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Is There an Ed-Tech Critic In the House?
theodp writes: Educational technology has been stuck for awhile, laments Hack Education's Audrey Watters in And So, Without Ed-Tech Criticism... (an accompanying 1984 photo of Watters making a LOGO turtle draw a square looks little different than President Obama 'learning to code' 30+ years later by making a Disney Princess draw a square). "We might consider why we're still at the point of having to make a case for ed-tech criticism," writes Watters. "It's particularly necessary as we see funding flood into ed-tech, as we see policies about testing dictate the rationale for adopting devices, as we see the technology industry shape a conversation about 'code' — a conversation that focuses on money and prestige but not on thinking, learning. Computer criticism can — and must — be about analysis and action."
That's the wrong way to use it,
There are many places where it is hard to find good math / STEM teachers. Here in Denmark, my kids make some of their math homework on a website, but it could be SOOO much better. A website which adapts it speed to the pupil, and turns out a nice daily report for the teacher showing where he needs to put focus in class... School is definitely THE area where automation is still in its infancy...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I haven't found this to be true. What I find is complete chaos. The University I work at and others I have been at are a mess, where everyone gets to do anything they want, and then we have to support it. So, it's great for learning just about any technology, but a terrible group to manage.
We could start with some evidence that tech per se is necessary to or improves education [*]. Education methods developed around 600 BC (if not borrowed from earlier times) have been pretty successful across many times, places, and cultures in the 2600 years since; post-1970 "electronic learning" beginning with PLATO has not proven very successful, or even at all. Oddly however the "metrics" so beloved of "reformers" today doesn't seem to apply to technology-based education attempts.
sPh
* other than education in that particular sub-area of technology, although even there deeper education in more fundamental principles often proves superior to narrowly focused training.
Giving someone control over a "turtle" and commanding it to draw shapes is a great way to introduce to the idea of programming, because it's simple, visual, and fairly intuitive. That's true whether it was kids in the 90s or the President in the 10s.
There's lots of innovation in education. The problem is that it's only possible (in the US) outside of typical school settings, so it's research or on the internet. The schools are all heavily regulated to the point where they can't innovate, or even allow individual teachers to innovate, until the "innovation" makes its way through a fragmented, highly political, expensive approval process.
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He spends a good amount of time bemoaning how people misunderstand him and how it's totally their own fault. This very long stream of words takes a while to get to his fairly straightforward point 'ed tech is incomplete without understanding the wider human context of it all'. The submitter interprets that to mean that it's silly how LOGO and the 'hour of code' get to roughly the same place 30 years later, but I don't think that's what the article is about. Others have started to interpret his stance as being that technology is senselessly pervasive in education, despite the author in this writing very clearly stating that is *not* what he is saying.
Of course I think his perspective is a tad off compared to the larger context. In technology (in his space specifically the advent of modern computing) there is of course areas where that wider context of humanity is relevant, much of the content produced in that realm is an expression of something akin to a film or literary work. Obviously the richest end of that would be gaming, which takes advantage of the medium to drive ways of consuming that are more a two way street than previous medium allowed. There's also room to explore how it changed human dialog by having internationally accessible forums for discussions organized around the subject material. Exploring these, however, is not synonymous with learning to code.
However, he seems to take issue with the whole of computing not being explicitly augmented by philosophical/historical context. By that argument, he should be disappointed that shop class does not go into the humanities context of a saw. Literary criticism does not talk about the physical mechanics of a book, it concerns itself with the words delivered by the book, and doesn't care about all books. If a work is delivered on a screen or prnted paper, it doesn't change the nature of literary criticism. On the other hand, if I were going into the business of designing a phone book, literary criticism has nothing at all to do with it. Education around the technology itself is like shop class. There are opportunities to integrate the humanities context of exisiting humanities curriculum. Shop class teaches about the practical use of the tool to do what you want, history class teaches about evolution of tools and how it shaped human culture when there was a large impact (e.g. agricultural tools changing society away from nomadic). The two need have little to do with each other. You don't need to understand how to use a plow to understand why and how it changed the world. You don't need to know about how and why it changed the world to use it on your fields.
Humanities are important for having well rounded individuals who may have the opportunity to improve the human condition or avert a repeat of past mistakes. However that does not mean it has to be fully integrated moreso into computing education than it should any other field. Argue that humanities isn't integrated into *everything* if you wish, but don't consider computing technology to be separate from everything else.
https://youtu.be/6i_xjqHPcok
While I can't speak to K-12, in my 15 years as a physics professor at a research university, the following ed-tech innovations been geninely and significantly helpful to me as a teacher:
Moodle/Blackboard (for distributing things like problem set solutions)
Powerpoint and digital projectors (for giving lectures)
Spreadsheets (for calculating grades)
Email (for communicating with students)
And that's pretty much it. Everything else is overhyped garbage -- the prepackaged physics apps and demos people are constantly trying to sell me most of all.
And don't even get me started on clickers.
Given the greater-than-zero proportion of high school leavers particularly in the US who can't even READ, should we not instead of shoving IoT down their throats and packing them off to summer camp with DFE-subsidised wirelessed-to-buggery tablets, why not fall back on that method that's worked for the past few millennia: pencil and parchment, all eyes front and let's bring back cursive practice.
I went to school through the 1980s (I left high school in 1991) and would be shocked to hear of any of my grade peers not being able to write their own name. This years' outgoing are cumulatively worse than last years'. I would be pleasantly surprised to hear of a single one who could count higher than ten without breaking out the Hello Kitty calculator app. I might sound like a forty year old fart saying this but I don't give a fuck: kids these days are fucking retards. Take away the batteries and they would fucking starve to death.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I know a lot of folks aren't going to like hearing this, but Basic Research (e.g. the expensive groundwork stuff) is almost exclusively done by central governments.Then businesses move in, do a few quick studies to figure out which of the 3 dozen or so studies can be made profitable in less than 10 years and go from there. I've heard that in the Bell Labs day this wasn't true, but it's certainly true today.
Well, we've been cutting education funding world wide (with the exception of a Germany & a few Icelandic states) for 30 years. There are consequences...
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A friend of mine named Seattle for Truth has been doing research into the ED tech craze, in addition I have been involved with education because my wife is an educator, It appears that ED tech has a deleterious effect of both reducing attention spans, in addition to indoctrinating children to think with feelings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i_xjqHPcok
There is a saying that whomever controls your eyes controls your mind, and in the case of Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, they call games as ideal methods of modeling behavior, by essentially getting the participants to model the behavior they want via mirror neurons.
Can I get a summary of this article? I read the first couple paragraphs, and after nothing of importance was said, I started scanning, then closed it.
I saw: "I didn't put in the effort so I'm still bitter".
I went to a christian school. So we had enough cash to buy 1 computer for every student.
One of the requirements in the 80s was to have taken programming.
Out of the class of 60 people I would say 3 ever did anything with it. One of those 3 is an 'IT guy'.
That was 3 years of computer classes for all of those people.
Nice thing was once I got to college I could test out of many of the classes and made a nice career of it. But most of my fellow students, 1 did not get it at all 2 never did anything else with it.
My point? Not everyone wants to be a programmer. Even the ones who do may not be any good at it. Even in my class of 60 only a few 'liked it' and even fewer could actually do it.
Hell, I'd be delighted if someone would simply tell admins that buying 10,000 fucking ipads and handing them to kids isn't a ED TECH program, it's an entertainment program, or a white wash, or a corrupt-kickback program, but in no sense is handing out such - without a deeply thought-through and integrated curriculum to back it up - an "educational" program.
-Styopa
It's "a while", TWO words, in this context. Idiots.
This is slashdot - there's an EVERYTHING critic in the house somewhere.
OK, so I'm old and all I can see is you youngin's on my lawn. But when I was a kid in school, they taught us to read and write and spell and think. The real thinking part came when I was taking courses like physics in high school. The idea of computers was introduced as an example when I was a kid reading a grade 6 textbook (the computer looked like a giant machine with 3 big dials on it, with paper going in and paper coming out). About 1976 calculators (TI30 calculators) that were more than just add, subtract, multiply and divide came out. They were a marvel. When they shut down this little floating dot would go across the screen (like the thing below the visor screen on the original Star Trek). By the time high school came around you could buy cheap computers (timex sinclair 1000's) for about $50, and for another $50 you could buy an extra 16k memory pack (and yes k, not M or G or T, but k). Very soon after I had an Amiga 1000 with 2MB of ram. Its been computers continually since (I haven't updated in at least 5 years, but its a Corei7 with 12GB of ram). The point is, I programmed them all, its all similar to the first $50 machine. In the mean time I've designed them, built them (logic gate circuits to chips on up), and if I were starting over, it would all be the same. You have to start by making little squares and showing how different things work. Take a small working example, build on it. Introduce new, add to what you know and move on. No one is born with a fully fleshed out CV. There was a first note for Beethoven, a first plucked string for Eric Clapton, a first brush stroke for Michelangelo. And it probably looked like most first brush strokes. Time might have moved, but beginners are always beginners.
there is plenty wrong with educational institutions who don't have a road map. Here are two reasons for that: First, much of IT is a black box, so it's not as simple as looking at an old school procedural(ish) language program (BASIC, LOGO, HyperTalk, etc.). Current high-level languages are (cue the barrage of comments here) obtuse upon initial inspection by learners, so people who need to learn are put off and people who already know how to do this are dismissive of just about every effort to simplify this and provide a lower floor to entry. Second, much of what is in the education pipeline for professional IT is for better or worse vendor-linked. You can be an Apple dev, or you can go MCPD or Cisco cert... etc. There is less abstraction of programming as a skill and you have to join a camp soon. Yes, AP is still Java, but watch the trashing of Java that happens here... Tech runs in dog years. There will be several generations of tech by the time a student gets from middle school through college and gets a job. Imagine the last 100 years of biology telescoped into less than a decade, then have students trying to learn it as it's changing. Compound that by educators are usually not IT professionals, and there isn't much of a connection between the two at the early levels. How many IT professionals are linked to an elementary or middle school?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
And make peanut butter sandwiches and a nice hot bowl of soup.
There are a great group of "critics" working on this exact topic at New America:
http://www.edcentral.org/learningtech/
They are specifically focused on the use of technology in early education, but I think that their reports will showcase a need for deeper thinking about the use of technology at all levels of education.
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TFA makes a very good point. In talking about education technology we need to eliminate technocentrism. The mantra should not be 'learn to code' as if there is something innately right or correct about learning to code when it comes to primary education. Hell, I was computer illiterate before college, but many people reading this have probably used hardware or software I helped develop.
Or as the author says, "computer criticism can – and must – be about analysis and action. Critical thinking must work alongside critical pedagogical and technological practices. 'Coding to learn' if you want to start there; or more simply, 'learn by making.' "
That said, the author's writing style is horrible.