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Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom

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201–210 of 454 posts

Re: Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom

#201
Anecdotally talking to teacher friends they have significant app fatigue. Multiple apps, crappy chrome books in the class room, they are basically a low grade system admin and IT support on top of trying to teach. Everything is benchmarked and thus gamed.

The older teachers often would rather retire than learn yet another ed tech system. They just want to teach kid not be screen dispensers.

Really feels like all the ed tech is snake oil. Education outcomes are dropping. Elite college are needing more and more remedial classes. Obviously there are multiple factors at play but we should remove complexity unless it delivers decisive results.

Re: Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom

#202
My daughter is in 5th grade and absolutely despises iReady assessments. She complains how much she doesn't like the screen and prefers paper tests. Her scores reflect it too. She does terribly on iReady assessments which is used for a TON of metrics (I think unfairly..?) but give her the same test on paper and she'd do remarkably better.

Re: Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'. I am in the US and there seems to be a FOMO plague infecting our school system when it comes to technology. In practice it seems more destructive to the child.

Luddite move. Buddy AI is here to stay. You remind me of my 2nd grade teacher who said 'we wont have calculators in our pockets'.

And s/he was right. Most students who were brought up with calculators in math class cannot do basic math without one today. When shopping in groceries, they have no idea if one product costs more than another by weight. They're easy to bamboozle with the simplest misrepresentations of numbers. Is one choice of product really better than another, fractionally, or corrected for a shifted baseline? They don't know and can't use basic algebra to find out.

This is bad -- an F grade for the education system that let them slide by without learning an essential skill. The chinese aren't this lazy. And if we persist in not learning this, America's future will regress to us asking them, "Do you want fries with that?"

Re: Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom

#204
I support this, up to the point where a second-grader has to carry four textbooks and four exercise books around on their walk to school; from the rucksack weight to body weight ratio they might as well be training for the marines.

Ipads are not the solution - that gets you back to screen/computer mode in the classroom.

e-readers/ e-paper tablets might be worth a try. (Just please don't make every child have a mandatory amazon account to link with their school kindle.) It would be interesting to know whether the "books+hand notes > screens + typing" comprehension studies have something to say about e-paper (I don't think this has been done yet).

My own experience, even to this day, is that it's easier for me to learn a new language or technology from a book compared to on a screen, even if the digital version lets me work on actual code: if I can, I first read the book and take notes, then I do the online version.

Re: Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom

#205
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parents do not have to be "experts in chilhood development" to know what is best for their children. Especially experts in their fields like the manufacturing of alcohol, guns or other products universallly considered dangerous.

So, if parents can rely on a a century of more of science showing the negative impacts of guns, tobacco, and alcohol on children… they can rely on vibes and politicians for evidence of harm from screens? I’m not even arguing with you. I’m just disappointed in how quickly so many on HN throw out all pretense of being interested in data as soon as a personal hot button issue comes up. It’s human nature I guess, but sti…

You feel pain? Doctor says it's probably in your head because statistically you shouldn't. -- Based on countless true stories.

Data is map, not terrain. It can explain some of the quantifiable world, not all of it. Common sense can also fill some of the gaps, some of the time. And there remains plenty still that's too entropic for our grasp. Waiting for data to speak is not always the best move. Heck, it might even sometimes be the worst. It seems this is a lesson we collectively keep forgetting over and over, despite the endless list of data-backed "facts" that, in hindsight, it turns out we were wrong or short-sighted about. Apparently, that too is human nature.

Re: Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'. I am in the US and there seems to be a FOMO plague infecting our school system when it comes to technology. In practice it seems more destructive to the child.

>I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'. Eventually everything that can be learned from a book will be done much better by machines, so for humans to have any chance of being employable they'll need to develop the soft skill of working with intelligent machines.

Just as "there is no royal road to mathematics", no AI can do your learning for you. The need for memorization of essential math identities (like multiplication tables and use of fractions) or rules of grammar (like verb conjugation or use of anaphora) will never be enhanced by AI. There is an essential role for good old fashioned rote learning that can't be avoided. To pretend AI will not impede that learning is a fool's errand, literally.

Re: Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom

#208
post #189

The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents wanting their children to have the same experiences they did, i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not really about improving learning. If the goal is actually to do a better job teaching kids, we need to better align incentives/minimize bureaucracy/measure outcomes bette…

Yes, there are a lot of people who wants it backwards due to their own experiences.

That said, we had some vision of learning with tailored gamified learning apps, and that has come to be in a certain cases but imho it sometimes also provided a sense of "false" accomplishments as it mostly helped with rote memorization rather than principle understanding.

The apps are in summarization often a rote thing rather than something making for deep exploration, that very forward kids might've benefited from something more "free" but a majority will end up not benefiting.

And often the practical outcome of "digital learning" in Sweden instead ended up being schools trying to save money on books by splashing random PDF's about subjects into teams folders.

Trying to help my kids on subjects often ended up being scouring those teams folders and try to reverse-engineer what the important parts and dependencies of a course has been and then go through that, with a textbook you can just flip through the relevant pages of the chapters they're working on to test my kid and go through what they were having trouble with.

Now a _very_ good teacher might build up a useful corpus (but it takes time/work) and worse teachers/schools (sadly a consequence of Swedens education privatization) often create an worse outcome than with books.

To summarize, Good real textbooks thus gives a far better chance of holding a good baseline level for education, whilst digital tools potentially could do good but in practice creates a risk for a really bad baseline without _all_ parts of the education system being good.

Re: Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom

#209
post #189

The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents wanting their children to have the same experiences they did, i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not really about improving learning. If the goal is actually to do a better job teaching kids, we need to better align incentives/minimize bureaucracy/measure outcomes bette…

What? There's been a bunch of research about how the tactile and 3D experience of touching a book assists in learning and knowledge retention, as does handwriting.

The more senses you engage while learning a thing the deeper and more effective the learning is pretty accepted knowledge at this point.

Re: Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom

#210

I remember that - even though Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a replacement to the 'heavy schoolbooks kids had to carry all day' - he never allowed his children to use iPads. I bet Zuckerberg doesn't allow his children to use social media. And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI chatbots. What does that tell us?

As troublesome digital tools are in practice, the stories of "tech execs refusing digital tools for their kids" is a trope often promoted/created by kindly put fringe actors.
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