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The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

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Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#301

Post by snapcaster »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #144
Afton wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But you turned out fine right? you're mad you're not even further ahead than the normies or what?

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#302

Post by simonw »

jackbravo wrote: post #254
quacksilver wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sad WGU is only for US citizens. I hear lots of good things about it but can't join in.

Yes, I'm wondering if there are alternatives outside the US to get a full undergraduate or master's degree online at your own pace.

The UK has Open University which has been around for a long time (since 1969) and has a really good reputation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_University

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#303

Post by kkfx »

Allow me to correct a bit the window: commercial EdTech push is clearly failed. The idea of remote learning might be perfectly valid though.

An example:

- TED Talk alike video lessons (ok, without political biases), meaning teachers who craft lectio magistralis on video, mount them, improve them over time and share them, their colleagues and students will makes the best emerge;

- students see and take notes of the video lesson in the evening (the best moment for young brain), in the morning they arrange their note for an afternoon speech, a random selection of students will actually give the speech on what they learned to their teachers and their peers;

- FLOSS desktop as basic system needs, no mobile crap or webcrapplications in the soup, people have to learn technically sound systems not commercially interested modern-archaic crapware.

Try this and tell the results.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#304

Post by lolinder »

Spivak wrote: post #272
s3r3nity wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. Folks pushing for equity haven't read (or too young to have read) "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, and it shows. Instead of handicapping those who are ahead, we should intervene with those who are falling behind. Instead of enforcing equal outcomes, instead prioritize offering equal opportunity for every student to get the highest quality of education.

You're literally describing equity. The more interesting question what option will you choose when you're told that individual interventions as you describe are so expensive as to be infeasible. I don't think it's an issue of a person's politics, Republicans tried the exact same thing with No Child Left Behind. Is the more important thing the individual rising to their highest potential, or is the more important thin…

> The more interesting question what option will you choose when you're told that individual interventions as you describe are so expensive as to be infeasible.

The top-level-commenter's point is that this is not necessarily the case anymore—the whole promise of educational technology was that we could finally scale individual intervention to every child, but efforts to do so have met with stiff resistance. I also work in EdTech and I've seen exactly what the OP is talking about.

We're at the point where we could extend the flywheel to more children than ever by integrating it into the public school systems instead of having it be something that upper-middle class parents have to provide as a supplement, but the culture has so thoroughly embraced the idea that "getting ahead" is unfair that we're not allowed to systematize it even when doing so would benefit poor students the most.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#305

Post by phyllistine »

pessimizer wrote: post #196
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 p…

The Harry Potter and comic book argument also works for paper newspapers, the same object contains good, informative articles, opinion pieces etc, but also the comics page.

I am arguing that thinking that the same object cannot be used in two contexts is incredibly reductive and essentialist. They are stacking the books (by double counting time listening to music etc) to prove the idea that they are insistent on, that computers (which the article generalizes from desktops to chromebooks to iPads to smart watches) are essentially bad for learning, when this is not necessarily the case.

Students will continue to learn using computers, just as I will, because they are ridiculously effective for doing so.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#306

Post by czinck »

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.

To put a name on this, it's the Baumol effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect. Essentially, as productivity increases in most industries (from automation), it drives up labor costs in the industries that can't be automated (healthcare, education, performing arts, etc), which drives up the price of those services (healthcare), or drives down the quality to find a market clearing price (increasing student to teacher ratios).

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#307

Post by walterbell »

WillAdams wrote: post #214
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 best school which I ever attended rigorously divided academic and social classes --- academic classes (reading/English/math/science) were attended at one's ability level, while social classes (homeroom, phys. ed., social studies) were attended at one's grade level. There was a 4 year cap up through the 8th grade (so I was a 4th grader attending 8th grade English, math and science classes), and after that, the cap…

Amazing! Any articles on that school?

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#308

Post by seabass-labrax »

consteval wrote: post #220
jppope wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

These industries, more or less, need to be highly regulated because we've faced the alternative and it's worse. The quality of education went up SIGNFICANTLY when the state took more control over it.

Part of that is questionable, because the state gets to set the means by which the quality of education is measured. However, a more objective measure is the extent of education; certainly, the introduction of national education has always produced a much greater literacy rate.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#309

Post by smeej »

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…

They're not just banded into a range based on their grade. They're banded into a grade based on their age, even though "being within a year of the same age as somebody" becomes essentially meaningless as soon as you're out of school.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#310

Post by cwoolfe »

VSerge wrote: post #148
jspiral wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah! I used Dragon Box in my high school math class back in 2015. Loved it!
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