Last week we heard from my new hero Steve, an electrical engineer turned high school math teacher, with his reservations about technology as a motivator for student success. Notice this week I can use Steve’s first name, though not his last name or the name of the school where he teaches. This alone says volumes about the prickly state of teaching today where saying the truth out loud can hurt a career. And I understand why Steve might be concerned, because this time he’s talking not about how technology doesn’t often enable better learning, but how it actually gets in the way.
“Now, consider what happens if you inject into this scenario an iPad into the hands of every student in the classroom,” Steve continued. “Certainly, for some students who are intrinsically motivated, this will unlock great learning options and it may, due to its more engaging nature, bring in some students who weren’t very interested and help them become more interested in learning. But many students will not use the technology this way. Many will choose to use the iPad as just another distraction (and a very compelling one) instead of focusing on learning the class content.
“I witnessed this myself the last time I took a summer course at my local community college. I was in a classroom paying attention to the professor, taking notes (on paper no less) and learning, while around me all my peers had their laptops open. Were they taking notes electronically? No, every screen was either open to Facebook or to some online game. These students were convinced that they could effectively multitask and learn while being distracted by the technology, but in the end, of the people around me, I was the only one who got an A on the final exam in that class.”
Steve’s solution for these technical distractions is institutional control of Internet access in the classroom. Limit surfing and apps the way I try to keep my kids doing constructive things with their computers at home. But as we all know, that doesn’t really work. The tools are too crude, the kids are too clever, and who are we to say, really, what’s learning and what’s messing around?
Still, I wish parental controls were better. Understand my control efforts go deeper than most since I have placed limitations on the individual workstations as well as global limitations on the network through my ClearOS (formerly Clark Connect) gateway, which has powerful content filtering capabilities. Kids can’t go to a web page, for example, that my DNS server deliberately knows nothing about. Our gateway is of course named Sergeant Schultz.
Forget the software for a moment, though, and let’s consider what’s at work here with all this goofing off, which is the simple avoidance of academic effort. It takes place at all levels.
From my first job at Triway High School where I taught biology, chemistry, physics, and vocational agriculture to my six years at Stanford I was continually amazed at how grateful students were for any class disruption, with a class cancellation being the best news of all. It’s like they wanted less for their parents’ money. Some (like John McEnroe, who dropped my class after the second week) would have been happiest with nothing for their money at all.
Education is a peculiar labor market. As a teacher I managed my students and required output from them (their product) which was paid for with grades from me. But if they didn’t do the work and their product sucked as a result, there was little effect on me as a teacher because their product never truly entered commerce. It was all just a game.
A reader from Sweden, reacting by e-mail to last week’s column, cited Victor Vroom’s Expectancy Theory as governing student behavior. Expectancy Theory (I hadn’t heard of it, either) says behaviors arise from motivations and motivations are based on expected outcomes. This makes sense, I guess, if McEnroe’s expected outcome was an NCAA tennis singles title, not passing my class. The experience wasn’t real for any of us but only McEnroe acted on that knowledge.
I think this goes a long way toward explaining what some folks like Peter Thiel are calling a bubble market for education, where grades are inflated, tuition continually rises, and the real world relevance of any of it is as subjective as the value of 16th century tulip bulbs.
Like all bubbles, this one is aspirational — driven by those who aspire to acquire something in limited supply that they perceive to be of value whether it actually is valuable or not. Being glad that class was cancelled just defines the underlying values more clearly. The term will still end whether class is held today or not, a grade (and ultimately a degree) will still be earned, so let’s all head to the O for a beer.
Where does technology come into this? It doesn’t. I think Peter Thiel is wrong, by the way, as I’ll explain in our third and final section to come tomorrow. Technology is essential, yet so far inconsequential in the calculus of education.
I guess that explains why all these computers haven’t made us particularly smarter.
You can lead a horse to water…
…especially if the water’s stagnant. I fulminated in a comment following RXC’s previous post about the standard of state school teaching here in England. It’s compromised by an influential minority of lazy, incompetent, politically-motivated teachers whose egalitarian fantasies are best served by aiming for a universal standard of mediocrity. Top achievers and the less academic alike are left floundering in large, mixed-ability classes (streaming is elitist, of course) and maddened with boredom. Teachers complain endlessly that they’re disruptive. I wonder why. No doubt they’d perform much more effectively if they all had iPads.
Inattention in class has much to do with a youthful inability to equate educational attainment with achievement in later life. Similarly, kids will stuff their faces with french fries, greaseburgers and fizzy drinks without thinking how fat they’ll be when they’re 30.
These problems are exacerbated by teachers who expect little of themselves and demand next to nothing from the pupils they teach. They’d probably welcome the distraction from mischief that iPads would provide whether the kids were on Facebook, playing Fruit Ninja or examining the Periodic Table.
Thiel is completely correct. He is only reflecting the thinking of the best economic bloggers out there. He is doing no original thinking but rather reflecting what best analysis yields.
See Micheal Shedlocks blog at:
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/04/education-bubble-student-loan-debt.html
No pile of occupy he. No dimwitted Krugmanic keynesian clown this fellow. He will set you straight Bob.
“I guess that explains why all these computers haven’t made us particularly smarter.”
Of course. A goof-off with a computer is still a goof-off. If he isn’t motivated do a good day’s work for a good day’s pay he’s still useless to both employers and himself. If he lacks the enthusiasm and the ability to learn, that’s what he’ll be all his life. What’s more, he’ll never understand this.
Steve Jobs was a world-class goof-off. It worked out pretty well for him.
You think Steve Jobs was a goof-off?
Have you see goof-offs make speeches? Have you seen Steve Jobs make a speech?
Goof-offs do not rehearse a speech a hundred times to ensure that it comes out just right — they slap together some slides the day before the speech then read off those slides to the audience.
The best programmers are lazy programmers. Their laziness motivates them to automate out all the drudgery of the common existence in favor of enhancing the fun side of life. Of course, for me the fun side is building interesting things.
It is really a zen kind of thing – laziness leads to short bursts of prodigious effort, the yen/yang of the computer world. The traditional school environment is more about conforming than striking out on your own; but that risk has the best chance of rising above the ordinary.
To put things into perspective from my point of view – my father told me if I didn’t get good grades I would be a garbage collector. The best thing he did for me was buy me a computer – because now I can build a garbage collector 😉 – and I make many times what the garbage collector makes. Was I a good student in high school? No. I barely made it out of there…but not because of stupidity — I knew my grades in high school wouldn’t matter. What I did have was a decent SAT score – which allowed me to get into just about any school I wanted. In college I stayed on the dean’s list the whole time because I was:
a) Paying for it myself.
b) Genuinely interested in the subject matter – it was challenging for the most part – unlike highschool.
Some of it was the quality of the professors compared to the run of the mill high school teachers. They were well spoken, thoughtful, and showed an interest in the subjects as active as that of the students learning.
Some of it was my own maturity – I waited until I was 28 before I went to college – so I had some experience under my belt in various areas. I also had been developing software for 10 years before I took the C language course. As a result I was able to absorb the nuances and take my knowledge to the next level – while all the ‘newbies’ around me were struggling to learn the basics.
Overall, could I have done it better/differently? Certainly, but I am uniquely who I am because of my journey – so I can’t really say that I would want to change anything at this point in my life.
Philosophically, I have a strong sense that life is what you make it – and that the real value of an education is unlocking that for yourself. Memorizing the date of some obscure historical event isn’t necessarily going to provide that for your students; but providing a role model and emphasizing critical thinking – rather than teaching to a standardized test will pay the biggest benefits. Two cases in point:
My daughter is an artist, and ended up going to state finals for art her senior year in high school. Her most important influence was her art teacher. While my daughter was interested in art – what really allowed her to open up was this teacher, who challenged her to question the mundane and extend beyond the conventional. As a result she won a gold medal in the state competitions – and it set her path that she continues following to this day.
My story is very similar – before my dad bought the computer for me, I had an elementary teacher (4th grade) – who liked my writing so much that she would hold my work up as example for the other students. One day I remember she told me, “you should be a writer.” From that day onward, regardless of what I was doing in my ‘day job’, I always thought of myself as a writer. As a programmer, I’m more of a linguist than a mathematician – so it fits. And I have several creative writing projects that are in various states of completion. My journey continues as well…
So ultimately I think it is a factor of many things that leads to your direction as a person. Teachers can’t shoulder all the blame for apparent ‘failure’…parents and students have responsibility for the stories they tell themselves about themselves and their existence. Their parents and teachers can encourage, and they can choose to live an uncommon existence or not – it is entirely up to them.
Too tired to provide the calculated response that your post deserves. Nonetheless, it struck a nerve and I just had to take a moment and thank you. You hit the nail on the head, and it wasn’t with Maslow’s hammer. Forgive me for coming across sounding presumptuous; but I could not have said, nor coded, it better myself!
It sounds like Steve has issues with classroom management and needs to figure out how to get his students to behave properly in his class, which is not a technology problem.
I don’t think anyone advocating for iPad inclusion in schools means ubiquitous iPad use. Teachers have the ability (and the duty) to have different activities at different times, some of which may use textbooks (whether they are on the iPad or not), webpages, or just their students brains. Plus, many of the benefits of iPad adoption come not from just giving teachers and students iPad, but changing how we teach and deliver content. In many ways, then the iPad becomes a tool for student learning outside of the classroom, and the teacher then uses the classroom for one on one, or whole group discussions, which can’t happen if students aren’t assured of having technology access.
And yes, I am a teacher.
I noticed the exact same multitask-with-Facebook trend when I put in my four years at an Ivy League institution. Laptops were just starting to become ubiquitous, and–though my experience is only anecdotal–I never knew/saw a single person that used note-taking software or anything beyond opening up a MS Word or text (!!) file to jot down notes.
And when I finally got my laptop, shiny and exciting as it was, the first thing I did at work was pretend to multitask. (Primarily reading blogs like this one!) I swear (anecdotally) that this kind of distraction has induced generation-wide Internet ADD. I stopped taking it to class in less than a month.
Now at a top-tier graduate school, every time I see someone whip out an iPad I wince. And then I catch a glimpse of their awkward pawing…and they’re checking their e-mail.
Research has shown that common wisdom regarding study habits – both in and out of the classroom are exactly opposite of what most people think.
Most people believe that they should be in stenographer mode – taking notes dutifully during the meeting. But that is the wrong way to go about it — if you really want to retain the content of the meeting – do NOT take notes during the class/meeting — instead wait until it is over, and then write down your notes. Once you get into the habit of doing this you will see that your retention of the information is better over time and your ability to listen is enhanced.
Additionally, you should wait until your ability to natively recall the information is degraded to the point where you struggle to recall — at that point have a study session on the material. You will reinforce it better in your mind – because your mind had to actively create links to the information in your brain. If you study too soon after a classroom session/meeting it will be too easy – and your brain will not develop strong links; conversely, if you wait too long it will be more difficult to recreate those links. The upshot is you really do not forget anything – it is in your brain somewhere, you just don’t know how to get to it if you don’t use the right strategies.
Finally – you are correct about multitasking though. We do not really multitask – we generally task switch – and there is a cost to switching between tasks. There are several studies that have observed this phenomenon – when you are juggling more than one task at a time, you don’t do any of them well – and this is primarily because the time it takes to reorient yourself back on track is so long that in an environment where you are constantly being interrupted – you never do any work…or if you do it is always sub-par. This is why I am militant about carving out specific uninterrupted time that I place on my calender – so I can focus and get work done.
The *only* activities that are appropriate to multitask are those that have a low task switching cost – which means they are tasks that are mostly automatic with low complexity. Most of our time is NOT spent doing low complexity tasks – and so we appear busy while falling behind our apparently ‘lazy’ peers who take the time to focus consistently on their tasks.
At most meetings at work there are several laptops open, with people at various levels of activity on them. I tried taking my laptop to one or two meetings, and discovered that at the end of those meetings I had little idea of what had happened. There are a few meetings that are “agenda lists”, and you really don’t have to pay attention until your time slot, and in those cases a laptop is probably OK.
Otherwise I just with we could drive the aggregate information bandwidth upward at meetings and shorten them, so we could get out and back to work.
I take my body – and now that I have an iPad I take that as well.
I do not take notes during the meeting – unless someone gives me specific directives/instructions of a technical nature. Then I will write those things down in my todo list (I use ‘Get It Done’ — a very cool and free iPad app for organizing your todo’s) in my iPad.
Otherwise I wait until the meeting is over and then take down the relevant information in notes on my computer at my desk.
I’ve been doing this since college – and I find it works better for me. Recent studies also bear out this approach (I love it when I’m right) – because you more actively listen to retain – and by struggling to recall the meeting – you more actively create links within your brain, which helps your recall the information better over the long run.
When I’m in meetings now – I’m in my element, and I have the flexibility to call out issues and tweak things that I see wrong because I’m active rather than passive in that environment.
Having a cancelled class can be great from the student’s viewpoint because a major focus of many educational establishments (earlier on, generally) is attendance, not understanding. This means having to turn up to be told things you already know. This is uninspiring.
I deliberately avoided taking a qualification in computing at school because I seriously didn’t want to sit through two-years of classes telling me things I already knew.
University by contrast was great – if I knew something I didn’t have to go to the lectures and could just go straight to the exam.
One of my more enjoyable activities is one-on-one teaching of private violin lessons. In a lesson, I can fully engage the student’s attention for the short time I have him or her in my studio, and accomplish quite a bit. But the majority of the learning occurs outside the lesson — practice. The students with the best focus and practice habits do many times better than the unmotivated ones.
I have had very bright and talented students that I have been unable to motivate sufficiently to get them to achieve their full potential. It’s frustrating, but I don’t know how to break through the distractions that are a ubiquitous part of the life of young children. OTOH, I have had students who positively stun me with outstanding progress — I currently have a 7-yr-old student I expect will be winning major competitions in the next 5 years.
The difference appears to me to be an ability to focus. If only I could teach that!
BTW, have you seen the new free offering from MIT? https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2011/12/21/m-i-t-game-changer-free-online-education-for-all/ While it’s touted as a game-changer, I don’t think it will actually do much about the problems cited in your article. But it’s certainly a shot over the bow to the idea of grade inflation. The seriously motivated student with the ability to focus can get a good education for very low cost.
Your “hero” is not yet there, with ideas that start well but don’t fully work. Education is ALL about motivation and technology is ALL about facilitation. The two can only work together is DESIGNED to do so but this has NEVER been done. However, the largest barrier to education isn’t technology (as a distraction).
You’re a VERY clever man (no I’m not sucking up!). So think (your forte) about it. The education paradigm is just about the ONLY paradigm that has never changed. It dates back to when formal education began in the churches, under the direct (tyrannical) rule of a cleric, a religious leader and the “teacher”. Thus was born the tyranny of the teacher! Tes the do still tyranise,no matter how nicely. The learner still has to do what the teacher says – which is completely contrary to motivated learning which must be , or more exactly must seem to be, self-led . What is needed is a new paradigm (tinkering with existing paradigms does not deliver significant change). The new paradigm has to eradicate the teacher role, a role that cannot be justified. Just think (again) – a teacher has to be an introvert (exam supervisor, book marker, lesson designer, etc) and an extrovert (presenter, coach, pseudo-parent, etc). Nobody can excel at being two opposites so tge role is doomed by design. Then again, what other role in the world requires an individual to be expert at so many skills (marking, supervising, planning, presenting,
Coaching, paremting, etc.)? It’s a role that can never deliver!!!
I could say more but it would take too much space! Your hero needs to think more laterally and arrive at the redundancy of his own role. Then he can arrive at a solution in which motivation comes first and technology is a much to be valued a facilitator that will help deliver major benefits that are untreachable without it.
PS – (re my previous comment), internet tools are distractions only because we do not know how to motivate learners (teachers make lousy motivators!). In a fit for purpose education paradigm, a tool like Facebook could be an educators and learners dream!
The Mcenroes of this world do not relate well to the current education paradigm because that paradim does not serve to motivate them. Their teachers may be highly educated, very knowledgable and nice people but that is ALL irellevant and actually unnecessary, as is the teacher!!!
As someone who works in education and also has children currently in full time education I genuinely believe that internet age technology has still only had a cosmetic impact on children’s education. Yet I am also acutely aware that” me+Google+Wikipedia” is a more intelligent entity than “me” alone. How can this be?
It may make your more intelligent, but also more flawed. Your ability to determine errors within Google/Wikipedia for example.
CBNC May 18, 2010 12:52 PM:
There’s perhaps no word that college students like better than “free.”
Combine that with the iPad, the latest technology rage, and students may think they’ve won the jackpot.
Illinois Institute of Technology is set to announce that the university will give all freshmen this fall a free Apple iPad, the Web-enabled portable computer tablet. It will cost the university $250,000, said university spokesman Evan Venie.
IIT is expecting between 500 and 600 incoming freshmen paying a tuition of $31,363. The iPad is priced at $499 and up.
* * * * * * * ENTERING REALITY DISTORTION FIELD* * * * * * * *
The school envisions that students can tote the light iPad to class and use it to take notes, read books, check e-mail and surf the Internet. Faculty, particularly those who teach in engineering and computer science, can build applications specific to their courses. IIT already offers courses focused on the development of mobile applications.
* * * * * * * EXITING TO REALITY * * * * * * * * *
Man, I love my Eat Better Today card
I’m never going hungry, I’m swiping all day, y’all
Sandwiches, chips, a big box of Oreos
Cereal, Kix, but I couldn’t buy a 40, dog?
SNAP SNAP SNAP
I’ve worked 25 years as a software engineer and still take notes with pen and paper.
During the last ten years I’ve seen more and more people attend meetings with laptops open. They’re mostly reading email. It reminds me of when the TV show lags, you start to chat with your neighbor on the couch.
The same thing happens walking around when you are talking with someone and they pull out their smartphone to check email, text messages, Facebook, etc.
I think this is the same phenomenon as men who overuse the TV remote and just channel surf, looking for bits of interesting content. This reflects a restlessness, where searching is a new kind of devoted attention.
Websites have known this, many people (I’m one of them) open up lots of news pages to read, then read the already opened pages one-by-one. It’s as though we put ourselves into “search mode” or “read mode”, but don’t like toggling quickly between them.
The challenge in a classroom is to keep the kids in read mode without them jumping back to search mode, which will be difficult to disrupt. Technology is a distraction not just in school, but also in the office where you need to use it to work, but also use it to avoid work and avoid paying attention at meetings.
Searching is ultimately more ephemeral than diving into something deep, but the divers become the experts that searchers are ultimately looking for.
I have to agree with John about meetings and laptops (also Crackberries and now iPads) being used for purposes other than supporting the meeting. At least in the business setting it’s most often email followed by some kind of IM interaction.
Culturally it could very well be due to our ingrained TV viewing habits. If we are not sufficiently entertained during a meeting (powerpointed) we use our substitute remote control to tune into something else more interesting.
I’m beginning to believe the format for any group meeting longer than 10-15 minutes needs to be re-thought. A much more collaborative setting with 2-3 people focused on a sub-task (be that a presentation or decision) would be much more productive.
I think the same is true for education as well. There maybe a place for lectures, but learning and engagement is best facilitated by small focused groups.
Children love to learn . . . they HATE to be taught. School is an artificial environment. Why would any one want to be there? School, television, video games. Artifical environments all. Their purpose is to keep children childish. Because it’s easier to sell crap to childish people.
Simply ASSERTING that kids love to learn does not make it so.
If kids love to learn so much, how come so few of them spend any time reading anything that’s not compulsory for school?
Step one in solving a problem is admitting there IS a problem.
kids do love learning: about things that are *interesting*, _to them_.
I’ve watched ten year old kids spent hours a day, over weeks, memorizing the creatures and their salient attributes of the 200 entities in a catalogue of Pokemon characters. At the drop of the hat they can recite more than 80% of the contents and tell you which transforms into which, under what circumstance, and who will beat who in a battle.
I’ve often wondered what would happen if a cell biologist and manga artist who both really grokked what “cool” is in the child mind put together a Prodigious Protozoa Compendium in a pokemon style game system featuring real information and attributes. What could be more awesome than an amoeba with a self grown harpoon that actually works?
Of course kids pick up certain things automatically: language, walking, social skills. They also have no problem picking up fun things.
The problem is that the job of school is to teach a very specific set of skills — reading and writing, analytical and abstract thinking, numeracy, basic facts about a wide variety of disciplines — and it is THESE that most kids appear to have no interest in learning by themselves.
People have been claiming that video games can change this, for thirty years. I have seen ZERO evidence of this — and god knows they’ve certainly spent enough money and effort on it. Before video games, it was going to be TV shows that made learning “engaging” and “fun”.
Like I said, step one in solving a problem is being honest about the real situation. Humans evolved to learn language, mimic their peers, and notice the natural world around them. Anything beyond that — reading and writing, numbers, abstraction, even something as basic as controlled observation and experiment rather than anecdote and fixating on unusual outcomes — is profoundly unnatural and, apparently for most kids, difficult and something they’d rather not do. Pretending otherwise is a waste of everyone’s time.
I think at that age, many students would see attending classes as just another chore like cleaning or taking out the trash. Perhaps they feel insulated from the harsh realities of the workplace and that skipping a few lessons will have few serious consequences.
In early March I will be a part of a team doing 2 training sessions – each session will be 2 hours long for Hi-tech Sales and Systems Engineering folks (annual Sales Kick-Off). I’m dreading this because I’m working my ass off to get ready and know that these ADD-oriented folks will have tuned out my work after 30-40 minutes (if that!).
In dealing with folks in the computer industry I’ve learned a long time ago that your best bet is a simple agenda that is covered in 15 to 20 minutes (MAX) with a Q&A session (or interactive!) at the end. I’ve done 50++ webinars and have watched people drop off as the session went kept going past 20-25 minutes.
In order to be succesful in training/teaching/Transfer-of-Information(TOI – yet another industry acronym!) its got to short, to the point and hard-hitting. Throw some humor (carefully not to offend the Political Correctness mafia) and you’ll have a decent rate of getting people to remember what you said.
Hey Cringely kids,
The password you’ve been trying to crack is ‘strudel’
They don’t even need the DNS password if they are clever enough to use the IPs directly.
Oh, I get it strudel…Sargent Shultz 🙂
I’m looking at this topic from another perspective. The goal of a teacher (I hope) is to engage the student thereby inspiring them to want to listen and learn the material they are offering. If you are defining a good student by a letter grade then perhaps we have a difference of opinion to begin with. I believe a good student is one open to and hopefully enthusiastic about learning.
The ipad/internet/computer are powerful tools/toys. But that’s not the point here. If the material is ‘presented’ in a way that’s not engaging a student, then the teacher ultimately fails. Teachers might argue that their role is not to entertain… If the student is not interested in learning, that’s a moot point.
I see tech in the classroom as a potential way of bridging that big gap between the student who isn’t particularly interested in learning and the teacher who needs to engage them.
With technology a teacher who isn’t a great lecturer can call up a great lecture by the tap of a finger or two, offer an game to draw a concept, create their own class experience. Technology doesn’t need to replace the teacher, but it’s a wise teacher who can enhance their performance by recognizing their strengths.
There really are few if any students who don’t want to learn. But there are a lot of students who don’t want to learn what’s being taught at the moment it’s presented. Those are the fence sitters that a wiley teacher might engage with some high tech tools or other innovations, like games in the classroom.
“The goal of a teacher (I hope) is to engage the student thereby inspiring them to want to listen and learn the material they are offering.” Ah, if only. Perhaps in some good old days of yore. Today the goal of the teacher (hoping to keep their job) is mostly to herd their class through test prep for assorted No-Child-Left-Behind standardized testing. Inspiration? Wanting to Learn? More likely found in the drop outs than in the poor kids stuck in their seats.
1. It’s important in these discussions, first, not to conflate ‘schooling’ (which has many non-educational aims) with education; and second, to define clearly what flavour of ‘education’ you are talking about: what exactly are the purposes of your ‘education’?
2. Most school-related problems are not educational, but cultural. Broken cultures produce broken schools; healthy cultures produce healthy schools.
To be perfectly honest, when I was young I didn’t have the emotional maturity to be engaged with any material that wasn’t of interest to me. I would sit all day in school and daydream or pretend to take notes or pretend to read. I managed to graduate high school on time, but BARELY.
Yet on Saturdays, I would get dropped off at our county library in the morning and spend all day reading books on every subject imaginable. The library was MY internet.
Later, I tried college, but didn’t last a semester.
I wasn’t ready.
It took 10 years and stepping on the yellow footprints to instill in me the understanding and discipline necessary to realize that I could complete something, and that it would have an intrinsic value to my personal well being.
Then I was ready.
I went to college, wanted to be there, was paying for it myself, and my grades and participation reflected that joy of learning.
Motivation is a difficult and complex subject at any level, but it is very easy to take the idea of motivation (out of context from where it originates) and plug it into a policy, process, or technology and expect an answer. This is fundamentally an incorrect connection between intangible ideas and tangible results. Our educational system has no clue how to address this flaw effectively and consistently because it is larger (by volume) and much more complex than the system itself.
Governments can’t solve this dilemma. Institutions can’t solve this dilemma. Only people at the level of personal interaction have any hope of changing the course.
::
By the way, I liked the Hogan’s Heroes reference.
Bravo!
Most educational systems try to put everyone in the same box and teach them about the cardboard walls. Just doesn’t work.
It took me until 27 to “know” what my life was going to be about from there on in. (by then I had 3 kids, wife mortgage, the full package).
In 1966 I had read about computers ‘n’ stuff in books and SF novels, maths was my subject, so when asked what I wanted to be I said “in computers”. “daft bugger” came the answers back then (only 6 computers, blah blah).
After 14 years in a completely different and boring job, I bought a ZX81 via mail order… The rest, as they say, is history.
Yep. Mine was a Commodore 64 with a floppy drive the size of a mailbox. I learned how to program on that simple machine. Ahh!, the memories. lol.
A notebook, a work book, a text book, and an electronic device are all TOOLS. Nothing more, nothing less. Whether or not one chooses to use a tool is a personal choice. It truly comes down to motivation and incentive.
There are many examples of great teachers and great schools. When you truly look at them they do have one thing in common – they excel at motivating their students. They demand more of their students and the students deliver.
Last week I wrote about a very good local high school whose students get crazy high test scores. Now I am going to tell you about what they do over the summer….
Each summer they conduct what is basically an academic boot camp. They take students who are willing to devote four weeks of their summer to improving their study skills and who are likely to enroll in a college preparatory curriculum but are not currently achieving their potential.
I know parents who have put their kids through this program. It changed their kids and made them much better students in short four weeks. When the kids returned to their regular school, it was easier, more fun, and their scores improved.
I have seen both good and less-good schools. In the less-good schools there is a culture of mediocrity. If the students do okay, it is fine with both their classmates and their teachers. In the good schools there is a results based culture. Everyone wants to succeed and no one wants to be left behind.
At this super good high school you will not see students toting around tablets or laptop computers. At this school they “believe there is real value in providing technologies that help teachers teach and students learn, and we also believe in the human exchanges that are at the heart of … education. In seeking to fulfill our mission of educating the whole person, we seek to provide students not only with tools that can help them learn or present effectively, but also with the ability to use such tools responsibly and with discernment, both academically and morally.”
Hello I,
We are talking about a tool. Tools to make learning/teaching better get introduced periodically based on new discoveries.
I wonder if one teacher at the dawn of pencil use made a similar case about paper and pencil, for example, getting in the way of learning because, you know, students misused it by drawing doodles.
Further back, a case can be made that the introduction of clay tablets weakened brain function; It decreased humanity’s ability to memorize.
What we need to know about maturity with regards to puberty is that there are holes in a young person’s thinking skills that are as outstanding as colour blindness. Thinking one can multitask on facebook during a lecture is an obvious example. Two teenagers tearing themselves from their phones to study for their test tomorrow is another example. They know they have the test, they comment upon the fact, but the awareness doesn’t not have the power to close the conversation. We can point fingers but it is as useful as pointing fingers at the colourblind. Parents and teachers have to understand this and realise that no matter how big, how vociferously inclined and how determined in excuse making the kid is, s/he doesn’t have the skill set to command every aspect of life, yet. Explain this fact ad nauseam, laugh and then lay out the rule and stand tall until it is accomplished.
Puberty ends finally, in all its bits and pieces around age twenty-seven. The goofy pieces come first. The rational ones last. That is why we send the young to war. They aren’t yet smart enough to make the right choices and take chances that are not always rational. It’s also why the majority of crimes are committed by fourteen to twenty-seven year olds. It’s also why we are the smart species and do great things.
A teacher, in his lifetime, will count himself blessed if he as one good student.
A student, in his lifetime, will count himself blessed, if he has one good teacher …
I’ve only briefly followed your recent posts on education and the impact of technology but I’d like to add my observations after being US public schooled my entire life. I agree that technology and the iPad will help those that are motivated to learn, as has been noted here. However, there are tons of kids in the US public school system that are in weaker districts and come from backgrounds that don’t allow them to truly intellectually thrive and advance.
With the advantage of hind sight (20 years out), I have been able to see first hand who truly excelled after highschool. I can tell you in no uncertain terms that nearly everyone who came from a family of professionals (architects, engineers, academics) went on to have successful college and professional lives. By this I mean, did well in college academically and got jobs that took advantage of their intellectual skill set. That’s not say that those who didn’t come from these professional family backgrounds weren’t also successful, they were, but the incidence was much lower. Consistent with this, when I entered graduate school I was shocked that nearly every one of my classmates came from families with professional backgrounds, hardly anyone came from a family that was working class. Again, there were exceptions, but not many.
So back to technology and education. The iPad potentially opens kids up to a huge body of knowledge that they wouldn’t or couldn’t have been exposed to previously through straight public education. While there has been a increase in the amount of advanced educational opportunities in the public school system, if your parents don’t know about them and you don’t have a strong teacher advocate, you simply will not take advantage. So here is the situation where perhaps the iPad and internet may act to supplement. You can now potentially follow college lectures if you wanted or teach yourself a programming language. But the down side of this is that not all students will be able to handle the avalanche of information and will not be able to make systematic advances in their knowledge without someone to guide them. Think of it like going to medical school and teaching yourself everything you would need to know to be a competent physician. Some would be able to do it, others it would take 10-15 years, others would be excited but overwhelmed.
So the bottom line is that the technology will potentially help those that may be held back by the rate and amount of knowledge offered through public school. Teachers are still necessary to guide. Those in strong programs and well educated families will be fine while those in weak programs and less educated families have a new opportunity to advance but may or may not be better off. So this new technological revolution will help out a few more kids that may have previously been unable to really expand their intellect, which is great, but it is probably not enough to really get at a lot of untapped potential.
Lastly, I am wondering if there has ever been a controlled study that looked at whether taking notes with a pen/pencil and paper enhances information retention compared to taking notes by typing? That is, is the physical act of writing notes, circling things, drawing pictures better for information retention compared to typing notes on a laptop or ipad?
Thanks for the discussion.
yes, studies have shown that handwriting supports learning more than typing, because more brain areas are involved. Forming shapes with your hand is more challenging than just hitting areas on a keyboard. Sorry for not including references.
Steve bemoans the use of current technology shoehorned into decades old teaching system. Maybe it’s not the students with the laptops that are the issue but rather the teacher, methods, and the setting. My kids, who have always had access to computers, laptops, iPads, and such, have no issue with using them while learning. The only bottleneck in the system are the teachers that are still living in the past. One of my daughters writes school “papers” on her iPod touch and does so quickly. I could never do that but that doesn’t mean my kids can’t and it doesn’t mean Steve’s kids can’t. My two daughters’ final for orchestra was to play and record a piece. They did so in their room, recording and emailed to their teacher via iPod Touch. Homework is often done collaboratively with friends via text, Facebook, email, and/or FaceTime. For most adults, each is a separate app, a separate task, a distraction. For my kids and for most kids, it’s communication and it’s not a distraction.
Back in the mid-1970s I was working at Bell Labs in New Jersey. My group was working what became known as the UNIX Programmer’s Workbench. At home, my next door neighbor was the principal of a large high school (900 students/class). He complained to me that the advanced math kids were running up big timesharing costs (using the NJ State educational service).
I suggested that He could own a Digital Equipment PDP-8 computer for less than his one-year’s timesharing bill. The $10K PDP-8 would be hard-wired to Teletype-33s and allow 24/7 access to up to four students programming in Basic. I also told him that while this option would be cheap and easy to maintain, teachers and students would drive him nuts asking for something better for the following year.
So the next spring he asked over the fence, “What’s the next step up? How can I get ahead of this?”
I was supervising a small group of programmers who were trying to keep our version of UNIX up-to-date with Thompson’s and Ritchie’s Research copy and at the same time provide a stable base for my department’s developers and a few hundred on line users.
I guess I didn’t have enough aggravation in my life, because I suggested to the Superintendent that he could get a $40K PDP-11/40 and that I would install UNIX on it and that C Language, nroff and other UNIX goodies would be available which ought to keep the geeks off his back for a while and would also let some “commercial track” students have a crack at learning word processing. It would be the first UNIX at a high school.
Anyway, my neighbor got the funding (the whole discretionary budget for a couple years), DEC and I installed the system and I taught a math teacher how to keep it running (more or less). I also taught an after-school class in UNIX voodoo, shell programming and C to about fifteen AP math seniors (no girls applied). I was disappointed that nothing happened with word processing: UNIX was too challenging for the teachers of that era. I might have been able to teach the students but I failed with the staff.
The PDP-11 was kept in a closet off one of the math classrooms. I happened to be at the school one day to update software when I witnessed a disturbed remedial student’s attempt at destroying the computer with a hammer. In a way I couldn’t blame him. It did him no good and it may have harmed him by distracting even more attention toward the gifted few.
Four of my after school students went on to important careers in CS; a couple worked at the Labs. But, all in all, a lot of work and money to help kids who would have succeeded anyway.
I learned the value of expectations while studying for my undergrad degree in electrical engineering. In 1st and 2nd year physics all exams were graded on a steep curve. The result of this was that if you to score above 75% you were given an “A”. There was usually one student who scored above 90%, but overall the bell curve was shifted to the left. On the first day of 3rd year Physics the professor stated “There will be no curve in this class”. The students who “earned” 75% A’s before now EARNED 90% A’s. We did the minimum required to get the desired outcome. Knowing the expectations we were able to adjust our effort. After all, the law of diminishing returns applies to most areas of life.
That is why I always strive to set high expectations for myself and others I am responsible for.
Wow… I don’t get it!!!
I have been out of college for over 25 years. And I remember enjoying when the professor was so late we all left. But I never looked forward to it. It was always like a treat. The equivalent to a snow day in elementary school.
IMHO students being glad about cancelled classes is a symptom of a broken education system. Most classes / teachers are boring, so students tune out, and aren’t eager to go to class. Some also realize it’s largely a “game,” where one must produce a pointless product to obtain a grade; there is a vague long-term reward of (theoretically) increased employability, income, and social status. Since the system isn’t very demanding, one can goof off and still pass, minimizing effort while still attaining the goal.
Technology can maybe/probably help keep students’ attention, but what’s more urgently needed is better teachers. Obtaining iPads is a lot easier than obtaining the latter, so I can see where the money will go… I’m convinced there’s something wrong with the way material is taught, but I don’t know what a better system would look like.
I found this yesterday, https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html
from http://confusedofcalcutta.com/.
It may give you a very different view of how technology can affect education. I think it also highlights the differences in learning something you want to learn, versus doing the required for a cookie (or grade).
“I guess that explains why all these computers haven’t made us particularly smarter.”
Be careful about saying “us”. For the five percent of students (and society) that DO want to learn and achieve something, computers have made us inestimably smarter.
That they have not had that effect on the other 95% says something about the relationship between that 95% and learning, but NOT about technology. It was ever so — whether it was claims that the Gutenberg press would allow everyone to read Aristotle, or that TV would be used to broadcast opera, we’ve always lived in a world where 95% of the population have close to zero interest in ever learning anything.
I think the best you can do is
– ensure that those few who do want to learn have a chance, no matter their social and family circumstances. (Something the US does pretty badly. Obviously there is the ghetto/race aspect of this, but there is also the lack of streaming, the fear of school uniforms and classroom discipline, and the use of mixed classrooms.)
– create a social environment that values learning enough that maybe an additional five percent switch over to wanting to learn, and the remaining ninety percent at least play along for the sake of fitting in — the stereotypes of Jews and Asians. (Once again, greater US society is completely uninterested in doing this, and I don’t see that ever changing.)
Given both these facts, yeah, I expect iPads in the classroom to be every bit as much a waste of money as were the Apple II’s in 1979 and the PCs in 1990.
Wait a minute! I benefited from those Apple ][ computers! I took the first computer programming course offered at my high school using those machines…today I’m a systems architect.
I don’t see that as a waste of money at all. I would argue that the explosion of the PC and the internet was fueled by those kids who learned to program and made careers of it – payed back in economic factors far more than those computers cost.
And you are part of the 5%.
I was specifically talking about the value of computers for the other 95%.
I don’t want to be rude but, honestly dude, is it so hard to read my entire argument?
I would argue that the value created by your ‘5%’, more than compensated society for the cost of those Apple][ computers. In which case, they were not a waste of money.
Freakonomics had an interesting article on the other side of the coin. Stanford had a free on-line class with 160,000 students. The professor is leaving Stanford for an on-line courses with 500,000 students.
https://www.freakonomics.com/2012/01/30/classrooms-with-500000-students/
When you think about it, the current teaching model predates printing. You had a professor sitting there reciting Aristotle to a few students because they couldn’t afford their own copies.
We know have the technology where you can not only have cheap copies of the texts you need, but free instruction from the best teachers in the field. It may not revolutionize the 1st world, but the 3rd world is going stay 3rd very long with access to this kind of technology.
When you write “aspirational” you neglect to mention that it is the aspirations of the parents and not their children (of course there are exceptions).
As for the use of technology in education, I’ve seen the same cargo cult mentality with radio, TV, VCRs, spirit duplicators, … and now tablets. The best teachers given motivated students can teach effectively with nothing more than a blackboard. Poor teachers and/or unmotivated students will never dazzle no matter how much tax payer funded technology we throw at them.
I used to get really angry when I would get to class and the teacher was not there. Sometimes there would be a note but just as often, nothing. It made me think my time ment nothing to them. I made the effort to get there. I had other things I could have been doing too. Plus no I might have to sit for two hours waiting for another class that might or might not happen. I paid with my money and my time and I expected the teacher to put in effort too. And I don’t mean like hiring a grad student to teach the class so they could “teach” multiple classes at the same time. I mean actually show up and help us learn a subject. But teaching is just like anything else, there are people who are rewally good at their jobs and people who make you wonder how they got the job in the first place.
note:
ment = meant
no = now
rewally = really
proof reading before hitting send = good idea
Who says students need an Internet connection in the classroom. The iPad only has to have textbooks on them not an Internet connection. If the school has Internet connects in all the classrooms that’s a mistake. The Library and study halls that’s a different matter.
If you want to have Internet connects in classrooms then you have a policy. If you caught on a non-approved site your suspended for a week. After a few students get suspended in the first week of a class year things will settle down quickly. If teachers don’t enforce it then it’s their fault. If were talking about college then the students can do what ever they want. It’s there money and it’s ultimately paying the teachers salary. If they want to screw up their education so be it.
Gaming, Facebook, surfing, TV, sex at an early age. The competition gets stronger every year. And I’m not even mentioning the challenges facing disadvantaged students!
It’s amazing that anyone succeeds.
but, it’s still a horse…
The distractions aren’t the problem. The problem is the fact that the students don’t believe the knowledge they can gain in the classroom will ever be helpful to them. And they’re right.
Interesting read as always Bob. As a teacher and self proclaimed “Geek/Nerd”, technologist etc… This intersection of education and technology is important to me both practically and philosophically. And, interestingly enough, I had this conversation with my pre-AP Human Geography students today.
The issue comes down to, IMHO, 3 things.
1)American education has not substantially changed since it was originally designed 100+ years ago. In the beginning it’s purpose was to provide a foundation for generations of factory workers and agriculture workers and/or their related fields AND good citizens. However and ironically, as technology has improved the % of people required for factory and agriculture (and there related fields) has decreased significantly to roughly 7% for Ag and 14% for Factory and Manufacturing. While all of this change has been taking place outside of education, little fundamental change has taken place within education. And no, I don’t consider NCLB to be a fundamental change. Most schools still run on bells! Really? Bells were used to get people used to the bells that sounded in the factories for the beginning/end of shifts, breaks and lunch… So, here in 2012, I’m teaching the same way I was taught (except for the projector hanging from my ceiling, hooked to my laptop etc…), which was the same way my parents were taught, which was… well you get the idea.
2)My students argue that they are not like their parents and that their parents expectations for them are different than the expectations their grandparents had for their parents. That with Facebook, Twitter and most importantly cell phones there is this feeling of being constantly connected… without really being connected. A texting conversation between a mother and daughter has taken the place of a real honest to goodness face to face conversation. Most of my students, grades 7-12 say they can’t leave the house without their cell phones. And if you watch the teens thru late 20’s, they don’t use their phones for talking. It’s texting, posting to Facebook and for many now, Twitter.
3)Education has to meet the needs of today’s students as well as those of tomorrow, and that includes using technology in their world. I have closed Facebook group pages for my classes, which are used at a greater rate than my “school/teacher” page. The added benefit, is how they support each other thru this use of technology. They don’t want to be encumbered with 5 to 10lb static textbooks (Let’s be honest – who did?). When a student pulls out their smartphone during class, if it’s to take notes – which many of them do, or look something up; I’m fine with that. Are there going to be students who don’t “get it”? Of course, just as there were students who didn’t “get it” in every past generation. But I believe that using technology effectively isn’t about the laptop on the desk, or the iPad or their cellphones. It’s about creating the structure that allows the student to use whatever the technology is to create an individualized learning plan that allows them to achieve in their way, not mine or someone else’s. Are we there yet? No. But I hope that’s where we’re headed.
For “computers haven’t made us particularly smarter” one would think as electronic resources/access become widely available and all the lastest information is at researchers fingertips that there would be an information revolution to rival the renissance as in major break throughs in all fields. Such appears not be the case.
Actually – we are more innovative than we’ve ever been at any time in history:
https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/cst_utlh.htm
What is your source for the assumption that we’re not in a time of amazing technological change?
A teacher’s take on this:
…As a teacher I managed my students and required output from them (their product) which was paid for with grades from me….
A grade should not be regarded as a reward, but as a measure of learning. When students… and parents… view grades as renumeration, you get requests for extra credit to artificially inflate the grade, usually in the last week of a semester when the grade is not what they wished it would be.
Also, expectancies and the self-fulfilling prophecies, in which a teacher has raised expectations for a student, is most effective in the younger grades. In short, the best, most powerful motivator for learning is parents.
Hey teach — remuneration?
I think it was Anthony Robbins who said the primary motivators are Pleasure and Pain. Whatever causes you pleasure, whatever gives you reward, creates positive interest. Whatever causes pain ro penalty creates negative interest. It seems to me that parents and teachers both have the power to affect these motivators.
As Bill Murray said in Groundhog Day: “You gotta want it!”
All parents seek to control their children, generally motivated by a desire to protect them from the dangers of the world. I had it pointed out to me once that this works best only when they are age 0 (newborn). Once they achieve age 18, adulthood, legally they are not required to listen to anything you say ever again. So imagine a graph with age from 0 to 18 across the bottom, and parental control from 0% to 100% along the vertical axis. Then take the two end points, age 0 and age 18, and plot on the chart with 100% control at age 0 and 0% control at age 18. Now draw a straight line between those two points, and there you can deduce what is generally the ideal amount of control you as a parent should be exerting based on the current age of the child. I concur that this is not perfect in every single case, certainly.
The point is, parents who try to exert too much control over their children, as they age through the years, first of all engender a certain amount of resentment; but one could argue that is possibly as harmful as exerting too little control. My 9 year old seems to be typical for his age, so we allow him to make 50% of all his decisions. He is halfway to being grown up, after all.
Some months ago, the Times reported that test scores lagged in school districts that invested massively in digital education. [3]
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/technology/technology-in-schools-faces-questions-on-value.html?_r=3&hp=&pagewanted=all
https://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NA31Dj01.html
Well I hope the last segment of this topic goes on about how we advance through education. Salman Khan has it right. Check out his Ted talk. We suffer in the hard sciences if we don’t fully understand the early courses. Advancing students based on a minimum grade is for the birds. Advancement should come with complete understanding, and that is what technology in education has to offer. Students should be able to advance at their own pace. Otherwise they get lost or bored.
Try this. Choice.: “Revenge of the Nerd: It’s Ray Bradbury’s future—we’re just living in it.”
url: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/revenge-of-the-nerd/
(Ignore the name of the web site. Just read the damn piece, ‘K?)
I can certainly sympathize with an educator who must now compete for a student’s attention with a web 2.0 enabled device (vs. simple day dreaming in the old days). This is a complex issue and a proper balance is obviously needed, but it would be foolish to “throw the baby out with the bath water.” I think Ken Robinson presents a compelling argument for changing the paradigms. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start.
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html
Look what you said is bull!
The problem is USA power and spin.
Bush43 was too dumb to analyse 9/11 his cabinet was too dumb to analyse the war cost. Bush43 said in 2005 that USA would default on its debts. Well this attitude has trickled down to students over years. See my ‘What would Sharon do?’ comment.
I could use a Classic Greek theory of Golden Age to anarchy in a number of generations.
There is no responsibility at the top and it goes all the way down.
Here in Oz I’ve seen idiots get degrees.
How do you think they will administer their responsibilities?
Who tells them off?
Hello there, You have done a fantastic job. I�ll certainly digg it and personally suggest to my friends. I’m confident they’ll be benefited from this site.
This is one of the reasons kids are not learning as much as they should be. If you took out all the expensive technology, textbooks, and other mindless crap that modern education has instilled in the classroom room and replaced that with real books, I am talking about a legitmate literture-based curriculum, then kids might be able to read chapter books before 4th grade. There is plenty of technology at home and in the society as a whole.
I do not comprehend this at all, everybody requirements to chill out a little and begin becoming much more peaceful. Please quit undesirable articles!.