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The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

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Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#141

Post by [deleted] »

Yhippa wrote: post #95
basilgohar wrote: post #68

As someone who's worked in EdTech for around two decades, I know why people think this. It's what a lot people here have already said. Education is what is failing, EdTech didn't magically solve this. Just like money, you can't just throw tech at education and expect it to solve anything. There are too many profitable incentives to poor education that are conspiring to perpetuate it. An ill-educated populace is easie…

> There are too many profitable incentives to poor education that are conspiring to perpetuate it. An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism, and won't hold their leaders as accountable. Power generally resides with those who benefit from an ill-educated populace, so anything that would actually help educate children and people at large is discouraged. I want to believe this but…

[deleted]

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#142

Post by cwdegidio »

el_benhameen wrote: post #124
tombert wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit tangential but related. I dropped out of college in 2012 and was one of the very lucky few who managed to find software engineering work almost immediately [1]. I had a bit of a complex about not having a degree, and a few times I tried going back only to drop out again because I would get bored; by the time I had gone back, I already knew enough stuff to be qualified as an engineer, and as such I didn't feel l…

Also tangential, but do you feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth out of the WGU program? I have also been employed as degree-less an engineer for a long time (I have a BA in an unrelated subject), and I’ve occasionally thought about going back to get a BS or a masters in comp sci. Partially for the signaling aspect, and partially to fill in any knowledge gaps that I’m unaware of. WGU’s pacing and pricing sound…

Not OP, but I think it was worth it. Within a year of getting my BSCS, I added almost 25% to my salary. It gave me the leverage I needed to push for more. For someone coming into it with no experience I can’t say how well it will play out, but for a degreeless developer, I think it just checks that one box and helps.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#143

Post by fny »

basilgohar wrote: post #68

As someone who's worked in EdTech for around two decades, I know why people think this. It's what a lot people here have already said. Education is what is failing, EdTech didn't magically solve this. Just like money, you can't just throw tech at education and expect it to solve anything. There are too many profitable incentives to poor education that are conspiring to perpetuate it. An ill-educated populace is easie…

> An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism, and won't hold their leaders as accountable.

This is a reactionary take.

Math, science, and basic language skills do not lead to political upheaval, and are incredibly valuable skills to the capital class. Leadership would be more apt to propagandize social studies and suppress dissent.

China easily comes to mind as a counter argument.

I'd apply Hanlon's razor: education languishes due to poor funding, lack of competition, and low salaries that attract mediocre teachers. We don't even properly fund development for blue collar jobs! Also the problem compounds since one generations students become the next generations teachers.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#144

Post by BeFlatXIII »

Afton wrote: post #106
michaelrpeskin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's "equity" for you. We can't be unfair and give someone something that makes them better. It's easier to keep the top kids down than it is to lift the bottom kids up.

To be fair, it is less about "keeping top kids down" and more about "let's use our very scarce resources helping the bottom kids". Put that way it seems less malicious, and more like probably the right thing to do over all, while still being extremely frustrating if you are, or are the parent of, a 'top kid'. I know that in Seattle, I've been very frustrated with all the talk and promise of our school to provide enri…

As one of those frustrated top kids, it taught me a well-earned contempt for my neurotypical peers. Frustration at spending the resources on them when it didn't seem to move the needle.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#145

Post by jppope »

mbesto wrote: post #121
basilgohar wrote: post #68

As someone who's worked in EdTech for around two decades, I know why people think this. It's what a lot people here have already said. Education is what is failing, EdTech didn't magically solve this. Just like money, you can't just throw tech at education and expect it to solve anything. There are too many profitable incentives to poor education that are conspiring to perpetuate it. An ill-educated populace is easie…

> It's what a lot people here have already said. Education is what is failing, EdTech didn't magically solve this. To expand this more globally - anything that requires human interaction fails at scale. Healthcare, trade skills, education, housing, etc. is all "failing" to some degree no matter how much technology we throw at it. The costs continually go up and the value isn't paired to it.

Seems like you're listing highly regulated industries not human interaction.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#146

Post by doctorpangloss »

LargeWu wrote: post #65
ak_111 wrote: post #38

Could it be that part of the failure is that EdTech companies are focused on replacing the pedagogical aspect of schools, but the main utility of schools for parents is not pedagogy - it is a daycare centre for kids while parents go on about their careers?

"it is a daycare centre for kids while parents go on about their careers?" This is the kind of thing that could only be said by somebody who is not a parent. There might be a minority of parents for whom this is true, but I know zero other parents who don't care whether their kids are learning.

> I know zero other parents who don't care whether their kids are learning.

Nobody said that.

While I don't think you deserve to be downvoted, the reason you are is that you are complaining about generalization ("the kind of thing that could only be said by somebody who is not a parent") while immediately generalizing, implicitly, that commenters on Hacker News are not parents. I am a parent, I care about my son learning, and the experiences I've seen for very young children (less than 5) are very close to daycare, even at the very best schools.

It isn't saying much that very young children learn best with one-on-one time with a very engaged adult, which isn't something you can do in daycare. Some people believe that learning occurs because of a specific ethnic heritage, using a pile of money, or a piece of technology. If these are your beliefs, then it can be hard to make any progress whatsoever.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#147

Post by areoform »

empressplay wrote: post #27

It seems the real issue here is that school devices should be locked down better? It's honestly shocking they aren't already. Why on Earth would kids be allowed to access TikTok over their school network? Mind-boggling, seriously.

I get culture shock on HN these days. People on HN advocating for locking down school computers? What in the dystopia is happening?

I'm personally glad that they're circumventing these "protections." At least, they'll learn something along the way.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#148

Post by VSerge »

jspiral wrote: post #75
tombert wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit tangential but related. I dropped out of college in 2012 and was one of the very lucky few who managed to find software engineering work almost immediately [1]. I had a bit of a complex about not having a degree, and a few times I tried going back only to drop out again because I would get bored; by the time I had gone back, I already knew enough stuff to be qualified as an engineer, and as such I didn't feel l…

WGU was a customer when I was at Learning Objects, they always impressed me visionary and outcome oriented. glad to hear a positive anecdote more than 10 years later.

I think many people have very positive experiences and data, at scale, speaking to the kind of success Edtech can have.

I was involved with a study by the Center for Game Science (University of Washington), led by Zoran Popovic (of Foldit fame), with over 40 000 kids in the US, Norway and France participating, from grade 1 to the end of high school. I think the numbers were 93% of kids managing to achieve mastery in solving an equation for x in one hour and a half of this, starting from first principles in their learning (it didn't matter what they knew before or didn't).

This was met by downright hostility from some schools systems, with the institutions saying in essence "it's impossible kids learn like this", ignoring empirical evidence in the process. Teachers on the other hand, thought it was great and had a profoundly positive impact on their students. Nordics seemed to be less averse to letting their students progress along this path. Ultimately the company that had developped the game went towards more traditional school publishing with paper methods + digital tools, which in my opinion is vastly less efficient, but that has the huge benefit of being something school systems know how to buy and implement.

This is meaningful when looking at the promise of edtech, because a lot of what's called edtech is frankly of poor quality, but some things are pure gems, and saying edtech has failed like the author of this article is not only misguided but dangerous in the extreme for the kids, often from underprivileged backgrounds, who benefit the most from this kind of cooperative, adaptive, and gamified approaches.

These approaches don't feel like school, they don't feel complicated, and kids can just have fun and explore and learn logical rules, verbalize what they are doing with one another and help one another, progress at their own pace, and end up learning stuff considered "hard" when it really isn't, like math, physics, chemistry, etc, ie logical ruleset that can be represented with meaningful manipulatives and made into a fun learning journey.

Here's a 5 minutes vid the center for Game Science published at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdrraeJyhoQ Some numbers here: https://dragonbox.com/about/algebra-challenge

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#149

Post by kranke155 »

donatj wrote: post #10

I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level. The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured. We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaint…

Montessori worked on this problem, and did a fairly good job, but somehow it's still under the radar that we could revolutionise our educational system according an already proven model.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#150

Post by brainwipe »

LargeWu wrote: post #45
brainwipe wrote: post #32

IMO education is still built around Victorian structures and needs to be reworked from examinations downwards. Examinations are an exercise in being good at examinations, not proficiency in the subject. Once you strip that away the you wind back all the structures that feed it. You can see this working at schools designed for the neuro diverse. Those students simply can't sit and listen to a teacher all day, so each…

What, specifically, is an example of an exam not measuring proficiency? If an exam is well designed, the student will need to figure out what is being asked and use their mastery to provide an answer.

Exams are a poor measure of proficiency. Proficiency is gained by doing and stretching a skill over time. You can measure that in small increments than a periodic exam. At the end of a period, a student would have a body of work to demonstrate proficiency rather than relying on a single day.

When I taught at university there was a disparity between exam grades and the physical body of work they had submitted over the years. You'd see the grade and be shocked the did so badly. The grade reflected proficiency in examinations, not in the subject.

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