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

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281–290 of 454 posts

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

#281

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?

2 of your 3 pieces of evidence are your guesses ("I bet", "I assume").

That tells us more about you than about tech CEOs.

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

#282
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. A public school in NY suburbs in the early 1990s.

Well... I am sure someone made good money out of that. In Slovenia, a post-Yugoslavian country, the school library coordinated a textbook borrowing scheme, where they would own all the material and lend it to students each year. Parents would pay a small "subscription", so each year or two one subject would get new books.

That's how it worked in USSR in 80s. The school supplied the books and they were the ones that the previous grade used. If they got busted beyond all repair only then they'd be replaced with new.

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You dont need to learn to touch type to avoid searching out each key individually. You just need experience. I was taught touch typing as a kid. None of it took. I dont use the home row. I developed into the gamer home row hand positioning for typing.

I guess this is technically correct in the same way that stenographers and highly-ergonomic alternative-layout keyboard users also don’t “touch type” according to a strict definition. If you’re capable of typing quick enough to publicly take meeting notes, then it’s fine. But if you can’t, I could see it being professionally embarrassing in the same way that not understanding basic arithmetic could be professionally…

Zen Z doesn't types to store knowledge. They would rather record the lecture or the meeting. I put aside my fone and put it on record while I am carefully listening to the meeting. I'm not even zen z. I would rather write than type

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

#284
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing this at work but so far no one has explained what “learning ai” actually means. It seems to just be nonsense like those people selling prompt recipes or claiming to be prompt engineers. No one needs training in prompting AI. I could understand if they meant a deeper layer of integrating tech with systems but all they ever mean is typing things in to a text box.

You absolutely need prompting skills to use AI usefully. You need to know how to eliminate sycophancy, how to ask for and check primary sources, and how to use follow-up questions. I've been using AI for some legal issues, and it's been incredibly good at searching for case law and summarising the key implications of various statutes - much more efficient than web search, with direct links to the primary sources it f…

> It's not so much a prompting problem as a critical thinking and verbal reasoning problem.

And that means you have to learn without AI to understand when the AI is wrong. This is just how its dangerous to use a calculator without knowing math since you wont spot when you entered things wrongly etc.

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

#285
post #268

Impossible for a Vocational Tech teacher in the networking field. How can I teach computers without computers?

(Maybe use some of those skills to figure out a way to read more than the headline.) I recommend reading at least the closing line: This means introducing digital technology at later ages after basic reading and other skills have been achieved.

Which shifts things from "before high school" to "in primary school and then gradual introduce aspects on it".

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

#286

They forgot the ballpoint pen. In 1950 Sweden flowing ink and cursive was the mark of a civilized man. I remember teacher using magnifier to detect cheaters as evil ballpoint technology advanced.

Evil ballpoint is evil. I remember everyone chewing up plastic ballpoint pens into unusablily and also using them as blowguns with chewed paper, whereas nothing of the sort was possible before their introduction. (however, flowing ink also had its uses :) )

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is poor teaching. My kids were almost always allowed calculators (always after the age of 8 or 9) and they can do all that and a lot more (my older daughter is an electronics engineer, in R & D).

For one thing you do not need to do much arithmetic to do algebra, for another estimating and getting a feel for numbers is not the same skill as learning a bunch of arithmetic techniques. No one is going to do long division while shopping.

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

#288
post #199

I worked in EdTech about a decade ago and our education/pedagogy experts were already talking about this. They also talked a lot about how handwriting is super important for cognitive development. After working on that company for a couple of years I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake. One of the reasons I left. In a decade or two the long term consequences of inundating kids with tech an…

You're assuming tech will ever be removed.

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

#289
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids Any scientific backing that screens are at fault? I don't think so. E-ink tablets do exist. When I'm having children, I'm buying them a remarkable with all the books scanned. Sure, they still need physical sheets of paper and a pen, but they don't have to carry 2-3 kgs of literature. The major reason against digital literature is…

remarkable also, as the name implies, can be used as a notebook ;-)

Yes, but you aren't going to give your teacher a remarkable to take home. Hence a sheet of paper comes in handy :)

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 f…

I do not see the point of either of your examples of rote learning. What do you lose if you do not know the? You will pick up enough of multiplication tables through doing maths, native speakers of a language will conjugate correctly without memorising (you do need to do it if learning foreign languages). Anaphora is a technique which cannot really be rote learned - and most people to try to use it do so badly and just sound repetitive.
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