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The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

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Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#191

Post by hibikir »

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.

Cost is a reason, but also there's social concerns. In the standardized system, all classmates share the same material, at the same speed. This shared experience disappears when every student is going at their own place, looking at a computer. This leads to the students being a bit more alienated from each other, and comparisons that go way past just a grade.

When a classmate at the same age is covering material that someone else did three years ago, you will get the tension from both sides, in the same way that it's not all that great socially to be on a traditional school and take classes 3 years ahead.

This issue disappears with all adult students, but around puberty, we are short tools whenever we don't have large enough cadres that we can just put all the kids fast at a given class all together.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#192

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

samvher wrote: post #92
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…

Seems like there might be some survivorship bias here, right? You teach students who made it to a top university because they thrived in the classical setup which is the most common one. Presumably your preferred teaching style aligning well with the classical approach also helped get you to that position. Personally I feel like my education/learning only really started to take off when resources like EdX and Courser…

Oh I agree 100%. Recorded lectures are a miracle for the 2x speed and buffering.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#193

Post by cmontella »

The problem with edtech is they make the key mistake of taking the curriculum intended for pen / paper / chalkboard and they just put it on a tablet and expect it to work.

Seymour Papert wrote "Mindstorms" about this very topic in the 80s when PCs were being put in classrooms. Back then, teachers took the multiplication tables they had been doing with pen and paper and just made kids do them on the computer. Teachers make the same mistake with iPads and iPhones. Papert's book talks about the right way to do it -- reformulate the entire concept of learning to include these new tools. Unfortunately, everything gets measured against the old standards, and when the new tools don't work as well to teach the old standards as the tools with which the old standards were designed to be taught, obviously the results are going to look bad.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#194

Post by dathinab »

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…

> We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.

are you US based?

so of the Nordic countries have implementing thins similar to what you describe as their normal form of education

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#195

Post by tombert »

ryanmcbride wrote: post #132
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…

I dropped out and became an engineer at almost the exact same time. I've thought about going back for a degree but I was always so horribly bad at school that it's scared me off. I was bad at it mainly for undiagnosed ADHD reasons that I'm now getting successfully treated, but I'm still worried that if I went back the same things would just happen again. I'd join a class, I'd already kind of know what they're teachin…

Nope, not an ad, I promise. I have negative things to say about WGU too, if that would help (mostly in their class selection for the CS degree).

Feel free to email me if you have any specific questions, I think you and I might be pretty similar in this regard.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#196

Post by pessimizer »

phyllistine wrote: post #71

This is largely just anti tech puritanism. I cant comment on the psych and neurological arguments, but the following line of reasoning > A pre-Covid survey exploring how US students aged 8-18 utilize digital technologies both inside and outside of school provides the answer (values below are per week) ...If we extrapolate and consider a typical U.S. academic school year of 36 weeks, these numbers suggest that student…

No, it's saying that if you use the same device to entertain yourself and to do homework, and you use it for entertainment 10x as often as you use it for homework, you'll get distracted then you're doing homework.

> It's like arguing that a student who likes reading Harry Potter, or Comic Books 2 hours a night is forming habits against the idea of using books for learning.

Books are separate objects, they are not a platform. It's saying that if you put a child's homework as a two page insert into a great comic book, the rest of the comic book will distract from the annoying, difficult insert.

The opposing theory is that the proximity of homework to comics will somehow make the homework fun. Homework is going to be hard and annoying no matter what you do, if it's not hard you're not learning anything from it.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#197

Post by red_admiral »

johndhi wrote: post #178
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…

can you give an example of someone being upset and what the thing they'd learned that they "shouldn't?" as a parent I find it confusing that I'd consider getting upset if my kid was learning 6th grade history as a 3rd grader (or 2nd grade art as a 3rd grader). what actual examples are there? the only examples of parents being upset about learning I'm aware of lately is, like, critical theory and marxism

Sex education? Not in the sense of the kids watching porn, but learning about contraception and STIs and that kind of thing.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#198

Post by insane_dreamer »

Ed tech, like most tech, is primarily focused on making money for the ed tech companies and their shareholders. Not at all surprised that it doesn't actually lift education standards.

As the parent of two kids in elementary and middle school, the one thing we learned from Covid is that children need live teachers. Yes, there are exceptional children who can self-teach with good materials (I have one such child) but most don't. And for those who do, you don't need fancy tech. I supplement my (advanced) child's education and primarily use books and pencils, and live coaching, as I've found those work better than any "adaptive" EdTech I've encountered. Finding it too easy? Just skip pages to the next chapter? Too hard? Find some extra review problems on the topic.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#199

Post by Nickersf »

Imagine blending the traditional educational structures into EdTech and using network engineering to clamp down what can be accessed in a classroom device to only the educational software modules needed. For example, you could put timers on how long each module is open. Give teachers the ability to override them and tap into each student individually if needed.

The issue is that the surrounding infrastructures would need to be much more competent than they currently are in education. I worked at an educational institution in the IT department, and the level of knowledge the IT staff had was abysmal. It was surprising that anything worked at all.

Additionally, not everything needs to be gamified. Somehow this notion that everything a child interacts with on a computer has to mimic a video game is a really narrow way of thinking. Instead, we could start with basic computer usage skills such as file management, and system configuration, and using core tools such as word processes and image manipulation software.

Instead of dumping kids into the world of Google which is a for-profit mechanism that is inherently designed to get people to click on stuff as much as possible, we actually as software developers need to re-think EdTech and have it be learning first.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#200

Post by theossuary »

lolinder wrote: post #78
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…

The incredibly frustrating thing about this is that this is always done in the name of "equity", but the result is that the system perpetuates the inequities that already exist. Because the public schools force kids into grade bands and don't allow children who are ahead to learn at their level, wealthy parents (and only wealthy parents) figure out ways to supplement or move their kids into schools that are appropria…

This is a silly thing to say. There's no evidence that edtech was forced to band students to grade levels due to equity. It's just as likely it happened due to Bush's Leave No Child Behind, or out of a desire for administrators to follow rules.
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