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."

Comments

Not just for coding

[spectrokid]

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...

Re:Not just for coding

[laird]

There are companies that make systems that do this. But it takes a long time to make improvements in education in the field. One huge impediment in the US is that every state has its won curriculum and laws regulating what must be taught and how, and decisions are made in a very fragmented and political way (state, city, individual school) so the market is very fragmented with incredible friction, making it an extremely slow business to get improvements not just technically implemented but aligned to state requirements, and through the adoption process. And schools in the US are so test-driven that they typically punish teachers who veer from the approved curriculum and resources, so only a few of the best teachers are willing to try anything new or different. So while there are many people trying to innovate in education in the US, even an attempt requires investing millions of dollars of effort over many years.

While "no child left behind" might sound noble, the way it was written and funded, it's been incredibly destructive to education in the US. It's been tweaked to avoid complete destruction, but schools would be way better off if they were allowed to educate kids to their potential instead of just focusing on getting everyone to pass the test. Because schools now aren't rewarded for kids who excel, they're just punished for any kids who fail, so schools allocated resources to keeping a few kids from failing instead of maximizing educational outcome across all students.

Re:Not just for coding

[Roodvlees]

Plenty of US states are easily big enough to organize this. Bigger than most european countries. A factor is you've got christians holding everyone back because they are afraid the kids might learn something that will make them question their faith (science).

Re:Not just for coding

[Half-pint HAL]

Ah no.. the problem is the ignorant masses propagating the fallacious idea that science and religious faith are incompatible, and there are perhaps more such people among atheists than religious.

Re:Not just for coding

[multimediavt]

You mean like the Virginia Tech Math Emporium?

Math Emporium website if you want to contact them. I am sure the process could be adapted for K-12 without much difficulty.

Re:Not just for coding

[Roodvlees]

Actually the masses are buying the religious claims that they are compatible, including scientific institutions.
I agree they are compatible so long as you're willing to pretend your religion is bullshit when your science is concerned. But if you understand how the world really works, you might see the religious explanations for the iron age bullshit they are.

Remember it's easy to be wrong. Scientists have to jump through all kinds of hoops, like double blind studies, because they know they can't be trusted to not fool themselves. The point of the scientific method is to prevent fooling yourself and every technique that reliably leads to a correct understanding of the world has been accepted into science.

So what have you done to prevent fooling yourself?

Re:Not just for coding

[nbauman]

[anti-black racism ignored for now]

The second is a fear of testing. I'm pretty sure the top countries in education test heavily (at least Japan and South Korea do). Testing is the only way we know if children are learning anything. Heck, that's the only reason we know the U.S. ranks so poorly in education.

You don't understand testing.

The person who explains it best is Diane Ravitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . She used to be in the conservative camp, and the Wall Street Journal even gave her a regular op-ed column (because she was for charter schools and against unions). She was Assistant Secretary of Education under both HGW Bush and Bill Clinton. She started out believing in testing, but in the Department of Education, her job was to review all the data, and she saw that testing didn't work, so she changed her position.

One big problem with testing is that, as Ravitch found, the one factor that most strongly affects test scores is family income. The effect of family income was stronger than any effect of the teacher. A "bad" teacher with wealthy students will have better scores than a "good" teacher with low-income students.

If you judge teachers by their students' test results, you'll just reward teachers with wealthy students and punish teachers with poor students.

You seem to think that the tests under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are like the College Boards or the AP tests, where you just count up the right and wrong answers and give the student a score. They're not. First, they don't judge the teachers by student achievement, they judge teachers by improvement, the delta of achievement. Second, they have to "adjust" the tests for income, student age, and other factors.

They wind up with a formula to judge teachers. These formulas vary according to the test, but the New York Times had a story on the formula used in New York State, which was so complicated that the NYT couldn't find anybody who could explain it or claimed to understand it. These formulas are developed not by people working in the schools, but by private contractors, like Pearson and McGraw-Hill. Diane Ravitch keeps complaining that the private companies don't disclose their methods or supporting data, as an academic researcher would do, so nobody outside the companies can see whether they're doing it right.

Another big problem with testing is that they're not validated. Nobody knows what they're measuring, and whether it's something that kids really need to know. You could teach a course in which students were required to memorize the names of the components of a computer (like "power supply" and "resistor"), and make up a test to tell you how well they memorized the names. (I saw a course like that.) You could rank students and teachers by percentiles. But they wouldn't know anything useful about electronics or computers.

Another big problem is that the high-stakes tests fail standard statistical tests. If you were dealing with a medical treatment, you'd have to say that the results were not statistically significant. Most teachers have too few students for statistical significance. For example, the NYT gave the example of a new teacher in a junior high school whose students were doing very well in terms of science fair projects and getting into specialized schools like Bronx Science and Stuyversant, whose principal liked her and wanted to rehire her, perhaps permanently, but the principle couldn't rehire her because she did poorly in the high-stakes test. According to the formula, she was in the bottom 5% of teachers. However, the confidence interval of her score was between zero and 51%. So she was equally likely to be in the top half. Or in other words, her test score was statistically meaningless. But she had to be fired anyway. (If you don't know what a confidence interval is, then I can't explain the problem.)

You would do just as well if you fired a

Re:Not just for coding

[nbauman]

While "no child left behind" might sound noble, the way it was written and funded, it's been incredibly destructive to education in the US. It's been tweaked to avoid complete destruction, but schools would be way better off if they were allowed to educate kids to their potential instead of just focusing on getting everyone to pass the test. Because schools now aren't rewarded for kids who excel, they're just punished for any kids who fail, so schools allocated resources to keeping a few kids from failing instead of maximizing educational outcome across all students.

I always thought that the purpose of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top was to destroy the public education system and the teachers' unions.

A lot of this dates back to the "segregation academies" of the South. The former Confederate states traditionally had low funding for black schools (they got hand-me-down textbooks from the white schools, teachers who were paid less, etc.). One of the solutions (maybe not the best one) for equal education was to integrate the schools. Some states responded by closing down public schools entirely, and letting people who could afford it go to private schools. A lot of the privatization and charter school movement was driven by the goal of preserving white-only schools (sometimes with a few token blacks).

Re:Not just for coding

[nbauman]

A factor is you've got christians holding everyone back because they are afraid the kids might learn something that will make them question their faith (science).

Let's make it clear that this only applies to Christian extremists. Some Christians are nice, rational people. You wouldn't know they were Christians if they didn't tell you.

Re:Not just for coding

[hackwrench]

Your sig:

10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then

is relevant to the discussion and thanks to QB64 it still is, except since you didn't use a quote mark and THEN is a keyword it will give a THEN without IF error, some form of which most BASIC implementations will give.

Re:Not just for coding

[dbIII]

I'll add to that.
Three of the four people that debunked the "great flood" theory and laid the foundations for the science of geology were ordained. Funny how the first to truly show that the Earth was a lot older than 6000 years old were professional Christians. Then there is Mendel and Darwin. A very different league to speaking in tongues and lifting up serpents.
I have to admit being a bit biased against the extremists because a Pentacostal cult set up near me was mostly so the founder would have access to a lot of children to molest, as it turned out including his relatives - it was carefully hidden until his death. Another was an outright financial scam and the leaders are in jail. I know that Christianity-lite is not all like that, but it makes me a bit sceptical of motives.

Re:Not just for coding

[nbauman]

Well, presumably, the purpose of religion is to increase the founder's inclusive fitness.

http://gocomics.typepad.com/.a...

Re:Not just for coding

[Half-pint HAL]

Well I personally don't believe in any god or gods, but I know a lot of people who do, and during my life I've seen a shift in attitudes within the religious community. When I was young, most religious people were ignorant of science, and shrugged their shoulders about it. They didn't declare it wrong, or the deceitful work of the devil, or anything like that. They didn't refuse medicine because it was unnatural or "interfering with God's plan". But now most of the religious people I know who are ignorant of science (as opposed to those religious people I know with respectable degrees in the physical sciences) are explicitly anti-science. This is not down to their preachers, as the anti-science preachers are restricted to minority evangelic churches where I live. Here in Scotland we have protestant churches with a love of schooling, learning and academic rigour, which have always put knowledge of the universe as a part of knowing God (also part of the Catholic tradition, incidentally) and our faith schools teach Darwinism, not Creationism or Intelligent Design.

The drive against science can not, therefore, be explained as something from within the church, but must be from outside influence.

I personally do not care whether people believe in gods or not, but I do care about people rejecting science, and I'm sick of self-important atheists (many of whom know nothing of science) scaring religious people away from scientific enquiry.

Re:Not just for coding

[pnutjam]

Everybody in education who looks at the data knows this. It's not controversial among educators.

Actually, it's not controversial among anyone with a rational and intelligent mind.

The problem with everything is the lowest common denominator is too stupid not to poison the well. We have to find a way to stop them.

Re:Not just for coding

[pnutjam]

True story.

Re:Not just for coding

[Roodvlees]

What self-important atheists do that? Do you consider me one? Because I don't just accept flat religious assertions and actually try to take power away from religion so it'll do less damage? That's something some religious have been extremely frustrated about, calling it the 'new atheist'.

It seems to me religious are becoming more anti-science because they realize it makes their religion look more and more useless.

Re:Not just for coding

[Half-pint HAL]

What self-important atheists do that? Do you consider me one?

Yes, I do. Why? Because you interrupted a thread discussing a very soecific topic on education -- educational technology and adaptive learning - in order to preach (yes, preach) about how bad religion is. That's self-importance: "what I have to say is so important, it doesn't matter that it's off-topic. Listen to me!" If there is a debate to be had about the effect of religion on the content of school lessons (and there is), then have that debate elsewhere -- here we are discussing teaching methodologies. In this discussion there is no need to make enemies out of people based on ideologies that are completely orthogonal to the debate.

Because I don't just accept flat religious assertions and actually try to take power away from religion so it'll do less damage?

Your approach is counterproductive. If you want scientific enquiry properly taught at school level, you will need the support of the numerous parents who are religious. By presenting the teaching of science as being in opposition to religious power, you militate against your own goal. You are doing exactly what I said before: you are taking people who are merely ignorant of science and telling them to be anti-science. And the longer you do this, the higher your moral ground.

Or so it seems. In reality, it's just your horse.

Re:Not just for coding

[Roodvlees]

"Because you interrupted a thread discussing"
nope I responded to this:
"Ah no.. the problem is the ignorant masses propagating the fallacious idea that science and religious faith are incompatible"

"Your approach is counterproductive"
I think we can only make progress proportional to how non-religious those parents are. Maybe I piss them off, but trying to trick them into accepting science is not going to work. Even if I make lots of progress there, the next scientific discovery that threatens their religion leads to a much greater backlash (proportional to the strength of their beliefs).

If they choose the failure of religion http://www.skeptic.com/reading... over the success of science then that's their mistake. But since I think they are in conflict with each other I'm not going to pretend otherwise so I can temporarily get a few people to tolerate science.

I know I'm ambitious, but every bit of progress is valuable, it's not a big bang idea where someone has to lose faith completely.

Re:Not just for coding

[laird]

Nope.

The US uses mandatory standardized testing more than any other country, in part because our system is very fragmented, with states and districts both having sets of tests. The result is that our kids spend weeks in just testing, taking typically 20 state and district tests each year (on top of the usual in-class testing that's actually of educational value). Contrast with Finland, arguably the most effective educational system on the planet, with essentially no standardized testing throughout education - there's one test at the end of high school. Though what's worse than the testing itself (in the US) is that the No Children Left Behind punishes schools quite harshly for low test scores (cutting funding, cutting teacher salaries, forcing firing staff, etc.), which basically forces the schools to spend months on test preparation instead of education. And, of course, once you make a test 'high stakes' it's no longer valid as an education measurement, because the high stakes distorts the process. For example, in Texas where the high stakes testing started, it turned out that the "Texas Miracle" of amazing test store improvements turned out to be entirely due to fraud by the school systems, as they did things like doing paperwork pretending to transfer all of the bad students out of the "good" schools to one "bad" school, so almost all school scores went up, and only one "bad" school was punished for failing. And, of course, there was more obvious cheating, like the school systems in Texas that had the teachers "correct" all of the wrong answers on the test sheets before sending them to be scored. And as NCLB went national, so did the fraud. And not to justify fraud, of course, but when the law says that if your kids don't hit an impossibly high threshold on a test of no educational value you have to fire half the teachers, well, schools have a lot of pressure to do anything you have to in order to save the kids from having their school destroyed, because their primary responsibility is to educate the kids.

You're right that Japan's educational system is heavily testing-driven and high-pressure. That's starting to change, as the pressure leads to astoundingly high rates of suicide and other social problems, which they're starting realize is a bad sacrifice to make just for economic success.

As for the 'gang' stuff, and the rather racist 'ebonics' comment, that's wrong, too. The largest determinant of student performance is parental income. Kids of poor whites are as bad off as poor blacks - when both parents are working crappy jobs just to survive, and can't spend time engaged with their kids, the kids' education suffers, whether that's in Harlem or Appalachia.

Re:Not just for coding

[laird]

I think so, too.

I'm not sure about that

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Evidence

[sphealey]

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.

Re:Evidence

[JaredOfEuropa]

I think technology has a (major) role to play in education, but that doesn't mean that education has to be technology-based. We know that there are various ways to teach a kid, and any method in particular will work best only for certain kids. Same with the environment: some work best alone while others thrive in groups. Some need more help than others, some learn faster, some need discipline and planning while others learn fine on their own. And even in a school system where one can choose from a variety of school types to best suit their child, schools are still unable to really tailor the learning experience to the different kids that come to learn. That's where technology can play a role: enable the teacher to find out what kind of programme best suits each child, and enable the school to provide such tailored programmes without having to assign one tutor to every 5 kids.

Such tailored programmes may have e-learning and computerized tests, but it's only part of the curriculum, and certainly only part of the solution. We're not going to fix education by handing out iPads.

Re:Evidence

[anchovy_chekov]

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.

The same critique could be applied to business. There's a lot of "magical" thinking when it comes to technology - as opposed to reviewing outcomes empirically. I think the point of the original article was to re-examine our techno-fetishism. Sadly, I can't see it ever happening and as a consequence education will suffer, business will suffer and society will just roll along...

Real reform *should* come out an evidence-based approach. But when the key metrics being developed in education now (ala MOOCs) is more about how we can get more revenue out of the education sector - not better learning outcomes - it's unlikely to get traction.

I don't understand the specific complaint

[laird]

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.

Re:I don't understand the specific complaint

[atherophage]

Until the educators master computer technology all hope is lost. Most teachers in the district I work would be hard pressed to describe the difference between a USB cable and an Ethernet cable. What would a nation of expert coders look like? How many of these citizens would be impatient, diabetic, over weight and myopic; cheap to hire?

Re:I don't understand the specific complaint

[AHuxley]

The " can't innovate" part is a product of testing over decades.
Think of a bell curve of results and the real needs of worlds best advanced nation building R&D. Only so many really, really smart, expensive people are needed per year.
Testing can find them in public, low cost and expensive private schools. The test results then allow a nation to ensure only the best 10 % of skilled students get well funded top merit based university access. Further sorting of the top 10% gets even better results with scholarships, easy loans, grants, academic industry and government participation.
No real effort is allowed to be wasted on the lower 90% of students.
A lot of cash might be seen to be spent but the best is saved for the smartest few %. Guest workers and foreigners at a lower cost can fill the low and medium skills sets at a lower cost and have fewer rights and have a loss of legal documentation as a control factor.
The lessons of vast science education spending of the 1950-80's was well understood. A lot of average science, math graduates just makes for a lot of average academic workers and their average private sector jobs. On average smarter workers might also be tempted protest unsafe working conditions if they have some understanding about science.
Looks good on test result and international academic rankings but does not provide the worlds very best long term R&D for gov, mil and private sector.

Vast majority of "innovations" are worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Vast majority of "innovations" are worthless

[coop247]

Our science department has been using InterLACE to increase collaborative learning. I think they just moved to Visual Classrooms (http://visualclassrooms). They did some training on campus last year and it was still a research project at Tufts, now I believe its a real company. Basically it allows students to share ideas and the teacher to get a much better sense of the amount of contributions and interactions taking place when compared to the horrendous BlackBoard forums.

For sciences they have a lot of visual ways of sharing and comparing ideas and thinking. My students really like the way that it allows them to see how others approached a problem/lab, saves me time in that I dont have to explain as much.

Re:Vast majority of "innovations" are worthless

[phaggood]

When I was a teacher I absolutely LOVED my clickers - quick quizzes after important lessons; instant feedback, it was SO worth the effort.

Re:Vast majority of "innovations" are worthless

[tom_neutrino]

After 30 years of teaching university physics, I have noticed the slow slide in ability to work with numbers among those fresh out of high school. (Heck, even college seniors.) They are crippled by calculators. My kids were required to have graphing calculators in high school --- what a joke! All they learned was how to punch a sequence of keys. And yet the math teachers loved it because it FELT like they were somehow cutting edge and really doing some good. HS graduates would be much more "numerate" if we just banned calculators from math classes in the public schools. This opinion is shared by many of my colleagues. (I have not done a real study of their opinions, so I won't say "most".)

too much emphasis on vocational skill too early

[ihtoit]

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.

Re:too much emphasis on vocational skill too early

[fermion]

How much reading and writing is necessary for an average person to succeed. Donal Trump speaks at an elementary school level. I my self have a terrible time with handwriting, and if weren't for computers I would not even have a job.

I also went through school during the 80's, the difference is that I did not learn specific programs because there were no dominant programs. So as a young student I learned to copy basic using a teletype and make it work, then I learned fortant on mainframe and to do shape tables and write papers and spreadsheets on a Apple II, and program an EEPROM copying prewritten assembly. When MS Excel came out my skills allowed me quickly learn it and get a good paying job. I learned whatever text editor or word processor I needed. I learned Pagemaker. Of course by 1990 MS Office had become dominant, so people learned an office suite, not how to use the computer.

I really don't know how anyone thinks that kids can make a living now without have deeply embedded basic computer skills that are taught from a young age. I don't mean how to use a program, but that computers are not magic and when we press a key a number of programmed routines are run to make things happen. So making a turtle move or a princess move or a robot move is teaching the kid or president how computers work, just like having kids play with toy hammers and screws teaches the kid concretely how things are put together,.

OTOH, a big problem is that computer education is not started early so we never get to the abstract stuff. We still test kids to see if they can use MS Office in a very concrete way, such as which function key starts the presentation, and then congratulate them that can do the work of a 10 year old. I know few schools that require a student to know the three or four top office suites, and be able to do real work in all of them.

In fact, this is the same problem we have with reading. So much time is spent on decoding and vocabulary, so little on whole reading. This means that the student gets trained to spend all their metal capacity on the words, and never learns to abstract to sentence, paragraphs, and structure. Reading, and actually knowing how to use a computer, is hard. A decent elementary school should be laying concrete scaffolding. A decent high school should be abstracting that to a useful skill. That way we are not teaching kids for their first minimum wage job, but for their fist middle class job when they are in their mid twenties, or for college that will increase the chance that they will have the skills to be successful when age discrimination sets in at 40.

Re:too much emphasis on vocational skill too early

[tlambert]

How much reading and writing is necessary for an average person to succeed. Donal Trump speaks at an elementary school level.

This is actually a valuable political and business skill. It's called "being able to speak to your audience", and it's fundamental to being able to communicate your point to people at that skill level themselves. Reagan had this same skill, as did Kennedy. You will find that all the people we consider "great orators" had this skill. Jimmy Carter, to a lesser degree (or he would have had a second term); surely people remember his "I want to be your president, because I like you". Mr. Rogers level dialogue.

I personally found both Ross Perot, and later, Steve Forbes, both intelligent and insightful about the problems we face as a nation, and they laid out their plans in great detail. But they both talked well over most of their audience's heads, which rendered them complete unelectable.

I don't know anyone in the Democratic field at this point who has a similar skill set to Trump. Perhaps Bernie Sanders. Definitely not Hilary Clinton.

Do not underestimate the value of speaking to your audience.

Re:too much emphasis on vocational skill too early

[dbIII]

I don't know anyone in the Democratic field at this point who has a similar skill set to Trump

I don't know anyone out of jail who has a similar skill set to Trump. The difference between him and them is powerful friends who kept the dogs off while he stole.

Re:too much emphasis on vocational skill too early

[cwsumner]

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 ...

Reading -is- a vocational skill.
IoT is not, and might never be, except in specialized jobs.

Re:too much emphasis on vocational skill too early

[cwsumner]

... I don't know anyone out of jail who has a similar skill set to Trump. ...

To quote a very old phrase:
"A compenent crook will do less damage than an incompetent idealist!"

This shouldn't really be a surprise

[rsilvergun]

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...

Many Ed Tech Innovations are Indoctrination

[starworks5]

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.

Re:Many Ed Tech Innovations are Indoctrination

[tom_neutrino]

My daughter teaches in the state of Washington; There, they mandate testing via computers, I suppose for "efficiency" and because Bill Gates generously and altruistically gave them lots of computers. So what happens? They only have enough computer stations to test 1/3 of the students at a time. So for a period of 3 weeks each semester, 1/3 of my daughter's students are missing -- a difference 1/3 each week. Students are losing a huge amount of learning time taking these mostly meaningless tests. In Denmark, they don't even test grade-school students at all some years, and they out-learn our students by every measure. Their teachers are free to teach, and free from teaching to the test. It gets worse. The State of Washington's solution to increasing teacher competency is not to pay them better or increase the rigor of teacher training in the universities. It is to recently mandate that all teachers pass National Board Certification every 5 years. My daughter says that amounts to doing a master's thesis every five years. I am not opposed to lots of education for teachers -- I have a Ph.D in physics -- but this is just nuts. Washington's non-elected apparatchiks have apparently been taking advantage of that state's easy access to weed. They will only succeed in driving talented teachers out of education altogether, and leave behind those who really don't care but like the security and benefits.

Ed Tech Critic

[argStyopa]

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.

Re:Ed Tech Critic

[whh3]

In the same way that dropping 100s (or 1000s) of OLPCs into Africa was not an ED TECH program.

There is nothing wrong with "ed tech" per se...

[jpellino]

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?

Early Education Technology research at New America

[whh3]

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.