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Children Learn Best When Their Bodies Are Engaged in the Living World. We Must Resist the Ideology of Screen-Based Learning (aeon.co)
Nicholas Tampio, associate professor of political science at Fordham University in New York, writing for Aeon magazine: As a parent, it is obvious that children learn more when they engage their entire body in a meaningful experience than when they sit at a computer. If you doubt this, just observe children watching an activity on a screen and then doing the same activity for themselves. They are much more engaged riding a horse than watching a video about it, playing a sport with their whole bodies rather than a simulated version of it in an online game.
Today, however, many powerful people are pushing for children to spend more time in front of computer screens, not less. Philanthropists such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have contributed millions of dollars to 'personal learning', a term that describes children working by themselves on computers, and Laurene Powell Jobs has bankrolled the XQ Super School project to use technology to 'transcend the confines of traditional teaching methodologies'. Policymakers such as the US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos call personalised learning 'one of the most promising developments in K-12 education', and Rhode Island has announced a statewide personalised learning push for all public school students. Think tanks such as the Brookings Institution recommend that Latin-American countries build 'massive e-learning hubs that reach millions'. School administrators tout the advantages of giving all students, including those at kindergarten, personal computers.
Many adults appreciate the power of computers and the internet, and think that children should have access to them as soon as possible. Yet screen learning displaces other, more tactile ways to discover the world. Human beings learn with their eyes, yes, but also their ears, nose, mouth, skin, heart, hands, feet. The more time kids spend on computers, the less time they have to go on field trips, build model airplanes, have recess, hold a book in their hands, or talk with teachers and friends. In the 21st century, schools should not get with the times, as it were, and place children on computers for even more of their days. Instead, schools should provide children with rich experiences that engage their entire bodies.
Today, however, many powerful people are pushing for children to spend more time in front of computer screens, not less. Philanthropists such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have contributed millions of dollars to 'personal learning', a term that describes children working by themselves on computers, and Laurene Powell Jobs has bankrolled the XQ Super School project to use technology to 'transcend the confines of traditional teaching methodologies'. Policymakers such as the US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos call personalised learning 'one of the most promising developments in K-12 education', and Rhode Island has announced a statewide personalised learning push for all public school students. Think tanks such as the Brookings Institution recommend that Latin-American countries build 'massive e-learning hubs that reach millions'. School administrators tout the advantages of giving all students, including those at kindergarten, personal computers.
Many adults appreciate the power of computers and the internet, and think that children should have access to them as soon as possible. Yet screen learning displaces other, more tactile ways to discover the world. Human beings learn with their eyes, yes, but also their ears, nose, mouth, skin, heart, hands, feet. The more time kids spend on computers, the less time they have to go on field trips, build model airplanes, have recess, hold a book in their hands, or talk with teachers and friends. In the 21st century, schools should not get with the times, as it were, and place children on computers for even more of their days. Instead, schools should provide children with rich experiences that engage their entire bodies.
See fox news isn't the best source.
Let's start there. Healthy physical and mental development isn't achieved by sitting in school. 4 hours school until puberty, then no more than 6 hours, no homework. The times when the economy had use for obedient worker drones are coming to an end, let's raise healthy children instead.
If the learning is about a real world activity, it makes sense to practice it in the real world, in order to develop competencies. If the activity is about something on a computer, such as laying to program, then it makes sense to practice it, not simply read and watch videos about the subject.
Albeit it has been brought to my attention in the context of how boys differ in how they learn best compared to girls, this is nonetheless not news.
And I think it makes a lot of sense, too. The concept of being told how to do something to achieve a not really desired, made-up goal is comparably new.
Don't get me wrong, this kind of learning has enabled us to broaden our minds beyond the immediate, has made us much more versatile, but I think it's easy to guess that this is hard on our still very animalistic brains.
Seeing an outcome you actually desire come together will give much more satisfaction. The tangibility draws you in more, I think.
It does make sense for every person to craft something from time to time. Or at the very least do some fixing around the house. At least in me, it also tends to give me a greater sense of accomplishment compared to let's say building a "cloud" for a client.
I might not even necessarily disagree, but "it's obvious" DOESN'T CUT IT, when you're debating a controversial topic, and neither does being a professor of political science who seems to think that having national education standards is evil and will destroy democracy as we know it.
How do we want them to learn - best, fastest, broadest, deepest, other?
What is most important is the we maintain a free system that uses many methodologies so that we don't create a learning style monoculture and then find out 30 years down the road that we missed something and some other country left us in the dust because their kids were better prepared for the new world. Not everyone has to learn the same way and end up with the same skills. In fact, it is much, much better if they don't. Diversity is necessary for any complex system to remain healthy and resilient.
I have a two year old who is very adept with her computer and spends much of the day watching learning shows (not youtube, but Amazon's much more heavily curated set of apps and videos for kids). So far, her breadth appears to be amazing. It could not have been achieved with toys and physical experiences. We simply don't have enough rooms for all the toys and puzzles that would be necessary or time for several trips to places every day.
Doing something yourself teaches you more about it than reading about it? Who would have thought...
So let's put little Johnny behind the wheel of that SUV, I'm pretty sure driving is more sensible for him than watching a destruction derby on the screen.
But seriously now. That's not even close to being the problem. The problem is that children want to learn. They come into the world as little information sponges. They want to know everything. You have one simple job: Not killing that willingness to learn.
We usually fail. No later than when we stuff them into schools. Quite frankly, so far school has managed to kill that willingness to learn in everyone.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You mean meatballs? As owners we do not need other meatballs. If all is automated there will be lot of unnecessary meatballs. In fact there are already too many on this planet. OC the belief that as soon as certain number is reached the lord of darkness will switch off the light as club of rome proposed was silly. I suppose dinos did not die in a moment a stone fell on yukatan either and this was much more violent and thus very fast event. As for meatballs like me and author - yes it would be nice to live in peace and prosperity but that is possible only for some of us in certain rather narrowly defined set of conditions.
Sounds like solid science-based evidence to me.
So we should, say, combine maths with interpretive dance? Computer programming with tae-kwon-do? And so on?
We already disconnect the learning environment from the "living world". This is why classrooms look roughly the same world over. And yeah, classroom learning is demonstrably not effective for a subset of children.
Yeah right.
What an immersive embodied being-in-the-world experience must it be to hold a book instead of a screen. I'm sure children learn much better if all the texts they have access to are linear, unsearchable and without hyperlinks. It is certainly a better exercise for your vocabulary memory if to look up a word, you need to wait for the library to open, pull heavy dictionaries out of high shelves, and spend minutes finding the relevant entries. We had it so much better than these poor kids these days that have everything at their fingertips but aren't allowed to truly comprehend in the Latin sense.
(Not.)
I've never stargazed, or had a course on astronomy.
All I know about stars I know from the Internet, Books and YouTube.
Same with programming.
It's all about balance. But screens certainly have their place.
I remember having to read silently most of the time instead. When this change occurred over time, was it due to solid evidence that silent reading improves comprehension, or simply laziness because it's easier to ask children to read silently instead of asking for volunteers?
You just spent too much time watching videos of typing on a phone keyboard, and not enough of the wholistic actual typing on a phone keyboard as previous generations had to do. You need to engage your whole body in the living world experience.
So if we take a horse and equipment, put them next to the child without giving any instructions, the kid will learn more about riding than watching a video about it?
I somewhat doubt that. I assume that you want to put a personal educator into the picture also who gives instructions about how to use the equipment and how to actually ride. Of course the kid might learn via trial and error, but I think it would be much faster just watching a video.
Why is this personal instructor important? Because it costs money, as do horses and equipment. If money is not an issue, we can have personal teacher for every student and a lot of equipment also. Reality is that at school you don't necessarily have even enough money for extra pencils.
So what the article is really saying is: If we have infinite financial resources, teaching can be more efficient.
"Knowledge flows from a student's eyes and ears, to the fingers, to the pen, to the paper, to the brain." Even a little physical motion of writing improves engagement so much beyond passively reading.
Please, stop calling Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg "philantropists". If you do need an old Greek term to sound smart, please use "philargyrists".
As it patently obvious, schools do not do much by way of immersive learning, because it's not an efficient method of learning, say, history. Or maths. These fears of technology are as overblown as the promises that others make. Obviously, what makes most sense is to use a range of pedagogical styles, tailored to the needs of the student, the nature of the subject etc.
And incidentally, screens can actually be used to engage in the real world for learning, and can make for much *more* immersive experiences than traditional methods.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In the real world, the choice is often between a bored and angry public school teacher barely out of the rubber room droning on for hours in a classroom full of other dysfunctional kids high on amphetamines vs "screen-based learning". Neither of those is "best", but one may well be a lot better than the other. Guess which one?
of course there is some truth in what this writer is saying, but at the same time, it discounts loads of people that learned loads of things from nothing more than reading it in books, self-educating themselves for many centuries. I'm sure he didn't even consider that aspect because fundamentally his position is just a contrarian luddite who's real goal is to wax nostalgic over the good old days and bemoan how terrible the modern world is. He tries to compare and contrast some idyllic ideal that most people didn't get in practice with the actual what-is.
When the reality is that the modern world is undeniably better than it was in numerous ways.
To test the hypothesis I learned skydiving on youtube. Whether it works we'll know in about 1½ minute...
-- Make America hate again!
That's why kids need to be working from an early age. There's nothing like getting out there when you're two or three and getting it done. Put them out in the fields, in the mines, in the factories, and let them experience the world early and often. Keeping them cooped up is not only unnatural, it's unhealthy.
I would recommend the following talk about Education: https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_... ("Changing Education Paradigms" from Sir Ken Robinson)
No... you need to do something Original "GOD"... that is the mark of guts, genius, and basically balls!
Any ASSHOLE can become an expert "USER" ... "God"...
& when it comes down to it? From what I see?? It's all you are... a user, consumer, bullshitter... but NO PRODUCER!
So FUCK YOU ALL you lame ass bunch of weasels...
LOL
APK
Shut the fuck up.
Great...
Look, no offense... just turning folks onto something good is all!
* Sheesh!
APK
P.S.=> You shouldn't swear, makes you look less intelligent... apk
Duh... Time spent doing teaches you more than reading about it. News at 11.
And in further news "books" that are smart, and change, are better than static ones. And they can add multisense output (sound, touch feedback, and sight).
Where online learning has gone wrong is the same as where tech breaks lots of things. Developers and technologists thinking they know better than the enormous amount of knowledge and experience already gained in the domain (except they call it "disruption") and higher-management seeing the tech purely as a way of reducing costs by replacing people and physical resource (in this case, teachers and classrooms) with online.
There is some really good learning out there which blends tech and classroom-based modes, reducing costs and increasing the richness, accessibility and availability. There is also a lot of shit where learners are chucked cheap videos and wanky click-through tutorials with badly-designed multiple choice questions for "feedback."
computers/tablets can be a great learning tool, it just depends on how you use them.
they can replace lecture books and greatly enhance on them because they can be made interactive and have various types of media etc.
even for more practical lessons watching a video, for example, is a great introduction if it is combined with actually doing it afterwards.
when i need to do something i haven't done before, i look up several video's on yt to get a general idea and know what to expect before i go on and do it myself.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Talking about living world interactions, there is no other class engaging with full body movements as PE in K-12 schools. But, PE sucks. There is no teaching of sports, e.g. baseball, or soccer, or gymnastics, etc. There is no teaching of basic skills in running, or jumping, or throwing.
^(oo)^pig~
Got a lot of justified criticism, because when you dissect a real animal, you learn the difference between the idealized diagrams in books and in this case computer programs, and the real thing. It's very educational, and an essential thing for most healthcare workers to learn sometime or another. Also useful if your path ends up being biology or biomedicine research.
I'd be willing to teach the coeds real world application of this topic.
Computers have a very basic problem. You are presented with a 2D screen that is popularly presented as this panacea but even with your ability to do so much with it, it is falls very short in some basic ways. Your brain, visual system, body, in fact everything about you is evolved to operate in a 3D world. Your thoughts, even dreams, are in 3D.
A perfect example is how a 2D screen falls short for a task it was obviously designed for: The simple task of reading. Billions of people read off of billions of screens every day. But you can read faster and more effectively from a book. Most people's knee jerk reaction rebels against this idea but a simple speed reading test will confirm it and the reason makes sense once you look at it.
A book is a real 3D object. The text is laid out on a somewhat flat page but even the page is a 3D object. Your brain and visual systems are specifically designed to deal with observing and manipulating it. It has no resolution limitations. Your eyes scan across it exactly in the way they were meant to interpret the world instead of having to deal with the serious limitation of 'scrolling'.
As you go from page to page you are manipulating and processing a natural 3d real world object. An easy example of the power of this is to grab a magazine at random that you haven't looked at. Take 20 seconds and flip from one end to the other quickly. You will have some idea of what content is in the magazine.
- Now try the same exercise with a PDF of a magazine. You won't pick up hardly any impression because it isn't displayed in a way your brain is designed to deal with.
Another simple example is look at all the research showing how physical activity slows the onset of Alzheimers and dementia. These are purely mental conditions but the fact that our brains are primarily designed to deal with the physical world means that moving through the physical world exercises our mental functions even though we aren't consciously aware of it.
Over reliance on computers has actually harmful effects but it is really really easy to do. Here is a basic truth: Any time you automate a human's ability the human will lose that ability. The quickest example is the contacts in your phone. How many phone numbers do you know for your friends and family? Probably at most 2 or 3 and 5 would be pretty extreme. 20+ years ago your average competent adult would know at least 20 phone numbers and many would know a lot more than that. They would also know the complete street address with zipcode to a number of those.
People can't add and multiply in their heads anywhere as well as they could 20 years ago. They can't even apply critical thinking as well as they could a generation ago. (Which partly explains why huge portions of an "educated" populous can be dragged around by their noses by click bait viral "news".)
To go more directly to the point of the article, it is well known that multi sensory teaching techniques are more effective. For people with more difficulty learning multi sensory teaching methods can be the only effective method to get results. For much more information on this look into IMSLEC and their various member organizations.
Computers aren't evil. They are just a tool like a stapler. Use them but at least do it with your eyes open.
Seriously, why are we reading this? You have a random professor who's written nothing more than an editorial which, while it may sound like common sense, provides no evidence to back up his comments. This is not news.
Just another day in Paradise
Like it or not, the future of education is Virtual Reality. The better it gets, the more real the brain feels it is, and putting every kid in a headset will always be cheaper and more effective than constant field trips. Plus, the number of immersive environments and subjects that can be taught this way are endless.
My field is psychology, and the research being done backs up the statement that students learn as well, or better, in a virtual reality system compared to a typical classroom.
So we should teach our kids to code with braille printers?
Build a couple of amps to integrate the equation.
As such, *always* look for the politics in what he's saying not any empathy or altruism.
I'm sorry. It's the meds. You can see by the post time it was early and the off the wall hostility that they hadn't kicked in yet.
I try. I really do. But it's hard.
APK
Other things are or have been obvious to parents, such as cold causes cold, carrots help you see in the dark, etc. Where is the peer-reviewed evidence that engaging the whole body is better for learning outcomes?
This isn't a study or an expert opinion, this is one parent who wrote an essay for a digital publication that accepts anything. This should be presented as "One parent believes this..." instead of titling it as if it's some scientific conclusion. This is not news, it is nothing and should be treated as nothing.
If you really want to understand what it was like for Vasco da Gama to voyage across the sea, you need a wooden ship, a cloth sail, and a couple years. Of *course* learning by doing is preferred. But we've agreed, out of necessity, that learning by reading is the next best thing. And digital text books improve the reading experience in every way. Mark Twain said "A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way." But he wasn't suggesting it.
Articles like this have been reporting on children's need for more visceral, hands-on learning for decades. You can go back to the 19th century, before teaching was professionalised, to find plenty of exponents of learning in and from nature. None of this is new. Then out come education 'experts' who've never taught a day in their lives, studied education, or have read any actual research on it, and tell us everyone's doing it all wrong. Yes, computers are a terrible idea in all but a narrow range of learning objectives and edtech is driven more by venture capital than education research and the learning sciences. Asking Silicon Valley to do education is like asking McDonald's to do nutrition.
Except the old way of doing things was book learning and not some sort of full body learning.
When flight simulators were first invented, instructors thought that they were useless because nothing can replace actual flight hours. What they didn't realize was that since simulator time costs something like 1% of what actual stick time costs, you can get tons of experience before even getting into the pilot's seat. Nowadays you wouldn't think of flying a new aircraft without flying it in a simulator first.
So even though nothing will replace that actual scalpel experience on a real frog, you can get lots more useful experience dissecting a dozen different virtual frogs with interesting conditions.
dom
You mean, several hundred thousand years of hominid evolution in the natural world, wasn't a key indicator?
We've only had 'screen-learning', what, a few decades at most? Sure. That's clearly the better environment.... /s
Unfortunately, horseriding isn't an fundamental skill that children meed to learn. Please elaborate on how you plan to have children engage their bodies in the process of learning how to read, write, do basic arithmetic, do basic research to find answers to questions (and we desperately need that last one taught more thoroughly). Those are the types skills children actually need to learn in order to be successful, after all, so that's where we need to focus on improving the teaching methods.
"it's obvious" DOESN'T CUT IT, when you're debating a controversial topic
This is exactly correct because it's not just a controversial topic it is also a highly complex topic. For example, it is extremely "obvious" to me that my son is far more engaged in front of a screen learning to program than he was going around several European cities on holiday this summer. So, going on this idiot's logic this clearly means that I must conclude that all students, everywhere are better off learning in front of a screen. If you also like the utterly wrong appeal to authority I'm a full professor of a real science.
However, as a real scientist, I know that without data on many different students my observation of one student is irrelevant for determining education policy for everyone. Not only that but, unlike say electrons people do not always respond in the same way towards any one stimulus. My son loves computers and learning from a screen works well for him. My daughter does not and she definitely benefits more from non-screen learning.
I would have expected that a vaulted associate professor of "political science" would both be politically and scientifically aware enough to know you need data to back up any argument and that people are complex and a variety of approaches is needed to get the best from everyone.
So let's put little Johnny behind the wheel of that SUV, I'm pretty sure driving is more sensible for him than watching a destruction derby on the screen.
You think that's bad? I'm a physics prof and with this idiot's policies teaching nuclear criticality is one lecture that sure to go off with a bang!
I teach Calculus, Upper Math, and Physics at one of the top high schools in China. I can anecdotally say that I agree with the author. We have a lot of bright students who may have been able to grok low end material before they hit my classes, they are used to just looking at the book and getting it. Not many can do that in Calc or Physics. I continually have to remind them to get their pencils out and actually actively learn. The ones that do perform better, pretty much universally.
I am not tech averse, I just don't think tech is the panacea that it is made out to be in University Ed. departments, in North America anyways.
But next week a report will come out saying they learn best when whipped constantly... or when put in a gold fish bowl, or what ever bs they want it to say.
Pick that week that matches your desired philosophy
Everything a child needs to learn and practise in the first 3-4 years of elementary school is:
- sports
- music
- maths
- literacy
"Why sir, you can talk and you can write! You can connect to any person from any background" -- I hear that often from all who know me (confirmed by a whole battery of assessments at work). Well, some of those predispositions/talents seem to be genetics (the IQ for example), but then how did I spend my childhood and teenage years?
Easy --> every single minute of free time (of which you have tons) was divided equally between reading fiction and playing with peers (study did not concern me since my father had done such a great job before my school years so that I could go directly in 4th grade, which I did not for social reasons). I had more than 1000 volumes of fiction, including serious stuff like World classics (emphasis on Russian writers, due to politics); even stuff like 1984, which was forbidden book under communism, under me belt before turning 16 and I had often spent 6-12 hrs per day socializing with peers. During vacations in the countryside the kids gang (of which I was the leader) gathered around 8 AM and disbanded around 10PM, sometimes after midnight.
No TV, no PC, no electronic games, not even board games. No comic books (that was a pity; most of those are quite serious and interesting artform), no Superhero movies or cartoons. The hot Sci-Fi show was Blake's seven (no Trek), we had the silly laser pistols made of cardboard. Played with mud, literally, building castles and waging wars...going fishing to the river, playing football, hide-and-seek, cycling "undercover" for 20 km to visit another village against the explicit ban from our parents and so on....
You know what --> within those years, with those kids we experienced just about any social situation you can imagine, multiple times, and we dealt with it without the parents. We did not run for help crying because someone feelings were hurt....When the hormones hit the whole boys-girls dynamic played out. We had the rude, sexists boys which were put in line by the rest of us; we had the jealousy between the girls for the cool boys, we had the first conversations about sex (we had all secretly read the one medical book about sex that every household had at the time) and so on....
And of course there were the endless conversations about stuff from life in general. We talked about science and engineering, about what we have read in books and magazines, I assure you. Often we asked the dads to give tips....to show us the engine of a car, or how to make electrical installation at home, how to make concrete (the dads will ask for help anyway to teach us responsibility and discipline). The grandmothers thought us cooking and gardening, the grandfathers to care for animals and crops. One neighbour is a train driver and will tell us all about it, another is carpenter, another is a farmer and so on....
What I childhood I had, behind the wall, poor as dirt...and it was wonderful!
I am happy to report that all of us are now responsible adults and without exception we are regarded as socially adept and capable individuals!
And yet I know pilots and most of them have never even played a flight sim.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I am sick and tired of this claim being made endlessly without any evidence. As a parent and a person who grew up on a computer, I fail to see how its worse than books. In many cases, it's better than books because it allows two-way engagement that books. Sounds like a bunch of Luddites.
How programming can be taught as a full body learning experience? :-)
Throw away all computers from schools?
Throw away all books too?
Or, the argument is "stop trying to teach anything that is not a full body learning experience"?
Then, only teach PE classes perhaps?
This is exactly what the Dynamicland project is trying to address: https://dynamicland.org/
Computing doesn't have to be based on screens.
Neither the author nor anyone he cites has a background in child psychology, development psychology, neuroscience, or education. He also fails to cite any research supporting his claims. He does cite a few tangential pieces of philosophy, but that doesn't demonstrate any facts in support of his argument.
While he seems to have some credentials relevant to political philosophy, he sadly lacks any discernible expertise relevant to the topic of the article.
This is just another scarcely-informed opinion piece. We've got quite enough of those already. This is almost pointless: weak signal, mostly noise.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
that's the best informed manifesto beaconing humanity back to common sense that's grounded in the real physical environment.
Technology does change wetware, how it processes and enforces binary judgement at the expense of thinking outside the box. Its the best manifesto at the right moment.
I hope there's more to the thinking that the drivel put forward in the summary. Equating the learning of physical techniques, teach of muscle memory and movement is not the same thing getting an education.
You may not be able to learn to ride a horse on a computer, but you'll likely do just fine learning to solve differential equations and when to use who vs whom. Last I checked Mr Gates and the Zuck were not teaching people to play tennis via their tablets.
When was this? Because they were held to be really valuable during WWII, and Project Whirlwind, which started during the war and created among many things core memory and the idea of the minicomputer, began as a project to build a particularly flexible flight simulator for the Navy (the flexibility is what led to them to using a digital computer, and to develop a new class of them to drive it).
The derision for that Apple ad was in part because we didn't expect such K-12 education programs to show such variability, and the obvious issue that they simply can't simulate things in 3D (this was long before VR), which is something a flight simulator actually does in a manner identical to how it's experienced in a real cockpit, minus the effects of crashing, real G forces and the like of course.
... roughly 20 years ago. "Silicon Snake Oil" is the book iirc. Good opinionated read. I mostly agree with a solid amount of scepticism concerning media technology in the class room. The raspberry pi is the most of computing that I would let into a classroom. And only with CLI centric/coding lessons. And if we're honest, the raspberry pi is quite a lot.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You mean, several hundred thousand years of hominid evolution in the natural world, wasn't a key indicator?
We've only had 'screen-learning', what, a few decades at most? Sure. That's clearly the better environment.... /s
Hominids have also relied solely on their legs for transportation for several hundreds of thousands of years. We've only had horses and camels for a few millennia, steam-powered trains for a couple of centuries, cars for just over a century and jet airplanes for a few decades... so surely using only legs to get around is better.
Everything has pros and cons, and the only way to figure out what is better is to actually try it and observe the results. Arguing that X is better just because it's what humans have done for a long time is just stupid. In some cases it might be true, but counterexamples abound.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Read Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv, for those of you that grew up playing outside until street lights came on will definitely appreciate it.
Parenting is inconvenient. Parenting is hard. Parenting isn't fair most of the time.
There's no pill you can take for it, only distractions like TV, Internet, and Video Games.
Is anyone really shocked that we have kids mowing down other kids at school with military assault weapons they got free with a subscription to Guns & Ammo magazine? We're abandoning parenting and leaving our kids in the hands of a bunch of unscrupulous, greedy companies.
"As a parent, it is obvious that children learn more when they engage their entire body in a meaningful experience than when they sit at a computer." This really bugs me. Not every kid learns that way. Learning at a computer provides different learning styles. I was terrible at Algebra when I was in high school. When I went to college I took an algebra class that met once a week and I got an A. The difference? I learned Algebra on a computer instead of a teacher that didn't want to repeat themselves or explain it in a way that made sense to me. The answer is to use technology to supplement education, it shouldn't be one or the other. Many classrooms around the country are already doing that. One last point. There are several jobs, like software development or IT, that you need to be able to consistently learn. You aren't going to be able to sit in a classroom and have someone teach you the new trendy programming language. You need to learn it on your own, usually with a computer.
From a political perspective, yes, 4 legs good, 2 legs better!
Why UNIX?
Nicholas Tampio, associate professor of political science
Philanthropists such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg
You know the big thing missing from debates on how to best educate children?
People who actually know anything about educating children.
Instead of turning to an associate professor of political science, how about we turn to someone with a PHD in early childhood development? Or young childhood education?
You know, turning to someone who actually knows what they are talking about instead of someone spouting off their personal opinion with a fancy-sounding but irrelevant title.
On the other hand, it is still a good idea to spend some time walking. We've evolved to walk, not sit and generally people who spend some time walking are healthier and live longer.
One nice thing now is that we can drive to interesting places to walk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
From a political perspective, yes, 4 legs good, 2 legs better!
Not unless your political perspective is that we should turn the clock back two centuries and all live in what would now be considered abject poverty.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Regardless of the ACs very poor communication skills, he or she is right that both are good, especially combined well. In a proper blend they compliment each other.
My four year old daughter is really into planetary astronomy right now. Saturn is her favorite planet, and she's really into the dwarf planets - Pluto, Makemake, etc.
We can go outside and see Saturn as a point of light in the sky. She enjoys that and learns something. Through our $400 telescope, she can just see the rings, which look like one big ring in that scope. She has fun and learns from that, but she really wants to see more. To see the distinct rings, we a screen. We load up Cassini images on her iPad so she can see detail of Saturn, it's moons and rings. The video tells her the names of Saturn's largest moons, and what they are made of.
It's a blend that's best. Similarly, we weren't made with five sense so that we could choose just one. We continously blend input from all five of senses for the best experience and learning. The internet is like a sixth sense to be blended with the other five. My daughter has looked in the telescope and seen a door of light near Jupiter. "That's Titan, the biggest moon", she said "no wait, Titan is Saturn's biggest moon", she corrects herself. Again, she just turned four.
She can't see the Keiper belt objects, but she can tell you about them because she enjoys learning about them on her iPad.
That's definitely not to say she should stare at a screen all day and never see or touch anything in real life, and also models. She enjoyed when I pointed a flashlight at her globe so she can really understand how day and night happen. She was excited when I put the flashlight behind the plastic drain pipe under the sink so she could see the water flowing down through the pipe.
She enjoys see a butterfly in the yard - and then studying super close-up pictures of butterflies on her iPad. That's the blended learning that works best, according to the studies I've seen and the obvious learning my four year old is doing.
The comparison isn't between computers and books -- it's between computers/books and face to face learning. The media just facilitates one-to-many styles of information dissemination. If classrooms shrunk from one teacher with 30 students down to a 1:1 personal tutor model, and all media were eliminated for face to face working in a totally personal way then wouldn't quality of education increase immensely?
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
From a political perspective, yes, 4 legs good, 2 legs better!
Not unless your political perspective is that we should turn the clock back two centuries and all live in what would now be considered abject poverty.
How would walking turn you to poverty? I choose to not use the car, I have a healthier lifestyle as a result. Please explain.
Why UNIX?
From a political perspective, yes, 4 legs good, 2 legs better!
Not unless your political perspective is that we should turn the clock back two centuries and all live in what would now be considered abject poverty.
How would walking turn you to poverty?
Motorized vehicles are essential to our economy. There's no way to conduct the large-scale trade that underpins our wealth without using them. And there's absolutely no way to do it with purely human power (no four-legs -- domesticated beasts of burden dramatically increased human productivity).
I choose to not use the car, I have a healthier lifestyle as a result. Please explain.
Now you've changed your argument from one about politics to one of personal health. Getting exercise is clearly good for you, sure. This can be done by walking or in any of many other ways, many of which are more time-efficient. I prefer rowing and cycling, myself, especially rowing because it's a whole-body activity.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
.. and it's not very impressive. This article says: ...the current status of the literature is that there is no evidence to support the use of Learning Styles in this way [matching instruction style to student learning style improves learning]. There are lots of links in the article to the underlying studies.
This is not exactly the same thing as screen-based vs. living-world-based learning, but it does support the idea that statements like "Children learn best when their bodies are engaged in the living world" without supporting studies are not helpful.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Yes, tactile books, because they print Braille along the page edges which imparts important subliminal messages as the unwary child flips though the pages.
It's amazing how much nuance subliminal Braille can communicate with a limited vocabulary of family members (your mother, your father, your sister, your brother), a few sexual acts, some poo words, one or two items of military apparel, and the ubiquitous "hot lead".
On the other side of this, it is actually true that the visual system programs its object model in the first years of life by correlation through the tactile system.
That said, by age nine, the printed world should start to open up whole new worlds, entirely on its own. Even without the supplemental playground Braille.
VR for every student!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I remember being forced to play sports when I was a kid. All I learned from that was that bigger kids liked to clobber me.
Then, when I had any free time at all, I wrote simple games on my PC. THAT helped me build a skillset that I use today, to command a nice software developer salary.
Its just one data point. Not evidence. But I am not trying to prove anything. Just stating why I think the article author is full of shit.
and yes for the snarkist it is technically misspelled
with water resistant/wireless tech there is no reason that children could not be taught OUTSIDE in a garden setting (of course have a normal classroom for when it is too wet, cold, or hot to be safe).
as long as its "just dirt" its not a tragic thing for a kid to get muddy
Why bother with long headlines?
YOU are a god damned teacher? You used zero capitalization in your list. Your sentences were mainly strings of concantenated fragments with shitty grammar. HOLY FUCK learn to spell! You also used text-speak. Your opinion is worth less than nothing. You don't know how to do your fucking job. Care to pontificate on how to cure pancreatic cancer, solve our economic problems, and adjust the valves on my '56 Chevy since you're talking about shit you don't know?
I got this, hold my beer.
Which one of your kids are you fucking? One of the non-mutually exclusive groups who demand homeschooling are daddies fucking thier daughters. They're usually fundamentally religious as well, which is why they think they have a mandate to fuck thier kids. Home child abuse was a one of the arguments used when America's public school system was designed and then mandated. School might be the only place they get to eat. It may be the only place they don't get beaten or raped. You don't want the public to see and talk to your kids. Are you beating them? Are you raping them? Statistics says some people are. You could be one.
This is a serious argument, I'm not trolling, I'm judging you. There's something about you and your wife that makes you think you're too good for the public education system, so you're already broken from the get go. No matter how great of a job you think you've done with those kids, they're fucked up. Homeschooled kids simply have no social skills. They think they will always get thier way and can rule with an iron fist. I'm the asshole that has to metaphorically beat them back into normalcy after I fire their ass.
I, too, am a vet. The way to be successful in the military has not changed in 10,000 years.
DO WHAT YOU'RE FUCKING TOLD.
That's it. Not complicted. Be here at this time, with this shit, and stay for this long. Run around this track 8 times in less than 16 minutes. Do 48 pushups in 2 minutes. Shoot 25 of these 40 targets. Go wash the captain's car and don't fuck his wife this time. Don't Armor-All the 5 ton tires.
The methods and exact details change with time, but the message doesn't and it's the same as what you criticize college about. All that namby pamby think for yourself and beat the enemy crap you're going on about applies to the enemy only. Do what it takes to beat the enemy but you better be kissing that captain's ass when you're in garrison.
Also, just because we said not to fuck his wife this time, didn't mean you could fuck his daughter. 15 days extra duty!
The CHILDREN! Won't SOMEBODY think of the CHILDREN???
From a political perspective, yes, 4 legs good, 2 legs better!
Not unless your political perspective is that we should turn the clock back two centuries and all live in what would now be considered abject poverty.
How would walking turn you to poverty?
Motorized vehicles are essential to our economy. There's no way to conduct the large-scale trade that underpins our wealth without using them. And there's absolutely no way to do it with purely human power (no four-legs -- domesticated beasts of burden dramatically increased human productivity).
Is money the only thing that you consider? Have you questioned if every single journey you make in a car is a car-only trip? Could you not use legs instead and try and save some fuel? The economy could perhaps be more focused around cycling, perhaps, I've dropped far more money on cycling than driving in the last four/five years.
I choose to not use the car, I have a healthier lifestyle as a result. Please explain.
Now you've changed your argument from one about politics to one of personal health. Getting exercise is clearly good for you, sure. This can be done by walking or in any of many other ways, many of which are more time-efficient. I prefer rowing and cycling, myself, especially rowing because it's a whole-body activity.
It was never a political argument, it was a reference to the book "Animal Farm".
Why UNIX?
Is money the only thing that you consider?
I didn't say anything about money. I said "our economy", meaning the goods and services produced, moved and consumed. If you like eating, staying warm (or cool, depending), and being able to buy things you need or want, you depend on motorized transport.
It was never a political argument, it was a reference to the book "Animal Farm".
I didn't catch the allusion and just took the words literally -- "from a political perspective".
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
How will children and humanity evolve if we force the old ways of learning onto them?