if you tried. Companies like Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble and the like didn't get to the size they are because they had idiots in the sales and marketing departments. I've worked directly with some of the marketing folks at Proctor and Gamble and they are exceptionally bright and very good at their job. Sure there are plenty of idiots out there too but saying all sales and marketing people are dumb is just as idiotic as saying all engineers are brilliant. Both statements are demonstrably false.

Re:Arrogance about a job you don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to make no distinction between "being a large company" and "being a benevolent company staffed by people who are not idiots"

I for one take exception to that and view the two as more-or-less mutually exclusive.

Re:Arrogance about a job you don't understand

[king neckbeard]

In all fairness, the sales and marketing folks just have to be smarter than the general public/potential customers (typically a low bar), and aren't always entirely honest. More importantly, their domain of expertise is not in how things actually work, but in how to sell something to someone, so paying them heed in regards to public policy is probably not wise.

Re:Arrogance about a job you don't understand

[bigtomrodney]

I am the OP and what I said was

They have a limited scope of action and limited deliverables.

Successful or not I was trying to call out the shortcomings of the role rather than the people working in it.

Every day I talk to project managers who probably do an excellent job meeting their deliverables and will be rated very well for doing so. Unfortunately what they do isn't the right thing but what they were asked to do. There's no reward for doing the right thing even if it's value-add. That same point is what I was trying to illustrate with my comment; the output seen here is the perfect manifestation of that kind of attitude.

When Technology Fails?

[DesertJazz]

I am a teacher that has been highly into technology as a hobby from growing up with computers around me. I consider myself to be very literate in technology - much more so than my fellow teachers most of the time. I've watched districts roll out technology as the savior of classrooms multiple times, and have shaken my head as the technology has failed due to poor understanding of the infrastructure needed to pull off the new 'greatest thing ever!' The fallacy here is related to the other article referenced, kids attention spans are shrinking. So are adults! Technology has some wonderful uses, but at times it's getting shoved into the classroom as the savior of education - when it's not necessarily.

Add to that what happens in the real world and you lose power from a major storm like we did Friday. Our IT department must not have everything properly isolated on UPS supplies or something, because it took all weekend and until late yesterday afternoon before they got our phone and internet system back up. Last I checked our Microsoft Exchange server is still down. If we depend totally on technology in situations like that we'll be even more out of luck. Our attendance systems were fun yesterday...

Learning != Consuming.

[taylorius]

Writing is not just about expression - it teaches fine motor control, attention, patience. To say it's obsolete would be laughable, if it wasn't such an utterly sinister proposition.

Re:Sales people do

[dimeglio]

It's not about what they know, it's about their credibility in opinions such as above. In this case, Microsoft is simply pushing their agenda instead of really looking out for students. I'm all for exposing kids to technology the right way. It's not about replacing chalk, pen, pencil and paper with electronics but using electronics where it makes sense.

Texting Maths

[Roger W Moore]

Actually, ironically, one of the best reasons to use pen and paper is for maths. It's rather hard to express matrices, vectors, integrals etc. in a text message. You need LaTeX and a graphical display and its a lot slower than pen and paper. An equation editor is even slower.

My kids use chalk all the time...

[Maxwell]

They draw dinosaurs, flowers, spiderman, farm animals, hopscotch, race tracks, cities. The driveway and sidewalk are fully engulfed my mid-spring and only 'reset's when it rains. Kids at play. With chalk. MSFT sales people are free to come by and observe.