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The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

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Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#181

Post by luqtas »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #135
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…

I've never seen a teacher that was comfortably capable with even 50% of whatever EdTech they're handed. How are they supposed to maximize the use of it? I remember having to painfully sit through multi-hour presentations in which they'd explain how to use a hamburger menu to find the app settings, and half the participants furiously scribbled down notes so they wouldn't get lost later when they needed to find the set…

as a counter-point,

not a teacher nor related to but i heard around 400 hours of pedagogy podcasts, be it the science of it, small-talk about teaching & sometimes edtech software that seriously, most of the time just sounded as apps coming from the next guy trying to be the next silicon money maker by offering what Google Docs offers but in a fancy app or in the most complex cases, what Matrix/Discord offers for free or what Emacs org-mode could accomplish without diving far from the basics it provides. there was good apps & often these were backed/based by novel & evidence based ways of teaching

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#182

Post by doctorpangloss »

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…

> I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level... and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be"

A charitable way to read what you are saying is, "kids are not sufficiently challenged in school." But you are railing against an antagonist that is kind of vague. What, specifically, are you talking about?

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#183

Post by tqi »

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…

"let's use our very scarce resources helping the bottom kids... They're doing what they can with the resources they have."

I'm not convinced that resources are actually that scarce (the US has the second-highest amount spent per pupil among OECD countries). I think your teacher friends are doing the best with what they are being given by school boards, which is different. In many cities, the school board is considered a key stepping stone into bigger and better offices (city council, boards of supervisors, mayor, etc), which means it often attracts folks who are trying to leverage their positions to take stances on issues that have nothing to do with education. I think attacking gifted programs / tracking is one example of this, which are cast as perpetuating inequality, despite evidence that they help students across the board.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#184

Post by leereeves »

dpkirchner wrote: post #134
sixo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equity really isn't the ideology doing this, except in a few cases, it's something else. I'd speculate the dominant effect is that people tend to dislike and resist what they have a hard time imagining: there's a strong bias towards easily-administrated uniformity, and ppl tend to enforce what they know and what they were brought up in themselves

Agreed, and that strong bias is likely driven by cost, not the equity boogeyman that causes many a jerked knee.

Can you name any examples of gifted programs being shut down, citing any reason other than equity?

The examples I've seen, in New York, Seattle, and LA, all cited equity as the reason.

Edit: I'm responding here to the comment "It's easier to keep the top kids down than it is to lift the bottom kids up."

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#185

Post by nadermx »

ggm wrote: post #168
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…

In some economies, to be an engineer means a chartered engineer, which demands completion of a formal assessment by the national engineering council. I'm not throwing shade on you, my degree from 1982 was 1 year too early to make certification in my field and I have worked for 42 years in software and systems without charter status. I am however cautious of using the word. I call myself a computer scientist even when…

So much this. I studied and got a degree in civil engineering and only call myself studied as an engineer because I never apprenticed or took the professional engineer exam. Despite doing a ton of software now I still feel it would be an insult to my friends who are P.E.'s to call myself an engineer.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#186

Post by dyauspitr »

brainwipe wrote: post #155
dyauspitr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion without exams, kids will never solidify what they learn. It’s usually pretty easy to think you have a solid grasp of some thing until you’re actually asked to solve a brand new problem.

Then I would ask anyone to keep building on knowledge rather than training for an arbitrary benchmark. Filling your short-term memory with knowledge to be then dumped straight after will get you a good exam mark but doesn't mean you have anything close to a solid grasp. Most schools (in the UK in particular) optimise for grade outcome because that's how they are judged, that's not the same thing as being good at a ta…

It kind of is. I’m a firm believer in that knowledge comes from doing. Even the trades use exams. If you want to become a welder, you have to weld five particular welds, then get graded. There’s no better way to gauge someone’s proficiency at something while also letting that person find out what their weaknesses are.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#187

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #20

The teaching method I find best is a teacher explaining and writing with chalk on the blackboard, and the students taking handwritten notes on paper, asking whenever something is not clear. In other words, the most boring classical setup possible. Of course all the nuances and little details make all the difference: board picture, structure, teacher personality, pacing, choice of topic, interaction, motivation, excit…

I mean, I’d argue the chalkboard method often can’t visualize things as well as modern educational stuff like 3blue1brown, which is the kind of thing I often supplement for my relatively dry university material. For tons of things, well-produced videos are more effective, especially when compared to a class with maybe a hundred fifty people in it where questions are discouraged during lecture.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#188

Post by bell-cot »

tejohnso wrote: post #99
panzagl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife had one kid scream for 10 minutes yesterday and another throw a chair. Another just sat there and didn't do a thing for 7 hours. The Little House/Christmas Story model hasn't been able to work for a long time.

> My wife had one kid scream for 10 minutes yesterday Did she actually allow this kid to disrupt the entire class for 10 minutes? Isn't there a responsibility to all the other students that they should have a reasonable learning environment? I remember being sent to the office for a lot less than that.

My impression is that both a teacher's power to do much anything about such behavior, and the rights of the non-problematic students to a viable classroom environment, are either gone, or "going, going", in most parts of America.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#189

Post by tombert »

ggm wrote: post #168
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…

In some economies, to be an engineer means a chartered engineer, which demands completion of a formal assessment by the national engineering council. I'm not throwing shade on you, my degree from 1982 was 1 year too early to make certification in my field and I have worked for 42 years in software and systems without charter status. I am however cautious of using the word. I call myself a computer scientist even when…

That's fair, I say the word "engineer" because that was the job title at the companies.

Generally when people have asked what I am, I just say something kind of hand-wavey like "Eccentric" or something.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#190

Post by doctorpangloss »

devin wrote: post #125
Parfait__ wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's weird that you're not telling us what "things they shouldn't be" are. There are plenty of things I think kids shouldn't be learning.

I doubt they were talking about any kind of "adult" content. The situation they're referring to is more like "your second grader should be focused on multiplication, not long division."

I'm not sure why the commenter is being downvoted. I too can make a drama, literally capitalizing one of the worst words ever invented, "actually," about a vague antagonist, and rile people up, letting their imaginations fill in whatever boogieman they feel wronged them in school. What specifically is the situation? I don't want to speculate.
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