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'Beware Silicon Valley's Gifts To Our Schools' (nationalreview.com)
schwit1 shares a National Review report: After three years, there is no proof that Apple's, Google's, and Microsoft's infiltration of the classroom is producing actual academic improvement and results. Take Facebook's efforts for an example. The company -- under fire for privacy breaches worldwide -- is peddling something called "Summit Learning," a web-based curriculum bankrolled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Last month, students in New York City schools walked out in protest of the program. "It's annoying to just sit there staring at one screen for so long," freshman Mitchel Storman, 14, told the New York Post. He spends close to five hours a day on Summit classes in algebra, biology, English, world history, and physics. Teacher interaction is minimal. "You have to teach yourself," Storman rightly complained. No outside research supports any claim that Summit Learning actually enhances, um, learning. What more studies are showing, however, is that endless hours of screen time are turning kids into zombies who are more easily distracted, less happy, less socially adept, and less physically fit. Standing up to the Silicon Valley Santas and asserting your family's "right to no" may well be the best long-term gift you can give your school-age children.
Eh?
No it's tycoons and watered-down education.
U r not right. I have seen the curriculum. Unless you want to skate through it for the right to say you did it, you would get a whole hell of a lot from the lessons
But seriously how's a bazillionaire with serious control issues and and a deeply programmed "liberal" identity going to self-sooth after a long day at the office, squeezing micro-dollars out of the metadata of the dessicated souls of billions of Facebook screen zombies?
Answer: help poor "inner city" folk get a better education, with expensive apps he paid for all by his wittle self.
Awwwww.
better US Presidents than white people
They could at least unblock the internet for these kids so they can look at porn
Michelle Malkin and National Review? Thanks msmash
Like which ones? Clinton and Bush? Weren't they the first and second black presidents? Or was that some kind of hippie humor my friends and I don't get?
Judging from the criticisms, Summit Learning sounds far better than regular education.
"You have to teach yourself," Storman rightly complained
Being able to learn yourself is the most important skill you can have. Unfortunately, many people never acquire that skill so have to be constantly spoon fed information, are left unable to do anything if it's not explained to them, and can't work through problems themselves. If children become more capable of learning on their own, it will greatly empower them and give them far more opportunities in the future. Teaching them that they don't need a teacher to learn, and can learn on their own initiative, is a very good start.
"It's annoying to just sit there staring at one screen for so long," freshman Mitchel Storman
There's a serious problem with this instant gratification generation. You can't expect everything in life to be a computer game with flashing lights to entertain you, and where you constantly level up, even if you're bad at the game. Learning is rarely fun, but you learn in order to acquire skills that can help you in the future. If he can't sit in front of a monitor for five hours per day, then he's going to have real problems in the workplace where he'll be putting in double that time.
students in New York City schools walked out in protest
Once again, we see the problem isn't the course, but the students. We've seen the issues with millennials in the workplace, with them constantly whining, protesting, being offended and then quitting because they're bored. What seems to have been lacking in the last few decades is discipline. In the past nobody would walk out of a lesson in protest, and if they did they'd receive a damn good caning. Now, this sort of behaviour is tolerated, and even encouraged. Lunatics in government tell us we need to listen to the views of 'young people' and so policy ends up being set based on the views of 14-year-olds who lack the experience to know what's best for them. These students are being presented with a great opportunity to learn, and yet all they're doing is walking out in protest becuase they think they're above all of this learning nonsense. They need to be told to sit down, shut up, and start working.
/. Sure is about news for nerds and stuff that matters! Also this comment will be deleted momentarily because ms mash sure has her priorities right!
The same author behind such enlightening articles as:
* The Authoritarianism of Silicon Valley’s Tech Titans ("Silicon Valley is imposing its own form of sharia.")
* Say No to Nanny Bloomberg ("Michael Bloomberg, the soda-taxing, gun-grabbing, snack-attacking control freak, should keep his nose out of our lives and out of the 2020 presidential race.")
* Look Who’s Back: Obama Crashes the Midterms ("Thanks, Obama, for reminding America of your miserable legacy.")
* How Google Co-opts Our Schools to Collect Kids’ Data ("Local school administrators have sold out vulnerable children to Silicon Valley.")
Not that I expected much from the National Review...
Keep "big tech" out of schools
*Disclaimer: I used to be a technology director for a school district.
Throwing technology at a social / political problem isn't a panacea. Never has been and never will be. The tech adds very little benefit to the learning process unless the teachers actively incorporate it into their existing lessons. Where many get it wrong is using the tech as a replacement for textbooks and paperwork and nothing else. Yes it's less paperwork to manage, and that's good for the teacher in multiple ways, but it harms the student when done incorrectly. Case in point: Auto-graded assignments.
Yes, many teachers would be up in arms over the idea of taking away auto-graded assignments, but most of those assignments are poor quality by necessity of the auto-grading system. I.e. Most are Multiple Guess. There are a few systems that accept fill in the blank answers, but many of those are very specific about what answers they will accept, and often just encourage the teachers using them to move to Multiple Guess only as a time saving measure. As for why Multiple Guess is bad: If you know the answers will be on your test, why bother studying beyond being able to pick the answer out of a group? The answer is always given to you, and even if you don't have the slightest clue as to what it is when presented with the choices, the answer can be lucked upon by the simple roll of a six-sided dice. This is one of the reasons younger generations cannot deal with complex issues in the workforce. They expect to be told exactly what is expected of them, and if exact instructions are not given, they often cannot come up with an answer on their own due to lack of practice and / or knowledge.
Another problem is the funding that tech eats up. Many school districts have their own budget for IT that is separate from their general fund. In some cases a school may not be able to afford safety equipment for science classes, but has plenty of money for the latest iPad or Chromebook. In other cases, the school may choose to replace working tech with the new shiny, even though it will cost the school more in the long run to support and maintain it, for nothing more than trying to one-up or emulate neighboring districts.This encouragement of tech being a separate budget drives funds away from areas that need it. Causing deficiencies in other areas of teaching, and in some cases can be dangerous. Like not being able to afford having a nurse on staff during the day. Or failing to pay for proper security.
Worse is when said school cannot afford the more expensive new shiny and buys it by the truckload anyway. In some worse case scenarios a school may not have a technology instructor, but is inundated with tech and clueless teachers / leadership. In those cases the tech is always a waste of money, because the students gain very little from it due to the clueless teachers' / leadership's inability to integrate the tech correctly. This last bit also causes the students to pick up bad computing behaviors as security and proper use always gives way to making something work during class.
Finally, most of these efforts made by the various companies are designed to lock-in the students to their products at a young age. Most of these schools won't be teaching technology as a general subject. Most of the time a task or goal that must be completed on tech is explained to a student as a series of menus or button presses. If you've ever encountered a student that could not make a slideshow presentation with anything beyond obviously cut and pasted bullet points in no particular grouping, or a student that couldn't manage their own files, this is why. When students are trained to specific programs / devices, they are fundamentally challenged when moving into the real-world outside of the classroom. As they go from being "experts" to "novices" simply by choosing a company to work for that uses a competing tech vendor as their primary provider, or by the vendor's latest revamp changing too much for them
That isn't Summit, that's education. Teachers don't do jack anymore - if they ever really did.
Not only did you pen one of the most opinionated pieces of "journalism" ever, but you used a filler-word, um, in a formal written document.
People who use this phrase never show any, nor are worthy of any.
What are all these wires? What the hell's a mouse? How do I windows?
So much bias it's like all I have is a right speaker.
———
In short, go back to journalism school.
In long, how about you title opinion pieces accordingly and not pretend they are in any way news. Also, go back to any school you attended and demand a refund, then learn how to write a formal document.
...
[Disclamier: I'm a developer born in 70-something who doesn't think children need the internet in their pockets]
My kids are 5th, 7th, and 9th grade. We've felt that 2 hours of screen time (Netflix, computer/console gaming, tablet usage) was a healthy upper limit per day. This idea was based on how my wife and I were raised during the 80's and 90's where most of our childhood was spent outdoors with friends. I know it's quaint these days, but it seemed to work for us; our kids can hold a real conversation with adults while maintaining eye contact, and despite fighting amongst themselves like cats and dogs, we are always complimented on how engaging and polite they are. Not a brag, just context. Maybe they're just good kids and us limiting screen time has nothing to do with it.
...but...
Now that the school has them on Chromebooks 3-5 hours per day during instruction time, then an additional 30-minutes of them just watching Youtube during Resource/Study Hall, then doing "homework" on the Chromebook for an hour at night...screen time has exploded from 2 hours per day to 6.5 hours per day.
They don't have smartphones (yet), but they are literally in the 1% of kids in their schools that don't have smartphones. I think beyond a reasonable amount like 2 hours, time that children spend looking at a screen is time they are not learning how to interact with the world with their senses. Some of their peers can't string 3 sentences together in a single conversation without drifting into looking at their phone or talking about what they saw on their phone.
I may be a minority even here, but I think the school (and these organizations) are doing a huge disservice to these kids...and for what, automated learning with built-in KPIs and a fatter bottom line?
...when everything is a crime, everyone is a criminal.
is for wealth brands that want to virtue signal that they are doing something political.
Giving people who won't and cant learn more free stuff is not going to "teach" a generation to a better IQ level.
Calculators, computers, laptops, tablets, robot kits, new type of computer "code", new codes of conduct for computer code are not making average people more educated.
Where transcripts are still base on tests and merit, generations of extra support results in mot much improvement over generations.
IQ over a generation cant be educated with a new robot kit.
What US prestigious universities have to do is send a message to all students.
Want to enter a prestigious university? Study hard, pass your exams and show you can study.
That might just ensure a lot of skilled people with the ability to learn try their best.
Open up the university admissions process to merit again.
A tale of hardship does not show the ability to study and pass an exam.
Once all students see they have the ability to be considered on merit and only merit, some might study more.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
is cost. And thanks to abundant work visas we don't need to worry about kids who can't hack it on their own. They can go do whatever it is those people do. Meanwhile we can all have another round of tax cuts at the cost of more cuts to higher education.
Those tax cuts don't pay for themselves. No, really, they don't.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"After three years, there is no proof that Apple's, Google's, and Microsoft's infiltration of the classroom is producing actual academic improvement and results."
ITYM 40 years, because that's how long that story has been spun . Tech can be a useful adjunct, same as a library. But it does nothing to actually educate. Setting someone down in the Library of Congress doesn't educate them, despite the volume of knowledge present. Medium vs. content.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
For them?
I mean we've gone from being effectively an adult at 13 to 18, and for recreational substances, 21. Most kids learn that if you want to do something, fuck the law, or why go to school when you can learn more about real life outside it.
Based on people I know who both dutifully went through school, and those who didn't, there is no obvious indication of more financial or academic success that is directly tied to school. The ones who ended up well off had the social contacts, most of which came from family or the right university, rather than the education they recieved.
The most immediately successful went to trade schools right out of high school, or left high school early thanks to GEDs or equivalent programs in their state that allowed them to move their education at their own rate, rather than being held back by crap like 'no child left behind'.
Quite frankly if children don't have a basic grasp of sorting through truth and fiction by 13, they will not be adults by 18, and our current education system and treating them like kids into their 20s is doing them a disservice.
Kids are finally doing their own productive politicial activism this generation. The millenials are already out in the workforce, and honestly most of the SJW crap is half and half between millenials and gen xers, with a few older generation people hanging on the coattails for their own political agendas. Personally I would like to age of majority reduced to 13-14, the k-12 education system migrated to a junior college style set of classes, and kids allowed to take classes at the maturity and difficulty level they desire, so that lazy or disruptive kids won't drag down the rest of a quickly moving class of students, which will allow many to reach maturity and adult level education by the end of middle school, rather than plodding along to 13-14 and starting to act mature, then spending 4 years being taught that immaturity is ok before being thrown into either the real world unprepared, or into a college will gives them another 2-8 years detached from the trials of the real world.
Said as one of those failures mentioned above.
"After three years, there is no proof that Apple’s, Google’s, and Microsoft’s infiltration of the classroom is producing actual academic improvement & results."
Try after 30 thirty years? Or even longer than that?
At the London Festival of Learning this past summer, Paulo Blikstein gave a great history of all the failed attempts by tech people to foist their wares on school systems, usually leaving the schools holding the bag after the tech people pull out within a few years.
Video: https://vimeo.com/283023489
"It's annoying to just sit there staring at one screen for so long," freshman Mitchel Storman
Welcome to your future job. The annoyance is slightly alleviated because you're paid to stare at a screen all day.
What school won't prepare you for is endless hours of pointless meetings, and political machinations that have no basis in reality.
Doing whatever their white masters said.
Didn't I read the book about how computers and the internet weren't really doing anything to improve education back in 2003? Oh right I did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TclggSNlu2M
The objective of these efforts isn't to enhance learning in any meaningful way, it's to create customers. Chromebooks, for example, are really only relevant because they gained a foothold in schools which has led to a user base raised on chromebooks continuing to use chromebooks. This is like the old tobacco and alcohol ads that appealed to children; target your customers early and create customers for life... kids that grew up on Joe Camel and Spuds Mackenzie became adults who smoked Camels and drank Bud Lite. Kids who grow up on iPads become Apple users, kids who grow up on Chromebooks become Google users... same early addiction model, only the product has changed.
"You have to teach yourself"
If my current vocational training, is any indication: It's not the actual teaching, it's writing the who, when, where of my own assignment sheet. It looks as if my training provider stole a government-training handbook and was too lazy to write complete assignments for students (ie. me) to respond to. Having the experiences of a dozen positions, I can fill-in the details. A teenager lacking a few years job experience, will be exhausted and demotivated.
"It's annoying to just sit there staring at one screen for so long,"
Schools now have personal interactive media technology available for the students. But they're not using that technology for more than putting the ole chalk'n'talk lessons on a display screen, lacking animation and interactivity.
Seriously, get computers out of the classroom (except for computer science classes). They don't help with ANYTHING.
Use notebooks, pencils and textbooks instead. And a whiteboard/blackboard for instruction during the classes. It's the most effective way to actually train the mind.
Don't look gift horse in mouth. Have you heard? It means exactly as that. In Soviet Russia, Tatoo You! Baby!
As one famous scientist said, "One good experiment is worth a hundred theoretical papers." That was said when his experiment, done in the course of a few days, proved the hundred theoretical papers wrong. The same is true here. These people have some theories about education, but they go right to the full roll-out without a clinical trial. How about an A-B test in which one cohort gets books and the other gets computers. I have a feeling that the book-learning will win (but that's just a theory).
There's an endless parade of 'tech solutions' for education, most of which are shameless cash grabs.
However, an educational system which encourages self-learning isn't inherently bad. For example, Sudbury schools use this model. In old schools that didn't use the 'grade' stratification of students, older students would help teach the younger students. It's said that you need to comprehend a topic three times as well in order to teach it rather than merely understand it, so encouraging students to teach one another would likely improve comprehension.
Furthermore, self-learning allows for an ideal version of the 'track' system used in Germany and elsewhere, where thinkers learn about more abstract subjects, whereas those who prefer to work with their hands learn more practical hands-on subjects. It's very easy for someone to say "all children should know X", and different people will have different opinions on what X is. Add those all together, and students end up with a bloated curriculum of stuff they really don't want or need to know in order to be effective and happy citizens and workers.
That said, there are so many models/ideas for education, that A/B testing and frequent reference to the What Works Clearinghouse should be utilized in order to determine efficacy, rather than ideologues saddling students with their pet system even if it never works.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
.... a conservative anti-government, anti-education, anti-intellectual rag is pushing the conservative motto of: "keep them stupid," and this is somehow news? It's always amazing to see conservatives undermine their own children's future by doing everything they can to make them completely unable to compete in the world.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Unadulterated code, best teacher.
[($)]
Your ways of spelling betray your statement.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
No outside research supports any claim that Summit Learning actually enhances, um, learning.
What's the deal with intentionally adding "um" and "uh" in written sentences? Is this millenial-speak?
In this and many other topics, people have become way too bi-partisan to be taken seriously. Either you're in one camp, or the opposite.
But truth be told, in most cases where there are two diametrically opposed camps, they are both full of shit.
What do Zuckerberg and Gates and other drop-outs know about education? Did they study it? Do they have teaching experience? Why do we assume that rich people know something about the world? The only skill we know they have is getting rich.
But likewise, there certainly is more that can be done about education. The success of Khan Academy shows that a different approach is possible and can be successful. Teachers are actually among those looking for better ways to teach all the time. But they suffer from both beaurocratic quagmire and the usual academic delay in everything (i.e. the teachers now were trained on average two decades ago. The current state of the art is taught in universities today, and will enter the schools in a few years, and in about a decade the first teachers from that cohort will be in positions to make decisions).
We can improve education. But not everything needs to be "disrupted" just because disruption is a successful Silicon Valley business model (and only if you ignore the many, many failed startups that didn't disrupt anything except themselves).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Perhaps the tax code should be changed so that "gifts" of software and hardware are not tax deductible. Only gifts of cash, with no strings attached, should be tax deductible. Let the parents and school board determine the needs of the schools.
Large Silicon Valley companies are likely gifting software and hardware for other interests besides education.
I realize that most school boards are infested with teachers, their spouses, and former teachers (i.e. more conflict of interest) who believe that only overpaying teachers and keeping school days short and school years short provides quality education.
But giving teachers raises and pensions is terrible Communism.
Let the free market decide! (except when state bureaucrats hire their buddy's gadget maintaining service for our school district)
...but the main point, that EdTech isn't helping children to learn is true.
The OECD commissioned a review of the research evidence and concluded that there was in inverse correlation between ICT use in classrooms & academic performance. I expect a few "no true Scotsman" arguments to follow: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c...
To anyone who works in education, studies cognitive science, &/or epistemology (i.e. theories of how we learn), this comes as no surprise. Children simply don't learn in the ways that Silicon Valley billionaires, so called "education reform gurus," & most of the general public assume.
While it's quite feasible that computers can be used to aid learning, according to cognitive science, that isn't what's happening in classrooms. Additionally, learning management systems, digital documents, online testing, etc., all come with increases in cognitive load, which in turn reduces children's learning in measurable ways. In order for an EdTech intervention to produce positive results, it has to be so effective & efficient that it overcomes this increase in cognitive load. There are strategies & techniques for doing this, e.g. see the work of cognitive psychologist Dr Richard E. Mayer, but what I've seen from Silicon Valley seems oblivious to them.
Another thing the article gets right is that classes without a qualified, experienced teacher don't help children to learn very well, e.g. Sugata Mitra's bold claims about self-teaching children in India & elsewhere weren't borne out by independently gathered evidence & review.
Let's face it, the current "factory model" of education that we have is the least bad system that anyone's come up with for educating tens of millions of children at a time. It takes the hubris of billionaires to believe that they can do better with no background in education, epistemology, or cognitive science.
Then again, I don't think their actual intentions are about improving education.
If you'd like to learn more about learning, here's a good evidence-informed blog written by experts (Dr Paul Kirschner is a veteran education & training researcher at the Open University of the Netherlands & Mirjam Neelen is a highly qualified & experienced educational consultant & learning developer): https://3starlearningexperienc...
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
*You're
"National Review" and it looks lile lots of people like talking a out crap on a page.
There are a lot of claims in this article about effects, but no citations are provided.
"Beware of Geeks bearing gifts", Virgil's Aeneid, circa 20 BC.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Beware of geeks bearing gifts
My kids are 5th, 7th, and 9th grade. We've felt that 2 hours of screen time (Netflix, computer/console gaming, tablet usage) was a healthy upper limit per day.
If your older ones end up taking up an interest in learning to program, do you plan to limit how much time they can spend on self-study of computer science on weekends and school vacations? When employers expect college graduates to have known more than one programming language before finishing high school, such a move could limit your kids' careers.
My College coding classes were in a room with a chalkboard.... no computers in sight until you went to the computer lab. And we learned that way, asking questions and interacting with the teacher.
Hell, we got to the moon using mindpower that was taught this way.
These "new methods" are merely teaching our kids to parrot back the answers the computers expect... no critical thinking, no interaction.. terrible.
I work in a blue state and it is similar with the source of trouble from the "red" side of things. We just have more power to resist the pushing; but too much is similar -- proving there is less difference in the bigger picture. It's just that the blue side allows more flexibility to fight back against such things... probably only because of the influence of the teacher's union. Lobbyists and free $$$ gets far with any kind of politician it seems...
AI is going to solve everything and allow the new generations to be stupid.
My son's STEM school has allowed him to excel. They all have to have chromebooks, but I've found if I'd have given him an old MacBook Air, the obvious problems would have been the ONLY problems (They're now doing arduino . . . he can't understand why I can't make it work).
Education is one of those things as many others mentioned you can't just throw Money or Technology at. Conversely, not having access to either when you have a decent curriculum and a plan to implement hamstrings you as well.
Living in CT and hearing common core as "The federal government taking over our schools", you can figure out where one of the roadblocks is. For reading, it literally meant ONE more test with no other changes to the system, but hey, let's complain. "States Rights" with education, you're going to end up with Smart and Dumb states. When I was younger, a NY Regents diploma was a big deal and was allowed in lieu of other (Arbitrary) job requirements.
In summary: No magic bullet, but you can't knock over the target if you have nothing to shoot at it with.
100 years ago you may have been expected to work at 13, but 13 year old then or now are in no way adults. Given ages of consent 100 years ago, no one in the Western world thought 13 year olds were adult then either, based on things like voting ages.
I remember this scam when I was in school. A company called channel one (or some associate) paid to install a TV in every classroom. The school was then required to air 10mins of Channel one programming every day which was about 25% "news" and 75% ads. The supposed benefit was that it was also used for the school's general announcements, but otherwise they still had to use an AV cart anytime they wanted to show an educational video to the class.
In order to prevent losing federal funding there had to be a strict amount of classroom time every day, so if a bus arrived late, they would hold the entire school behind the bell that amount at the end of the day messing up everyone's plans. but of course that couldn't cut into channel one time instead.