Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 174 posts

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#41

Post by bamboozled »

webwanderings wrote: post #27
mark_l_watson wrote: post #25

I have mixed feelings about this. Personally, working as a contractor at Google was one of the interesting jobs I have had and I generally like Google. That said, after reading Dave Eggers' excellent book "The Circle" last year and having watched the movie yesterday, I was reminded of the dangers (even if fictional in the case of the book) of a monopoly controlling knowledge. The book/movie is obviously about Google…

Did the invention of printing press made them a monopoly? Google does not generate information; they facilitate it. The more the information is free, the more it will be converted to knowledge by these same schools and students. Your comparison of it to your values of buying things for yourself, is misleading.

If you don't pay for the product, you are the product. That's how these services are funded, by selling your personal information at scale, which you generate.

Now, your kids are the next product.

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#43

Post by watwut »

jtraffic wrote: post #12

> I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don’t know why they are learning it This sounds disingenuous to me. There are lots of things kids and college students and adults learn that have no immediately foreseeable application. I'm sure most people on HN have thought about it. I wonder what the consensus is. My take is that learning how to use technology should not be a class…

I agree on both points. If we limit education on absolute minimum every kid is guaranteed to use, they wont learn all that much and they wont be able to proceed to college nor do non-trivial professional jobs. If you come to college without knowing quadratic equation, you wont be able to keep up with physics classes designed for students who already know elementary school math. If you don't understand for cycle when you are 18, you will have very hard time competing with students who come in already knowing real programming. Duh.

Continuation of that quote is no better. You wont even recognize utility of quadratic equation in more complicated equation (exercise) if you do not understand and remember it - much less google it. You will simply fail at solving it. There is also big difference between people who know history enough to see something suspicious when they see bad history and people who believe everything they read on random discussion forums.

-------------------

I think that changing tech school to use because new tech is more convenient to administer is perfectly good reason on itself. I don't know why everyone needs to bs about "transforming education" each time. However, I would much rather have education transformed by people who a.) value learning b.) can explain what quadratic formula is useful for c.) have knowledge of education theory (they dont need to agree with most of it, but they should know what it is they disagree with).

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#44

Post by zanny »

xnzakg wrote: post #31
WalterBright wrote: post #20

> he said: “I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don’t know why they are learning it.” He added, “And I don’t know why they can’t ask Google for the answer if the answer is right there.” Wow. Back when I worked for Boeing on the 757 design, there were engineers that were "formula pluggers" who pulled formulas out of manuals and used them. Then there were engineers who unde…

You're talking about engineers. Of course you need to understand some formulas if you're going to be an engineer. But for most of the people who aren't going to do that, they're useless.

Except the quadratic formula, just as an example, has a lot of positive qualities when taught to children:

* The longform is fairly complex, so it is non-trivial to remember or recount. You can't just guess it (at least without knowledge well beyond it). So it looks like "magic".

* It is a great introduction to what formulas are. They are non-trivial proofs of concepts that took research and logic to conclude.

Learning logic and learning patterns, especially the non-obvious ones like the qf, are what promote analytical thinking. We need more of that, not less. Maybe the problem is more that kids are shown a magic formula and made to mechanically repeat it on a couple dozen data sets than to actually learn how to reach conclusions like the qf. Making kids proof it would probably be more valuable than making them repeatedly use it beyond a few times to assure them it is valid magic math.

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#45

Post by coleca »

jtraffic wrote: post #12

> I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don’t know why they are learning it This sounds disingenuous to me. There are lots of things kids and college students and adults learn that have no immediately foreseeable application. I'm sure most people on HN have thought about it. I wonder what the consensus is. My take is that learning how to use technology should not be a class…

The other issue is that these devices have a limited lifetime in comparison to what they are replacing, paper textbooks. We may complain that textbooks our kids have are X years old, or don't have Y or Z fact in them that has transpired since the book was printed, the fact remains that the school didn't have to refresh that book every couple years at great expense. Chromebooks, laptops, iPads, etc. all are fragile and have a very limited lifespan in comparison to a textbook. That money would be much better spent on teachers which will have a far greater impact on the student's lives than any book or piece of tech ever will.

Do we really think that 20 years from now students will look back fondly and remember their old Lenovo Chromebook? Or will they remember the teacher that took the time out to make an impact in their lives?

Technology changes, it's impossible to keep up. Human interaction is a constant over all these years and advances.

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#46

Post by bad_user »

Roritharr wrote: post #29
watmough wrote: post #23

I have a daughter in the local school district. They use Lenovo Chromebooks which are built like brick sh*thouses with proper full-travel keyboards and touchscreens. Chromebooks work, and I am a big fan of them in education. I have a pretty good idea how hard our teachers work, and I'd hate to think of the Windows bullshit being imposed them, like it's imposed on me and my coworkers. Chromebooks free up teachers and…

OneDrive works, if one wants to use it. It just came too late.

I have an Office 365 Home subscription and OneDrive is a piece of shit.

The client is slow and unreliable, had problems with conflicts and the service doesn't do file versioning, thus your files being susceptible to ransomware or random mistakes.

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#47

Post by giomasce »

> “I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don’t know why they are learning it.” He added, “And I don’t know why they can’t ask Google for the answer if the answer is right there.”

To me, this is giving Google much more than your privacy, customer loyalty or ad exposure. Your are giving away some of your very basic abilities: if you only learn to search with Google, you will not learn how to reason on your own. Knowledge stored in your brain is of much better use than that on Google, because your brain is capable to perform much more powerful queries on it.

However, using a brain at its maximum power needs years of training, which is what one would really expect to receive in school. This training requires that your brain works on its own, without external help from a search engine, for more or less the same reason you will hardly become a strong cyclist if you train on a motorbike.

Schools should really be wary of too much computer time for children.

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#48

Post by xbmcuser »

Google I feel has broken Microsoft Office monopoly the difference will be felt 10 years from now though. Earlier everyone had grown up using Microsoft office now most children will grow up using Google Office suite. Though I still think Google sheets is still way behind Microsoft Excel. The day Google can build a convertor that can convert all excel files and macros etc I would shift to Google sheets currently I have too many years of work to move to Google sheets. The next generation of students growing up with Google won't have the same problems.

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#49

Post by bushin »

Eridrus wrote: post #35
jtraffic wrote: post #12

> I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don’t know why they are learning it This sounds disingenuous to me. There are lots of things kids and college students and adults learn that have no immediately foreseeable application. I'm sure most people on HN have thought about it. I wonder what the consensus is. My take is that learning how to use technology should not be a class…

This is probably taking his off-hand remarks too seriously, but I don't think anyone really uses the quadratic equation for anything. Quadratic functions definitely come up, and the derivation of the quadratic formula is definitely useful to learn, but the formula itself seems like a mathematical dead end. In general I think being forced to learn things with no clear application is part of why the school system fails…

According to the Abel–Ruffini theorem the formula for fourth-degree equations is a dead end :)

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#50

Post by eternalban »

mafribe wrote: post #16

“I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don’t know why they are learning it.” If Mr Rochelle cannot answer this question, and recommends just googling it, he might not be a good person to be anywhere near STEM eduction.

He is exactly where he is supposed to be. They do not want a thinking general population equipped with cognitive tools. That would be a disaster for that set and the end of their long running party.
Post reply on HN