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The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

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Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#371

Post by jules »

bitcurious wrote: post #47
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. Can you give examples? Are we talking evolution or addition?

In primary school there was a teacher who straight up hated me because I did the exercises too fast and this would cause extra work for him to keep me busy.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#372

Post by aidenn0 »

Since the primary thing my son has used his school-issued device for is playing games and watching youtube during class, this doesn't surprise me. Whether that's a failure of EdTech is, I suppose, up to interpretation.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#373

Post by andrei_says_ »

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 expand on threats re kids learning what they shouldn’t be? What are some scenarios for these to occur?

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#374

Post by albumen »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #360
seabass-labrax wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there any highly advanced economies that have "a formal assessment by the national engineering council" for software engineering or computer science? The EUR ING certificate from Engineers Europe can be awarded to those who have attained a degree in engineering, but also for those with "no exemplifying formal qualifications, but will have engaged in professional Career Learning and peer review via the individua…

And so what? Those gatekeepers might not accept a John Carmack or a Palmer Luckey (or Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or Vitalik Buterin, etc, etc), but how many of their certificate-holders have done any comparably significant engineering work?

Does it matter for them? Would any employer/investor, seeking to hire/fund carmack etc hold back because they didn't have a cert? The vanishingly few with those levels of talent stand out quite easily and don't need "proof of competency" to be evaluated.

For the _vast majority_ of others, certification allows employers to have externally-validated trust in an engineer who mightn't stand out as obviously.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#375

Post by ashoeafoot »

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…

What i also observed was that gamification of learning is violently opposed .The protestant work ethics demand that children suffer jaded while learning, the intrinsic motivation of games be damned. Then the dull overpriced app looses against the tiktok experience and a surprised pikachu face appears. Cant have minecraft with chemistry crafting cause the fun "has no place in school"

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#376

Post by braza »

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…

> 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 unclear. In other words, the most boring classical setup possible.

I had 14 years of this method and personally, it made me not like any school at all. It makes sense for Math and Grammar, but for most other disciplines (Life Sciences, Geography, Science) I think it's harmful to say at least.

At the time that I got access to Encarta 95 [1] for me was the tipping point that I could explore any topic and navigate until where my curiosity got me.

The missing part of the actual EdTech for me it's that they try to emulate the hiperpassive method of learning of a class with the only difference tgar the people are in the computer.

Now with augmented reality and virtual reality, it's a shame that we still do not have more immersive classes. For instance, would be great to have a class about dinosaurs with some kind of immersion, understand the cell's lifecycle using some VR, see the human body in more specific details, or even learn art via complete immersion.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG7hquyHncU

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#377

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

>conferred an unseemly advantage on the students who were able to take advantage of it,

Meanwhile private school...

Its all crabs in a bucket. Instead of suggesting that more schools do this to boost education, let's tear town the successful ones and pretend we're a meritocracy.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#378

Post by corimaith »

You know, for EdTech, STEM is one thing but the humanities already had a fully successful way of engaging kids in their concepts for decades, genre fiction.

While perhaps they aren't as deep or worthy of academic analysis, their stronger engagement is undeniable, they still do messages worth listening to, and lays down the path for stronger appreciation for more subtle world later. Which makes sense, you don't start out in Tolkien in Fantasy, you'd probably put off 95% of potential readers into boredom. We go with Sanderson, or Patrick Rothfuss then we go on to more complex classics.

The fact that kids are forced to start with Shakespeare is insanity and the exact opposite, and then teachers disdain people who predictably get put of by that culture. Why don't they change it is a question beyond me.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#379

Post by firejake308 »

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.

I understand education and healthcare, but how do trade skills and housing require human interaction? For housing especially, a lot of foreign/remote investors can own houses and just collect rent checks from tenants in a pretty hand-off manner. Housing is supply-limited, sure, and heavily regulated, sure, but I don't think it requires human interaction, and certainly not to the scale of education or healthcare.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#380

Post by Karrot_Kream »

lolinder wrote: post #304
Spivak wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

I went to one of those low-income, garbage schools. I grew up in poverty. I was very frustrated by this attitude when I was in school but with a few decades of hindsight I see why this issue is complicated: do you focus on helping your poorest students graduate and not fall into indigence or do you focus on helping your brightest escape the flywheel of poverty and enter the upper-middle class?

I'm curious what exactly this "unfair"ness is. (I'm being genuine, my partner works in EdTech but I don't and I have very little idea what happens behind the scenes.) My impression in my low-income school was that the parents barely had any idea what was going on and if anything pressured their kids to leave school asap so they could get jobs and bring money home.

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