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

Salespeople making salespitch

[bigtomrodney]

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.

Re:Salespeople making salespitch

[bigtomrodney]

When your brief is simply sell and your output is "Ah sure no one should use pens any more, buy our product" you can either stand over it or recognise the base nature of what you've done. Your argument about creativity really can't reasonably apply here. The output is by nature not of substantial creativity but rather the narrowly interpreted result of a functional requirement.

Re:Salespeople making salespitch

[Evtim]

Funny....today at work some colleagues with kids were discussing an article stating that you think better and remember better when you write by hand because it is more difficult in general [and slower] than typing. Broad analogy would be taking a photo with digital camera or an analogue one. When you can make hundreds of photo with minimal effort and cost you produce way more bad photos than when you know you just have 32 frames and that's that.

The discussion started because I quoted a statement from a book that poets need to carve in stone - then they WILL learn to say a lot with few words, which is what poetry is...

Horay for another wave of dumbing down of our kids and grand kids in the name of profit!

Re:Salespeople making salespitch

[samwichse]

"No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. I would certainly try the physics department or the music department first -- and after that biochemistry. Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that."

--Kurt Vonnegut

This is total nonsense

[eibhear]

It has been well established for many years now that both learning and using "cursive" writing (I know it as "joined" writing) is important for the development of young brains.

For example: http://davidsortino.blogs.pres...

This is irresponsible marketing, and with continuing cuts in education, stands a very good chance of not being challenged by educators before politicians base policy on it.

Mathematics, Pen, and Paper

[catchblue22]

Try to do calculus problems without pen and paper. Would Microsoft suggest using MS Word Equation Editor?! Just give me a minute while I swallow my vomit. Ok, I'm fine now.

I'm a LaTeX aficionado. I do quite a reasonable amount of math type-setting. I use LaTeX because the output looks amazing, and because I can use my keyboard alone, instead of having to click on menus and buttons. However, it is still an order of magnitude slower than good old fashioned hand-written problem solving.