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

61–70 of 528 posts

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#61

Post by parpfish »

tivert wrote: post #15

I think people, and society in general, need to be a lot more careful about buying into hype, and prematurely adopting hyped tech. Would you buy (or fly in) a "revolutionary" new jet, that (by the way) hasn't been tested, but it's makers are really hopeful it will be safe and perform better than other jets? IMHO, changes in education need to be studied for at least ten years, then rolled out slowly with much more ske…

i think part of the reason computers swept into classrooms so quickly is that we had a generation of old folks seeing their jobs get computerized and they (correctly) felt that computer-literacy would be essential for a huge swath of the workforce.

however, this group also had a very hard time learning how to use computers later in their career and felt "wow, this is really hard. we need to be very proactive about teaching this to kids".

it was well intentioned, but i think they really REALLY overestimated the need for 'teaching computer literacy' because: a) we've gotten a lot better with UX so computers are easy to use b) the older generations difficulty was more related to unlearning old ways and transitioning rather than difficulty inherent to computers

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#62

Post by Abekkus »

debacle wrote: post #5

The article doesn't match the conclusion. The buried lede: procrastinating with the Internet is easier than procrastinating without the Internet. If you care about your kids, control their access to the brain rotting aspects of technology like a tyrant.

I sympathize with this goal, but I'm not seeing what to do instead of screens for kids. I've been looking, hard. Suburbia makes this really hard. try getting three kids to sports with two working parents, and thats only half the time you're trying to fill. Try to get any kind of regular playtime with other families who are busier than you. We kid ourselves we're keeping them off of algorithms, but craft materials only take them so far, and the rest will be filled with TV and video games when we are stuck working.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#64

Post by vundercind »

jansan wrote: post #14

Router-manufacturer should be mandated to implement a functionality that allows applying a whitelist filter for certain times of a day. It would have helped me a lot as a parent to make sure that my children can only access Desmos, online Office sites etc. while they are supposed to do their homework.

Apple devices, both iOS and macOS, have great and fairly easy to use remotely-managed parental controls (Microsoft may too, IDK) that can do things like apply all sorts of limits to allowed websites or apps during certain periods of the day, but god-damned school-provided-and-managed devices blow holes through any plan to use that for those purpose. Even if the school sends home devices in your ecosystem, you won't be able to configure the parental controls on them, and their settings are always way too loose.

Which leaves you with your network as the place you have to manage all of that, which is a much bigger pain in the ass.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#65

Post by LargeWu »

ak_111 wrote: post #38

Could it be that part of the failure is that EdTech companies are focused on replacing the pedagogical aspect of schools, but the main utility of schools for parents is not pedagogy - it is a daycare centre for kids while parents go on about their careers?

"it is a daycare centre for kids while parents go on about their careers?"

This is the kind of thing that could only be said by somebody who is not a parent. There might be a minority of parents for whom this is true, but I know zero other parents who don't care whether their kids are learning.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#66

Post by boohoo123 »

The teachers, the tools, the curriculum are not the problem. The No Child Left Behind Act is the problem. When everyone passes regardless if they learned anything or not, literacy skills are going to go down. You used to stay in a grade until you passed that grades curriculum, now everyone gets a pass. There are no consequences, resulting in no incentive to learn. Repeating 8th grade while all your friends move to high school is a pretty good incentive to get your act together.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#67

Post by kazinator »

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?

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.

That what you want them to be focusing on is no longer the path of least boredom like it was in the previous era; the path of least boredom goes through their mobile device.

People's ability and willingness to concentrate on something that interested in has not changed one iota. That sort of biological change takes hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

Observations of the behavior of people interacting with tech can easily support the wrong argument that people's attention spans have increased. Just look at how somebody can play the same game for 11 hours straight, right?

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#68

Post by basilgohar »

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 easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism, and won't hold their leaders as accountable. Power generally resides with those who benefit from an ill-educated populace, so anything that would actually help educate children and people at large is discouraged.

I'll repeat what others have said here. Giving teachers the means with which to properly work with their students, and investing in students at a more individual level, is what's needed. Sadly, my refrain with regards to public education is that is has become little more than glorified babysitting. Those that succeed do so in spite of the system, and not because of it. Meanwhile, students that suffer from one or more disadvantagements (poverty, disability, social issues, mental or physical health issues, and so much more) tend to just...suffer more. And then they fall into cycles where preventable issues repeat or enhance into the next generation. They'll still spend all of their little income excessively, so profit is still to be had, or they'll end-up in prison, which, again, thanks to privatization, is also immensely profitable, so no problem there, right?

The system is setup to fail because that's what's profitable in the long run for those seeking such profits. And because they can lobby, and use their wealth to influence politics, it won't change. Something else needs to happen first.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#69

Post by shortrounddev2 »

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?

My guess is that the kids were learning ahead of the rest of the class and it made the teacher's life harder to keep track of where each kid is, or had to field questions outside of her expertise since often elementary school teachers only know enough to teach elementary school

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#70

Post by marksbrown »

LargeWu wrote: post #45
brainwipe wrote: post #32

IMO education is still built around Victorian structures and needs to be reworked from examinations downwards. Examinations are an exercise in being good at examinations, not proficiency in the subject. Once you strip that away the you wind back all the structures that feed it. You can see this working at schools designed for the neuro diverse. Those students simply can't sit and listen to a teacher all day, so each…

What, specifically, is an example of an exam not measuring proficiency? If an exam is well designed, the student will need to figure out what is being asked and use their mastery to provide an answer.

A good example in the UK is teaching students the FOIL technique for algebraic expansion. Students typically can expand (ax+b)(cx+d) because they've learnt a recipe but cannot expand say (ax2+bx+c)(dx+e).

Many schools here focus on such tricks (nix the tricks was a great book focusing on such things) as schools here are judged on pass/fail rates.

In general, exams are an excellent way to assess students en masse at their ability to remember similar problems but not inherent problem solving techniques. The latter I've found is possible to teach 1to1 but far harder with a class of varying abilities.

Post reply on HN