Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

afterbabel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 528 posts

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#441

Post by mixmastamyk »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #391
rpcope1 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WGU is a real and legit, and probably one of the top things I would consider if needed to get a bachelors degree while working as a now middle aged adult.

I'm not sure I'd call it legit. As someone who hiring for low-to-mid level IT roles the caliber of WGU students vs. real brick and mortar schools is vast, like vast . There are edge cases, but if you didn't have the grades and SATs to do real college you're not going to be competitive in this market. I'd take a WGU grad but would put that degree under a VA Tech, RPI, UC Davis, etc. for sure, and way under Stanford or…

Lots of folks do IT and learn on the job, so why would going to (even a mediocre) school hurt any?

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#442

Post by randomdata »

dfabulich wrote: post #216
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…

"Holding kids back" is not the reason EdTech fails at scale. The problem is that people who succeed in tech are able to effectively educate themselves, alone, without a dedicated human teacher supervising them or a group of student peers. (You need this skill to succeed in tech, learning new APIs/languages from written materials and online videos.) The techies who build/fund EdTech wrongly assume that everyone could…

> The problem is that people who succeed in tech are able to effectively educate themselves

Not by magic, though. Those who take an interest in tech are forced to learn how to educate themselves in order to fulfill their interest in tech. The same story applies to many other interests. Of course, it is possible one will never develop any interests...

> But for most students, fitting in with peers and earning the respect of their teacher is the only reason they're bothering to learn at all.

But is socialization the only thing most children can take an interest in, or does sticking children in these rigid school environments take away from them discovering other interests? In other words, is this just a symptom of them being in the wrong environment, rather than the nature if it?

Furthermore, if socialization really is the only interest, why can't it still be used to force learning how to educate oneself? If fitting in and admiration are a compelling reason to learn in general, why would it not be equally compelling towards learning how to learn?

> Banding kids into grades is the only thing making most kids succeed.

Of course, that questions if most kids should succeed. What for? Being from the most educated region in the most educated nation, it's not clear what we actually get for it. The popular tropes don't hold up. Other parts of the world are much more progressive, economically vibrant, healthier, etc. It is hardly the worst place in the world, but a relative backwater compared to other much less educated places.

You don't have to go back many generations to find populations not exposed to much, if any, formal education and they don't seem to have ended up any worse off than the average person today. I expect there is a strong case to be made that people with a vision can leverage educational resources as a force multiplier to propel themselves well beyond what those earlier generations could have ever dreamed of been capable of, but for the average Joe just trying to fit in...? Perhaps we are missing the forest for the trees.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#443

Post by bigger_cheese »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #283
Swizec wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you give examples? Are we talking evolution or addition? Not GP but I can share a personal experience from high school: I was extremely advanced in English class. Like would literally finish a 45min exam in 10min and get an A. This caused problems for the teacher. For one I was constantly bored and disruptive of others around me because I was bored and needed friends to chat with. But this made their grades suf…

I was the same in math and science. I remember being told “You are not supposed to know that, and who told you?” angrily. My moment of disillusionment with authority.

I had something similar happen to me. But it sounds like my teacher handled it differently. I used to watch a lot of documentaries. There was a public access TV channel that would air educational content, I'd occasionally watch it for "fun".

After watching a documentary about Conic Section I asked my math teacher "When are we going to learn about Ellipses and Hyperbolas?" This was in year 7 (so age 12/13), We were learning about perimeter and area at the time I found it dead easy.

He patiently explained to me that we needed to build up to those topics and it wasn't something we could just skip ahead to. looking back on it I think he handled me pretty well. He didn't discourage me and he justified things in a way that 12 year old me could understand that there was a reason we covered the topics in the order that we did.

Conic sections would end up being taught in 11th Grade when I was 17.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#444

Post by disqard »

pier25 wrote: post #31

I worked for a couple of years in edTech and the reality is that all you need is a good teacher, pen and paper, and a chalkboard.

Would you be willing to share any (anonymized) anecdote(s) that helped you see this reality?

I'll share that I saw how much EdTech was infested by folks trying to leverage "gamification", and I read Kentaro Toyama's "Geek Heresy". That, and other events like Sebastian Thrun admitting "We have a lousy product" (on MOOCs) was enough to disabuse me of any notion that our generation's EdTech hype would prove any different than its predecessors (education over TV, or via Radio).

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#445

Post by disqard »

jppope wrote: post #139

Pretty fluffy article for someone who is a PhD, MEd, (AND Best Selling Author!). I read the first half and skimmed the second half because the author couldn't make a point somewhere in the giant wall of text. Even if there was a point in there, the subject is too broad which is another question I have... Anyway, in a broad (meaningless) rebuttal, I wouldn't say EdTech has failed- everyone I know has learned how to do…

In TFA, "EdTech" refers to things like grade-school subjects: e.g. learning to do fractions. In this respect, replacing human teachers with software/apps is what's being debated. The consequence of this replacement is a sharp drop in face-to-face engagement, and the substitution thereof with 1:1 screen time.

You provided some examples of auto-didacts teaching themselves useful life skills via YT. I think these are good resources for such folks -- I know I've benefited from them myself -- but it's hardly in the same ballpark.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#446

Post by pokerface_86 »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #167
kranke155 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Montessori worked on this problem, and did a fairly good job, but somehow it's still under the radar that we could revolutionise our educational system according an already proven model.

Montessori is more of a brand. People definitely perceive it to be the way you are describing, but really, if there were something old and certain, it would be widely used. On the flip side, there are lots of pedagogical practices that are proven, and this article is trying to show you how they are probably being disrupted by cell phones.

?? i went to a montessori school and i learned how to read and write poetry, cursive, tie my shoes, use scissors, all 4 mathematical operations, how to read novels, hell, i used to read our encyclopedia for fun, did a project on the bernoulli principal, and more, all before 2nd grade. no one i have ever met had an identical experience

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#447

Post by j45 »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #24
crimsoneer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting follow-up here... there is no reason these effects should be restricted to children. Like, if children can't learn with devices in a classroom, it suggests executives can't learn in an office (and might give a hint as to why we haven't seen expected productivity benefits driven by it). But again, if the effect was this strong, I'd really expect to see broader evidence (even just at a national level ba…

There have been consistent reporting for two decades that screens are leading to measurable reductions in attention span. Three decades of reports linking the internet and digital culture with mental health issues. What evidence is missing?

I suspect it's not screens alone, but whether one is creating with screens or consuming with them. Different parts of the brain.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#448

Post by forgetfreeman »

kazinator wrote: post #418
forgetfreeman wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People with an Internet- connected screen appear to have a short attention span because they have instant access to a multitude of things that they're interested in, competing for their attention with whatever you want them to be focusing on. This is incorrect. There have been repeated studies that show a distinct decline in individuals ability to consume and process long-form text. Folks brains are literally remod…

But that's more like a developmental situation in the individual having to do with their education. I would expect, say, individuals not going to school past grade two showing a declined ability to multiply 12 by 11. People's handling of long form text may be off from several decades ago, but it's still better than their illiterate ancestors 500 years ago.

It has literally nothing to do with education. It's the brain's own neuroplasticity responding to overstimulation:

https://longevity.stanford.edu/lifestyle/2024/05/30/what-exc...

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#449

Post by SoftTalker »

SergeAx wrote: post #432
SoftTalker wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big difference though between how you're able to leverage online learning as an adult with at least some real-world life experience vs. what a 3rd-grader can do. I am a strong advocate for zero technology in schools until high school. One thing that is rarely mentioned is that schools that issue technology to students and use it in the classroom now need to have a hardware, software, and network support person at e…

Instructional staff doesn't scale. One teacher can teach only one class at a time. The whole idea of EdTech is to scale learning beyond that.

Except it doesn't work, as the subject article demonstrates. At least not for primary education.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#450

Post by naijaboiler »

ndiddy wrote: post #331
dfabulich wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Holding kids back" is not the reason EdTech fails at scale. The problem is that people who succeed in tech are able to effectively educate themselves, alone, without a dedicated human teacher supervising them or a group of student peers. (You need this skill to succeed in tech, learning new APIs/languages from written materials and online videos.) The techies who build/fund EdTech wrongly assume that everyone could…

You're absolutely right, even in this thread there's a ton of "I was able to teach myself, so clearly everyone would be geniuses if only the system didn't hold them back" posts. It's the same thing that led to a lot of the problems with the OLPC project (check out the book "The Charisma Machine" if you're interested in that subject).

It’s sickening to read over and over again. It Jide’s reinforced my belief that tech folks are some of the most ignorant on social problems
Post reply on HN