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 complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.
Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth. It's such a crying shame.
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.
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, excitement, etc.. It is not guaranteed to work, but as a format it is workable, and I found nothing so far that is better either as a student (long time ago) or as a prof at a top university (for some time now).
A distant second is the format we used during COVID: writing with a tablet using xournal, and streaming it via zoom (loosely like Khan academy). This is of course only my personal experience/opinion, but also informed by vast amounts of student feedback.
EDIT: I agree with the different perspectives from the responses, and should have qualified that I meant it for subjects one typically learns at a university, like calculus or linear algebra. One-on-one tutoring, self-learning can work even better or complement the above and skills, e.g. playing a musical instrument should be approached totally differently.
This is largely just anti tech puritanism. I cant comment on the psych and neurological arguments, but the following line of reasoning
> A pre-Covid survey exploring how US students aged 8-18 utilize digital technologies both inside and outside of school provides the answer (values below are per week) ...If we extrapolate and consider a typical U.S. academic school year of 36 weeks, these numbers suggest that students spend 198 hours annually using digital devices for learning purposes, and 2,028 hours annually using those same exact tools to jump around between scatter-shot media content.
is incredibly silly, given that it is counting time on device outside of class (things that students are allowed to do) against effectiveness of in class usage.
It's like arguing that a student who likes reading Harry Potter, or Comic Books 2 hours a night is forming habits against the idea of using books for learning. Students who play games or watch movies are not alcoholics using beer for buoyancy studies.
Not only this, it groups listening to music on a computer as an independent recreation activity, and not something that students will do concurrently with homework or other tasks outside of class, double dipping on recreation hours. As if listening to music isn't a boon for learning, which it easily can be.
The argument Jared makes in the body of his article ("The argument I’m making is that digital technologies so often aren’t used for learning that...") is less bold and sweeping than the one in the title ("The EdTech Revolution Has Failed").
It's true that edtech hasn't (yet) created an educational utopia, as some people may have imagined or hoped. But there are educational technology tools that my son (8yo) uses several times per week, that undoubtedly help him to learn important stuff:
1. Math Academy (truly amazing for 4th grade math all the way to first year of undergrad: https://www.bit.ly/ma-way)
2. Skritter (for learning to write Chinese characters)
3. Anki (flashcard program).
4. Octostudio (for learning to code, by the same folks as MIT Scratch)
#1 and #2 are both much more efficient (learning per unit of time) than any other method I've seen. They (along with #3) use spaced repetition and retrieval practice as part of their secret sauce.
But they are also highly domain-specific. Math Academy relies on thousands of hand-crafted math problems, all designed within a (hand-crafted) graph of topics that students must master. Skritter has tools that give people (adults or children) an easy on-ramp to learning the broad strokes of each character, and more advanced modes that train more precision.
As others commented, the article doesn't really talk about edtech, but about introducing smartphones/tables/computers in curriculum in a way that makes it harder to limit their use both at school and at home. From my kids' experience, I agree with the article.
But I also want to touch on products. Had a startup in the space[0], and we only achieved commercial success once we started gaining customers outside of EdTech.
EdTech is hard, in that it combines enterprise-like sales with scrappy startup-like budgets. On top of that, you're selling to people who are far removed from the user experience (heads of districts vs students and teachers). End result is stuff like Blackboard, who everyone hates, but it's everywhere.
I've seen a ton of interesting, promising startups that tried to engage students and help with learning (in various ways), only to never hear about them again.
I've also seen (& heard from) a lot of teachers with great ideas, who basically need to do grassroots campaigns and teach each other tips & tricks, because they're not really supported by their organizations.
What is missing in edtech is a concept of progress and partial correctness and guess work. The primary input in edtech is multiple choice. This is selected so a person does not need to evaluate the answer making it cheaper. But leads to kids guessing. Starting a blank line to write a response is what really kicks the brain in. There is no easy way out.
We could replicate the same blank page and grayscale human response to questions. But then we have not made a cheap factory that reduces costs. Its the typical fast, good, cheap conundrum. Everyone keeps picking cheap and getting mad when it does not work.
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 skeptical study. First you've got "balanced reading" that de-emphasized phonics and reduced literacy (but I'm sure resulted in massive textbook sales and prestige for a few education academics), and now you've got EdTech screens that have hurt students' learning (but probably made some VCs rich). Implementation's got to slow down until we actually are sure the shit actually works better.
Ed tech, like most tech, is primarily focused on making money for the ed tech companies and their shareholders. Not at all surprised that it doesn't actually lift education standards.
As the parent of two kids in elementary and middle school, the one thing we learned from Covid is that children need live teachers. Yes, there are exceptional children who can self-teach with good materials (I have one such child) but most don't. And for those who do, you don't need fancy tech. I supplement my (advanced) child's education and primarily use books and pencils, and live coaching, as I've found those work better than any "adaptive" EdTech I've encountered. Finding it too easy? Just skip pages to the next chapter? Too hard? Find some extra review problems on the topic.
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.
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 student learns in their own way and are better of for it.
Arguing about the effectiveness of edtech is like complaining there wasn't a viola on the Titanic's band.
This is interesting, and I think plausible, but I find it... surprisinging that the evidence base is so poor. Like, I know entire states have banned smart-phones now, can we see those effects yet? If it's anywhere near as powerful as the author suggests, surely we should?
The second question I have is about the outcome variable on these (but I realise I should probably just go read the damn research) - is it possible that letting people use phone teaches digital skills, at the cost of traditional spelling, for instance?
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?
Venture capital technology is mostly about replacing expensive processes with human input by cheap substitutes that are 75% as good but hoping scale will compensate. Sometimes 10x at 75% is really is better than 1x at 100%. Sometimes it’s not, because 75% isn’t good enough, and it might as well be 10x at zero.
Education is closer to the latter. VCs think they can remove the humans and the scale and cheapness (the latter in theory, at least) will compensate, but people are social animals, and students lose trust in the state when it wastes their time, so education by machine turns out not to work well at all, despite the fervent belief held in a few hundred Bay Area tech companies that it should.
The problem with edtech is they make the key mistake of taking the curriculum intended for pen / paper / chalkboard and they just put it on a tablet and expect it to work.
Seymour Papert wrote "Mindstorms" about this very topic in the 80s when PCs were being put in classrooms. Back then, teachers took the multiplication tables they had been doing with pen and paper and just made kids do them on the computer. Teachers make the same mistake with iPads and iPhones. Papert's book talks about the right way to do it -- reformulate the entire concept of learning to include these new tools. Unfortunately, everything gets measured against the old standards, and when the new tools don't work as well to teach the old standards as the tools with which the old standards were designed to be taught, obviously the results are going to look bad.
KISS. Teacher, Whiteboard, and a textbook. (Preferable one the student can keep at home and one in the classroom) EdTech resources are amazing for self-study, but should be divorced from the school system. There will be non-profit (Khan Academy) and for-profit options available for students and parents.
Though I am in favor of any suggestion that makes a teacher’s life easier.
However, I do have the controversial opinion that there should be no calculators allowed at all in K-12. So, I have some anti-tech bias.
Imagine blending the traditional educational structures into EdTech and using network engineering to clamp down what can be accessed in a classroom device to only the educational software modules needed. For example, you could put timers on how long each module is open. Give teachers the ability to override them and tap into each student individually if needed.
The issue is that the surrounding infrastructures would need to be much more competent than they currently are in education. I worked at an educational institution in the IT department, and the level of knowledge the IT staff had was abysmal. It was surprising that anything worked at all.
Additionally, not everything needs to be gamified. Somehow this notion that everything a child interacts with on a computer has to mimic a video game is a really narrow way of thinking. Instead, we could start with basic computer usage skills such as file management, and system configuration, and using core tools such as word processes and image manipulation software.
Instead of dumping kids into the world of Google which is a for-profit mechanism that is inherently designed to get people to click on stuff as much as possible, we actually as software developers need to re-think EdTech and have it be learning first.
As someone who tried all kinds of EdTech, I'd venture to say that the key to education quality is not in tech but in pedagogy and student engagement. The pedagogy depends on the quality of teachers, or specifically the quality of lecturing and the quality of assignments. Good assignments are really hard to come by. They need to be tailored. They need to have progressive difficulties. They need to be designed to help students understand fundamentals. They need to inspire students. And very importantly, they need to be graded and reviewed by the teachers. All such will require dedication and ingenuity of teachers.
As for the student engagement, I believe it depends on the passion and curiosity of a student, but I also recognize that most students simply don't want to work hard, and therefore they need certain healthy pressure, or at least a specific goal. Maybe EdTech can make quality teachers and homework accessible to millions, but it's just hard to keep students engaged. On the other hand, there are enough amazing free education materials in libraries and on the internet. The barrier to access them is really one's motivation.
In my experience as a parent of a senior in high school, the classes where the least amount of learning happens are those that depend on and are designed around "EdTech". The best ones still use paper and books.
My son's AP calculus 1 and 2 classes were all paper and books and run by dedicated teachers. I have never seen my son learn so much and put in so much effort. Other classes relying on "EdTech" are just babysitting with free grades. The teachers give up because they can't obtain a basic level of control of the student's use of the devices.
In my son's 12 years of education so far there has never been a class where the teacher had control of the technology - the Chromebooks. There was no switch the teacher had to turn the Chromebooks off or lock them. No ability to filter out games. The school district IT could never stay on top of the filters. Games are a constant presence.
Having these entertainment devices in the classroom just distracts from real learning and only serves to feed kid's behavioral data into Google's profiling algorithms.
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 something real they didn't know how to do before from youtube. Easy examples: basic plumbing, basic electrical, playing guitar, playing drums, systems design, how to improve in their sports, software stuff... even my dad learned how to properly put up a gutter on their house recently.
What I'm observing it seems like people are learning more its probably just schools getting in the way.
I took about 60 credits - ~8 hours per week each school semester - of Computer Science courses back in the mid 00's at a top state school. Besides the 101 Course, heavy on Java syntax; and Software Architecture where one learns the dark art of Swing, we used pencil, paper, and white boards (even a few chalk boards!) for the rest.
I use concepts like Dijkstra's algorithm and the Turing machine regularly in my job. They are very real to me - more real than any programming language - because I sat for hours taking paper notes off a whiteboard while some OG Computer guru discussed the topic.
If I didn't need tech to learn Computer Science, kids definitely don't need it to learn Algebra.
I discovered some amazing EdTech recently: the game Prodigy. It’s brilliant. Kids play it, and it’s an utterly uninspired example of modern gamification with a big dose of paid (by parents, of course) DLC. The selling point is that it’s (a) free for schools and (b) mixed in with the gamification is a little bit of measurement that is supposedly aligned to common core standards. The game does not even pretend to teach the material it measures.
And now we’ve gone past the usual endpoint where the metric becomes the goal. It seems that the ability to waste everyone’s time measuring the metrics has become the new goal.
It seems the real issue here is that school devices should be locked down better? It's honestly shocking they aren't already. Why on Earth would kids be allowed to access TikTok over their school network?
I think education is best done with 'minimal power' in the students' hands.
An example:
A student is taught how to calculate an integral with MathCAD on a school PC. They now know how to use MathCAD on Windows to calculate an integral. If the OS or software changes, they may lose that knowledge, and they may not understand the concept. They've effectively 'lost' knowledge due to time moving on.
Differently:
A student is taught how to calculate an integral with pencil and paper. Due to pencil and paper doing nothing without the student driving it, they must understand the steps to the process, and in doing so, will likely get to understanding why those are the steps. At the very least they may be curious about the steps, why they work, and why all are required. If you give them a PC, they'll likely be able to figure out how to use it, as they understand the concept. If you take away the PC, they'll still be able to use pencil and paper.
The distraction/multitasking angle is interesting too, but I really think education works best when you take all unnecessary power away from the student. They are forced to learn the concepts rather than get lost in all the peripheral details (PC, software, notifications, etc.) and understanding of fundamental concepts will rarely become useless. While understanding of computing platforms or software versions will very quickly become useless.
As someone who has taught in formal and informal settings, the promise of EdTech was amazing, but the delivery has not really been that good.
To me, a lot of the companies in the space seem to be more concerned with how to maximize dollars sent to them and not as much about how things are improving or better with technology. Tech should be a tool to help the learning, it doesn't have to be each and every part, and I feel like the ultimate goal of at least some of the companies was to create an all-in-one solution for every problem.
This strikes me as a really strange way to define EdTech:
> In this article, I’m defining EdTech as any student-employed, internet-connected digital device; this includes computers, laptops, tablets, cell phones, and smart watches. I am not discussing or evaluating the use of digital devices by teachers.
Aren't there a huge swath of self-defined "EdTech" startups aimed at tools for teachers, and-or use in the class, perhaps exclusively by the teacher?
I find this article to be frustratingly gappy and the discourse here about it to be awful, a soup of personal anecdotes that would make the bikeshed painting discourse proud. Given at least 10 years of different types of EdTech in classrooms, is there really no peer-reviewed study about the effects of technology in the classroom conditioned on type of technology, time spent, etc? It's no doubt that the comments are personal anecdotes because the article itself is a soup of meta-analyses that dance around a picture that isn't really clear to me.
I don't disagree with the thrust of the article and it makes intuitive sense to me but it feels so substance free as to be unactionable. Yes multi-tasking is bad for individuals, yes kids spend a lot of time on media. Are there other interventions that are better? Are lower class sizes a bulwark against this? How does income and culture (anglosphere, asia, etc) affect this?
In general, people tend to learn most subjects through their own actions and continuous practice... and not through abstract imagination of some non sequitur that lecturers may not even fully comprehend. Only 1:17 people have the self discipline to do self-directed study... online that stat is likely more dismal... =)
Yet, we found Steve Brunton's book and many labs tended to engage people better than handouts:
I wouldn't say it has failed completely, but yes, it has not delivered on the promise. Edtech and teaching is close to my heart and I have spent a lot of time analyzing this. My insights are mostly from what I have observed in India.
Edtech has failed in India because there is very little tech and even little education in the apps. Mostly edtech in India equates to exam preparation apps.
Other approaches like the duolingo gamification approaches have also failed to actually educate users though some of them have found success as startups.
This has lead to a disillusionment among parents about the edtech promise. Also, unfortunately the big successes of edtech(Byjus, Whitehat etc) turned out to be bad apples.
But lets take the positives. The main positive is that parents and kids are willing to try and there is a huge market. They just need the right product.
My takeaways are as follows:
1. Too many products try to reinvent the wheel with their own curriculum etc. This creates an extra burden for students who have to study these in addition to their course work. Given the paucity of time, guess what they drop?
2. Too much gamification and engagement farming. The emphasis on gamification instead of learning.
3. Most edtech is about putting videos online and adding quizzes. No emphasis on making the content actually interactive and engaging. In this day and age why shouldn't text books be interactive.
This is what I am focusing on and helping my wife do a startup in this space(I am unfortunately busy with running a SaaS startup, so I just help out of passion :))
So far, we have made the whole of CBSE(India's national curriculum) curriculum for math as an interactive textbook. But it's a long journey. There is no hurry. The revolution has just started :)
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.
Allow me to correct a bit the window: commercial EdTech push is clearly failed. The idea of remote learning might be perfectly valid though.
An example:
- TED Talk alike video lessons (ok, without political biases), meaning teachers who craft lectio magistralis on video, mount them, improve them over time and share them, their colleagues and students will makes the best emerge;
- students see and take notes of the video lesson in the evening (the best moment for young brain), in the morning they arrange their note for an afternoon speech, a random selection of students will actually give the speech on what they learned to their teachers and their peers;
- FLOSS desktop as basic system needs, no mobile crap or webcrapplications in the soup, people have to learn technically sound systems not commercially interested modern-archaic crapware.
I stopped monitoring that side of tech, but early MOOCs (first gen coursera, edx, stanford) were as good or even better in some regards than my own college programming studies[0]. I could engage deeper in the material and there was some healthy emulation between people on the dedicated IRC rooms. On site college doesn't give you full focus, you might be distracted by people, teachers won't necessarily be more present for you (so not worse than rewatching a video)
bonus point: there were some famous names in our groups, it was fun to see the spread between absolute noobs and cpp iso standard contributor
[0] for programming, questions + test suites are very effective to try various ideas and see what fails. for other subjects, like philosophy it might differ
As a former teacher and current parent, I hate ed tech for a variety of reasons:
-ed tech exists, by definition, on the greatest distraction machine heretofore known to humankind
-ed tech lets the tech do the grading, removing the ed from the loop. It abstracts away the teacher's mental model of my student's mind.
-ed tech is overwhelmingly short-response or multiple choice; this measures only the most basic forms of learning.
-there is rarely a physical artifact, making lessons and learning far more ephemeral. Often, I cant review previously-submitted work to see where my children have gone astray.
-ed tech has completely removed the physical aspects of education. Writing notes is better than typing notes is better than merely listening to a lecture, on a retention basis. Rather than actually submerge an object in a graduated cylinder of water to calculate its volume via displacement, its now a shitty online "experiment"
I could go on and on, and perhaps later I will in subsequent comments.
Electronic learning materials tend to be consumer oriented. Instead of reading a book you’re going to click through an interactive story book, etc.
But custom software and is very expensive, and doesn’t scale. Thousands of work hours to make 1 consumable hour. It’s like maintaining an MMO and adding new quests every week, but without the talented devs or interesting source material.
The real leverage offered by technology is creative tools that enable experiences which are impractical, like simulations, etc.
But it’s probably a tougher sell to administrations:
- no telemetry (surveillance)
- not an on rails experience you can drop a low performing kid in front of
Tech and Education solutions or proposals always seem to be sort of island solutions.
But none of them address the structural problems / challenges with education. Teachers are burnt out, many teachers are terrible with tech, do not get enough support, the structure of education systems doesn't allow for flexibility. Parents aren't involved in many cases, kids are hungry, social worker type issues. Education IT is often underfunded, their IT workers get low pay so they leave. The list is endless.
But tech is dropped in like a bomb on a building that is supposed to help with renovation ...
no it hasnt, edtech's purpose is, and always has been, selling to administrators. I have never met a single educator of any sort who ever believed that this technology would be valuable to students in any way.
I still appreciate how self-learning is now easier and more convenient than ever. It's always been possible by reading books, but the addition of resources like Kahn, 3Bl1Br, MitX etc are lovely.
Given the adversarial of systematic education, and their focus on discriminating into social status castes, the self-learning will have a dual advantage: Growth, enjoyment of learning, and a large advantage in the competitive aspect. Someone who's smart may score well on an evaluation; so will someone who's seen the material, and worked through the problems before.
I find it telling that “EdTech” is naturally assumed to be “classroom tools”. Talk about a lack of vision. The fine people at OMSCS are pioneering a fantastic new future for higher education, and it goes way beyond flash card systems and pop quiz tools.
Education is in trouble in America, but that doesn’t mean a) the concept of technology has failed, or b) it’s in trouble everywhere. The edtech revolution can’t fail, it already happened for many hundreds of millions worldwide with the advent of Wikipedia, YouTube, and Kahn Academy.
I’m the CEO of an ed tech startup that delivers on some of these promises in critical areas for post secondary. It allows scoring and adaptive learning to be self paced and based on skill mastery.
I teach tech to elementary and intermediate grades. The Chromebooks are locked down ewaste. I'm not saying if one of you guys buy a Chromebook you can't have it function as a general purpose computer. But the Chromebooks students use aren't computers.
The more that I think of it. They are terminals that permit students to access random edtech platforms. Very little computing going on. Which is absurd when a potential computer is sitting right there in front of you in computer class.
It's because medtech is only useful if individualized, and individualized does not scale. You will end up with 'range' of kids, but even that is dumb because each children apprehend different subjects differently. You can put each kid in a range for each subject (history, language, math), but even that isn't enough. In the end, it just cost 'too much' (I.E more than we want to spend).
Was one of the goals with EdTech to sort of gamify learning to get kids more engaged or something? I could imagine a scenario where some kids learn more by a paper / pencil / book modality and would do worse learning from an iPad— while other kids who are totally disengaged might learn something at all from an iPad so that’s better than nothing?
Step one should be having an edtech ecosystem that doesn't allow students to use the web. There are just too many distractions online. I think noone has really invested the kind of capital required to do a good job with this. Most of the software my kids have to use for school is pretty bad.
Computers and access to the Web are incompatible not with education, but with the paradigm of conventional school education, where teachers instruct classes of pupils to a national (or otherwise standardized) curriculum. In the school context, an electronic device competes with the teacher for the pupils' attention. Educational resources such as Khan Academy explicitly attempt to follow conventional curricula, but one that only follows one country's educational expectations (here, that of the USA), and even that only loosely; many of the most informative online resources aren't intended to fit into any standard curriculum at all.
Essentially, statistics will tell you how to gradually improve a system that you already have (conventional class-based school education), but won't tell you about the value of an entirely new system. It's a sort of 'local minima' problem like that.
The article admits as much, but fails to acknowledge the other solution to this conflict: instead of a 'phone-free school', why not change the school to support an electronic educational paradigm? Just as the Montessori method or the culture-rich concept of Kindergarten education are usually very valuable to those children who are lucky enough to experience them, there is already a wealth of evidence for interactive and electronic learning methods - not just a 'potential' as the article claims. The key difference between learning paradigms such as Montessori and Kindergarten and electronic education is that the former requires expensive (and safe) access to materials, and the latter is now almost free! The article claims: "However, if there are two or more options for engaging with learning material, then it is best to select the tool that will yield the best results." I ask, what justification is there to not select a tool that isn't perhaps the best, but it the best that society can afford? One-on-one tutoring with experts and fully-equiped laboratories would be wonderful, even better than electronic education, but that was never the offer. Historically progressive educational authorities are literally rejecting an educational opportunity that requires nothing except open minds.
P.S. An irrelevant but interesting nit-pick: the article mentions that you have to hold each word in memory as you read a sentence of English text, but this is untrue. Readers create a mental, semantic and emotional image while they read; dyslexic readers might struggle with the concept of a 'word' itself yet are still able to understand the meaning of a sentence.
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.
> This is why, when getting paid as part of a research study to focus on a 20-minute computerized lesson, nearly 40% of students were unable to stop themselves from multitasking.
I read this as I was waiting for unit tests to compile and run. Such a paradox.
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.
I think the EdTech revolution hasn’t truly happened yet, but it feels inevitable. In fact, the PISA Test might soon incorporate LLM prompting. I’m not kidding. Things are accelerating in every direction, and I’d rather brainstorm here on HN than focus solely on the article, which I think is a valuable resource regardless of whether you agree with it.
Just my two cents, not claiming this is groundbreaking, but hoping to provoke insights from smarter and more experienced folks here:
- Education should be a blend of virtual and physical, working with both individuals and groups.
- Kids should be able to set their own pace but also have structured routes to accelerate when possible.
- Curriculum could be streamlined into core components: today, you can learn subjects like chemistry, physics, CS, math, and biology through various Python packages. So, why not start by learning a programming language?
Most student devices are older Android or iPad tablets. Sometimes they get older generation Chromebooks. They are not getting M4 laptops. Then EdTech delivers MS teams level bloatware and expects it to run? This stuff is generally absolute garbage that even at the most optimistic barely works as advertised.
Lots of this stuff gets built with very little thought on how it's supposed to integrate into a classroom setting. None of it even attempts to integrate with the student grading or scheduling system(s).
We expect public school teachers to be:
* Very well educated.
* Emotionally mature and able to understand/handle emotionally immature students.
* Very good at their jobs.
* Able to understand the dizzying array of laws and regulations around education.
* Handle the politics of education(around what can be taught or not, what books can be used, etc.)
* Having students who were promoted from the previous grade, even if they can't do previous grade level things(like say HS students that still can't read). * Teach to a test.
* Teach to an individual up to their ability.
* Teach 30+ students at once at the lower grades.
* In Middle School/High School teaching over 200 unique students in a day.
* Dealing with unreasonable demands by some parents.
* Some students having special needs, diets.
* Having little to no classroom level funding.
* Understand and be educated in the latest tech.
* In some states teach students that are hungry.
* In some states carry guns to protect from school shooters.
All while also being paid poorly, if not terribly.
Sure, I can totally see that working out well.
If we paid teachers like we paid any other professional job(lawyers, doctors, etc), I guarantee we will get much higher calibre teachers. Teacher pay in the US hasn't even kept up with inflation over the past decade. Not to mention salaries of all the support staff around teachers to help them thrive in the classroom.
Tech has infinite possibility in educating people, and may eventually remove the need for school altogether. What has to be faced is:
1) that our theories about education are bad, and that we've been cargo culting traditional education and haven't made any significant changes in the process for hundreds of years,
2) our theories about how to handle the future of education with the new tools that we now have were doomed to failure because of that, and
3) with no theoretical foundation, charlatans tried to push a theory that sheer proximity to technology would have an emergent magical effect on education (while another set of charlatans push a theory that technology has a magical dampening effect on education.)
It's the same situation we're in with governance, or law. The English accidentally and clumsily developed a Parliament that worked, and the people who wiped the King's ass developed into a cabinet. It was productive. We then formalized it by examining what had been done and simply writing it down and sometimes streamlining it. We also do that explicitly in the common law, where we assume that every judicial decision ever made was correct, and concentrate on when they contradict each other to make changes. It's productive, but it's not theory; they're descriptions of history.
Covid was a test for Edtech, and it failed horribly. We need to ground education in reality: we're trying to force unwilling children to remember things. We need to focus on their wills, and their memories, and to come up with theory. We can experiment on adults, although the difference between adult education and children's education is that adults are self-motivated, so this would concentrate on memory methods. When focused on children, how can we give a child the discipline to feel like they want to participate in and contribute to the world? Does that have to do more with social services, the safety net, and giving children real responsibility earlier than with educational theory?
Recent interesting read for me was a failure and partial success trying to use spaced repetition in the classroom. His partial answer was that it was better when everyone shared the same screen and answered together, you move slower than you wish you could, and you don't demand that they remember forever. Also, from my reading, the expected schedule of schooling completely disrupted what he was trying to do. Schools have to be redone, not tweaked. People knew this in the 19th and early 20th century, even if they didn't manage to come up with a formula that worked.
> Seeing as the great majority of students spend over 80% of their digital device time using these tools to multitask, the automatic response for a great majority of students using these tools has become multitasking.. Unfortunately, when we attempt to employ digital devices for learning purposes, this primary function quickly bleeds into student behavior.
> This is why, when using a computer for homework, students typically last fewer than 6 minutes before accessing social media, messaging friends, and engaging with other digital distractions. This is why, when using a laptop during class, students typically spend 38 minutes of every hour off-task. This is why, when getting paid as part of a research study to focus on a 20-minute computerized lesson, nearly 40% of students were unable to stop themselves from multitasking. It’s not that the students of today have abnormally weak constitutions; it’s that they have spent thousands of hours training themselves to use digital devices in a manner guaranteed to impair learning and performance. It’s also that many of the apps being run on those devices were carefully engineered to pull young people away from whatever they were doing.
> And perhaps this is the key point: I’m not saying that digital technologies can’t be used for learning; in fact, if these tools were only ever employed for learning purposes, then they may have proven some of the most important academic inventions ever. The argument I’m making is that digital technologies so often aren’t used for learning that giving students a laptop, tablet, or other multi-function device places a large (and unnecessary) obstacle between the student and the desired outcome. In order to effectively learn while using an unlocked, internet-connected multi-function digital device, students must expend a great deal of cognitive effort battling impulses that they’ve spent years honing - a battle they lose more often than not. (of course schools do often try to implement blockers and restrictions, but this opens up an eternal cat-and-mouse struggle, and the mice are very good at finding ways to evade the cat.)
COVID was to EdTech as The Fukushima Nuclear event was to Japanese Robotics -- the one big event where all hands were needed on deck and the decades of investment came up...lacking.
In the case of Fukushima - getting entry and information on the inside of the reactor core eventually required U.S. developed robots, built for much more challenging and pragmatic environments.
With EdTech, for decades we knew that it was a backup option to solid in-classroom, instructor led, education. AFAIK, measured outcomes on non-traditional learning have nearly always lagged the classroom. But more and more institutions were turning to it because, quite frankly, its cheaper -- with student flexibility as the trailing, but strongly upsold, benefit.
The 100%, digital, EdTech event that was COVID has forced a reckoning. We finally have, at massive scale, real data (and not small or unusual situations) that comprehensively shows the tech either isn't ready, or never will be.
I personally don't understand why this seems to be such a surprise. Ever since I went through school, there was an attempt to shove technogadgets into classrooms that offered very minimal educational value over a teacher using their judgment, training, and experience to work with a student to learn a topic.
There's a part in this article that I think is the key problem:
> What he found was equal parts surprising and predictable: nearly everything has a positive impact on student learning.
I remember a specific "training" I received years ago as an adult. The instructor put each student through a comprehensive skills assessment. Then the students spent 8 weeks in a room with the resources we should have used for learning -- books, video, software, and so on -- but without any instruction of any kind. At the end of the 8 weeks we were all assessed again and voila! nearly all students had shown progress. Great success! and the instructor was free to continue doing next to nothing and doomscrolling Facebook most of the day in his best job ever. Providing no education whatsoever, but just access to resources, had a demonstrated positive outcome.
A lot of EdTech falls into this same sort of bullshit pile. It doesn't really do anything in particular, but will sometimes show the promise of improvement. Fingers are pointed to improperly trained educators, or lack of time with the technogadget, or some other reason other than the tech when searching for what's holding the tech back. What the deployers of EdTech are really measuring is not educational outcomes, but improvements to the bottom-line. If they were really focused on education, then EdTech would only be used where it should a learning effect at least as great as classroom instruction. But we know it generally doesn't, and yet here it is in our classrooms.
Source: Developed adult learning curriculum in advanced technical areas and delivered material to over 2,000 students who were required to have had at least an undergraduate degree and significant other job-specific training as prerequisites. Was also a "cursed" gifted kid in K-12.
don't forget that 2021 is when we let all the students get infected with a virus that causes neurocognitive issues, and then infected them again. it's not the whole story, but damned if it isn't a big part of it.
The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
(afterbabel.com)343 points by obscurette 12 November 2024 | 500 comments
Comments
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 complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.
Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth. It's such a crying shame.
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.
A distant second is the format we used during COVID: writing with a tablet using xournal, and streaming it via zoom (loosely like Khan academy). This is of course only my personal experience/opinion, but also informed by vast amounts of student feedback.
EDIT: I agree with the different perspectives from the responses, and should have qualified that I meant it for subjects one typically learns at a university, like calculus or linear algebra. One-on-one tutoring, self-learning can work even better or complement the above and skills, e.g. playing a musical instrument should be approached totally differently.
It's like arguing that a student who likes reading Harry Potter, or Comic Books 2 hours a night is forming habits against the idea of using books for learning. Students who play games or watch movies are not alcoholics using beer for buoyancy studies.
Not only this, it groups listening to music on a computer as an independent recreation activity, and not something that students will do concurrently with homework or other tasks outside of class, double dipping on recreation hours. As if listening to music isn't a boon for learning, which it easily can be.
It's true that edtech hasn't (yet) created an educational utopia, as some people may have imagined or hoped. But there are educational technology tools that my son (8yo) uses several times per week, that undoubtedly help him to learn important stuff:
1. Math Academy (truly amazing for 4th grade math all the way to first year of undergrad: https://www.bit.ly/ma-way)
2. Skritter (for learning to write Chinese characters)
3. Anki (flashcard program).
4. Octostudio (for learning to code, by the same folks as MIT Scratch)
#1 and #2 are both much more efficient (learning per unit of time) than any other method I've seen. They (along with #3) use spaced repetition and retrieval practice as part of their secret sauce.
But they are also highly domain-specific. Math Academy relies on thousands of hand-crafted math problems, all designed within a (hand-crafted) graph of topics that students must master. Skritter has tools that give people (adults or children) an easy on-ramp to learning the broad strokes of each character, and more advanced modes that train more precision.
But I also want to touch on products. Had a startup in the space[0], and we only achieved commercial success once we started gaining customers outside of EdTech.
EdTech is hard, in that it combines enterprise-like sales with scrappy startup-like budgets. On top of that, you're selling to people who are far removed from the user experience (heads of districts vs students and teachers). End result is stuff like Blackboard, who everyone hates, but it's everywhere.
I've seen a ton of interesting, promising startups that tried to engage students and help with learning (in various ways), only to never hear about them again.
I've also seen (& heard from) a lot of teachers with great ideas, who basically need to do grassroots campaigns and teach each other tips & tricks, because they're not really supported by their organizations.
[0] https://blog.senko.net/the-story-of-a-web-whiteboard
We could replicate the same blank page and grayscale human response to questions. But then we have not made a cheap factory that reduces costs. Its the typical fast, good, cheap conundrum. Everyone keeps picking cheap and getting mad when it does not work.
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 skeptical study. First you've got "balanced reading" that de-emphasized phonics and reduced literacy (but I'm sure resulted in massive textbook sales and prestige for a few education academics), and now you've got EdTech screens that have hurt students' learning (but probably made some VCs rich). Implementation's got to slow down until we actually are sure the shit actually works better.
As the parent of two kids in elementary and middle school, the one thing we learned from Covid is that children need live teachers. Yes, there are exceptional children who can self-teach with good materials (I have one such child) but most don't. And for those who do, you don't need fancy tech. I supplement my (advanced) child's education and primarily use books and pencils, and live coaching, as I've found those work better than any "adaptive" EdTech I've encountered. Finding it too easy? Just skip pages to the next chapter? Too hard? Find some extra review problems on the topic.
Arguing about the effectiveness of edtech is like complaining there wasn't a viola on the Titanic's band.
The second question I have is about the outcome variable on these (but I realise I should probably just go read the damn research) - is it possible that letting people use phone teaches digital skills, at the cost of traditional spelling, for instance?
- Khan Academy
- playing games such as _Dragon Box_ (which teaches the principles of math and esp. algebra)
- reading and using books such as:
https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...
https://www.motionmountain.net/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/...
and at the elementary level texts such as: _Just Grandma & Me_ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wanderfuls...
and how much of it is what else?
Education is closer to the latter. VCs think they can remove the humans and the scale and cheapness (the latter in theory, at least) will compensate, but people are social animals, and students lose trust in the state when it wastes their time, so education by machine turns out not to work well at all, despite the fervent belief held in a few hundred Bay Area tech companies that it should.
If you care about your kids, control their access to the brain rotting aspects of technology like a tyrant.
Seymour Papert wrote "Mindstorms" about this very topic in the 80s when PCs were being put in classrooms. Back then, teachers took the multiplication tables they had been doing with pen and paper and just made kids do them on the computer. Teachers make the same mistake with iPads and iPhones. Papert's book talks about the right way to do it -- reformulate the entire concept of learning to include these new tools. Unfortunately, everything gets measured against the old standards, and when the new tools don't work as well to teach the old standards as the tools with which the old standards were designed to be taught, obviously the results are going to look bad.
Though I am in favor of any suggestion that makes a teacher’s life easier.
However, I do have the controversial opinion that there should be no calculators allowed at all in K-12. So, I have some anti-tech bias.
The issue is that the surrounding infrastructures would need to be much more competent than they currently are in education. I worked at an educational institution in the IT department, and the level of knowledge the IT staff had was abysmal. It was surprising that anything worked at all.
Additionally, not everything needs to be gamified. Somehow this notion that everything a child interacts with on a computer has to mimic a video game is a really narrow way of thinking. Instead, we could start with basic computer usage skills such as file management, and system configuration, and using core tools such as word processes and image manipulation software.
Instead of dumping kids into the world of Google which is a for-profit mechanism that is inherently designed to get people to click on stuff as much as possible, we actually as software developers need to re-think EdTech and have it be learning first.
As for the student engagement, I believe it depends on the passion and curiosity of a student, but I also recognize that most students simply don't want to work hard, and therefore they need certain healthy pressure, or at least a specific goal. Maybe EdTech can make quality teachers and homework accessible to millions, but it's just hard to keep students engaged. On the other hand, there are enough amazing free education materials in libraries and on the internet. The barrier to access them is really one's motivation.
My son's AP calculus 1 and 2 classes were all paper and books and run by dedicated teachers. I have never seen my son learn so much and put in so much effort. Other classes relying on "EdTech" are just babysitting with free grades. The teachers give up because they can't obtain a basic level of control of the student's use of the devices.
In my son's 12 years of education so far there has never been a class where the teacher had control of the technology - the Chromebooks. There was no switch the teacher had to turn the Chromebooks off or lock them. No ability to filter out games. The school district IT could never stay on top of the filters. Games are a constant presence.
Having these entertainment devices in the classroom just distracts from real learning and only serves to feed kid's behavioral data into Google's profiling algorithms.
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 something real they didn't know how to do before from youtube. Easy examples: basic plumbing, basic electrical, playing guitar, playing drums, systems design, how to improve in their sports, software stuff... even my dad learned how to properly put up a gutter on their house recently.
What I'm observing it seems like people are learning more its probably just schools getting in the way.
I use concepts like Dijkstra's algorithm and the Turing machine regularly in my job. They are very real to me - more real than any programming language - because I sat for hours taking paper notes off a whiteboard while some OG Computer guru discussed the topic.
If I didn't need tech to learn Computer Science, kids definitely don't need it to learn Algebra.
And now we’ve gone past the usual endpoint where the metric becomes the goal. It seems that the ability to waste everyone’s time measuring the metrics has become the new goal.
Mind-boggling, seriously.
An example:
A student is taught how to calculate an integral with MathCAD on a school PC. They now know how to use MathCAD on Windows to calculate an integral. If the OS or software changes, they may lose that knowledge, and they may not understand the concept. They've effectively 'lost' knowledge due to time moving on.
Differently:
A student is taught how to calculate an integral with pencil and paper. Due to pencil and paper doing nothing without the student driving it, they must understand the steps to the process, and in doing so, will likely get to understanding why those are the steps. At the very least they may be curious about the steps, why they work, and why all are required. If you give them a PC, they'll likely be able to figure out how to use it, as they understand the concept. If you take away the PC, they'll still be able to use pencil and paper.
The distraction/multitasking angle is interesting too, but I really think education works best when you take all unnecessary power away from the student. They are forced to learn the concepts rather than get lost in all the peripheral details (PC, software, notifications, etc.) and understanding of fundamental concepts will rarely become useless. While understanding of computing platforms or software versions will very quickly become useless.
To me, a lot of the companies in the space seem to be more concerned with how to maximize dollars sent to them and not as much about how things are improving or better with technology. Tech should be a tool to help the learning, it doesn't have to be each and every part, and I feel like the ultimate goal of at least some of the companies was to create an all-in-one solution for every problem.
> In this article, I’m defining EdTech as any student-employed, internet-connected digital device; this includes computers, laptops, tablets, cell phones, and smart watches. I am not discussing or evaluating the use of digital devices by teachers.
Aren't there a huge swath of self-defined "EdTech" startups aimed at tools for teachers, and-or use in the class, perhaps exclusively by the teacher?
I don't disagree with the thrust of the article and it makes intuitive sense to me but it feels so substance free as to be unactionable. Yes multi-tasking is bad for individuals, yes kids spend a lot of time on media. Are there other interventions that are better? Are lower class sizes a bulwark against this? How does income and culture (anglosphere, asia, etc) affect this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
In general, people tend to learn most subjects through their own actions and continuous practice... and not through abstract imagination of some non sequitur that lecturers may not even fully comprehend. Only 1:17 people have the self discipline to do self-directed study... online that stat is likely more dismal... =)
Yet, we found Steve Brunton's book and many labs tended to engage people better than handouts:
https://www.youtube.com/@Eigensteve/videos
https://www.amazon.com/Data-Driven-Science-Engineering-Learn...
Thanks Steve =3
Edtech has failed in India because there is very little tech and even little education in the apps. Mostly edtech in India equates to exam preparation apps.
Other approaches like the duolingo gamification approaches have also failed to actually educate users though some of them have found success as startups.
This has lead to a disillusionment among parents about the edtech promise. Also, unfortunately the big successes of edtech(Byjus, Whitehat etc) turned out to be bad apples.
But lets take the positives. The main positive is that parents and kids are willing to try and there is a huge market. They just need the right product.
My takeaways are as follows:
1. Too many products try to reinvent the wheel with their own curriculum etc. This creates an extra burden for students who have to study these in addition to their course work. Given the paucity of time, guess what they drop?
2. Too much gamification and engagement farming. The emphasis on gamification instead of learning.
3. Most edtech is about putting videos online and adding quizzes. No emphasis on making the content actually interactive and engaging. In this day and age why shouldn't text books be interactive.
This is what I am focusing on and helping my wife do a startup in this space(I am unfortunately busy with running a SaaS startup, so I just help out of passion :))
So far, we have made the whole of CBSE(India's national curriculum) curriculum for math as an interactive textbook. But it's a long journey. There is no hurry. The revolution has just started :)
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.
An example:
- TED Talk alike video lessons (ok, without political biases), meaning teachers who craft lectio magistralis on video, mount them, improve them over time and share them, their colleagues and students will makes the best emerge;
- students see and take notes of the video lesson in the evening (the best moment for young brain), in the morning they arrange their note for an afternoon speech, a random selection of students will actually give the speech on what they learned to their teachers and their peers;
- FLOSS desktop as basic system needs, no mobile crap or webcrapplications in the soup, people have to learn technically sound systems not commercially interested modern-archaic crapware.
Try this and tell the results.
bonus point: there were some famous names in our groups, it was fun to see the spread between absolute noobs and cpp iso standard contributor
[0] for programming, questions + test suites are very effective to try various ideas and see what fails. for other subjects, like philosophy it might differ
-ed tech exists, by definition, on the greatest distraction machine heretofore known to humankind
-ed tech lets the tech do the grading, removing the ed from the loop. It abstracts away the teacher's mental model of my student's mind.
-ed tech is overwhelmingly short-response or multiple choice; this measures only the most basic forms of learning.
-there is rarely a physical artifact, making lessons and learning far more ephemeral. Often, I cant review previously-submitted work to see where my children have gone astray.
-ed tech has completely removed the physical aspects of education. Writing notes is better than typing notes is better than merely listening to a lecture, on a retention basis. Rather than actually submerge an object in a graduated cylinder of water to calculate its volume via displacement, its now a shitty online "experiment"
I could go on and on, and perhaps later I will in subsequent comments.
But custom software and is very expensive, and doesn’t scale. Thousands of work hours to make 1 consumable hour. It’s like maintaining an MMO and adding new quests every week, but without the talented devs or interesting source material.
The real leverage offered by technology is creative tools that enable experiences which are impractical, like simulations, etc.
But it’s probably a tougher sell to administrations:
- no telemetry (surveillance)
- not an on rails experience you can drop a low performing kid in front of
But none of them address the structural problems / challenges with education. Teachers are burnt out, many teachers are terrible with tech, do not get enough support, the structure of education systems doesn't allow for flexibility. Parents aren't involved in many cases, kids are hungry, social worker type issues. Education IT is often underfunded, their IT workers get low pay so they leave. The list is endless.
But tech is dropped in like a bomb on a building that is supposed to help with renovation ...
Given the adversarial of systematic education, and their focus on discriminating into social status castes, the self-learning will have a dual advantage: Growth, enjoyment of learning, and a large advantage in the competitive aspect. Someone who's smart may score well on an evaluation; so will someone who's seen the material, and worked through the problems before.
It cannot be that so much govt money is spent without rigorous checks / very solid justification.
Education is in trouble in America, but that doesn’t mean a) the concept of technology has failed, or b) it’s in trouble everywhere. The edtech revolution can’t fail, it already happened for many hundreds of millions worldwide with the advent of Wikipedia, YouTube, and Kahn Academy.
The more that I think of it. They are terminals that permit students to access random edtech platforms. Very little computing going on. Which is absurd when a potential computer is sitting right there in front of you in computer class.
Essentially, statistics will tell you how to gradually improve a system that you already have (conventional class-based school education), but won't tell you about the value of an entirely new system. It's a sort of 'local minima' problem like that.
The article admits as much, but fails to acknowledge the other solution to this conflict: instead of a 'phone-free school', why not change the school to support an electronic educational paradigm? Just as the Montessori method or the culture-rich concept of Kindergarten education are usually very valuable to those children who are lucky enough to experience them, there is already a wealth of evidence for interactive and electronic learning methods - not just a 'potential' as the article claims. The key difference between learning paradigms such as Montessori and Kindergarten and electronic education is that the former requires expensive (and safe) access to materials, and the latter is now almost free! The article claims: "However, if there are two or more options for engaging with learning material, then it is best to select the tool that will yield the best results." I ask, what justification is there to not select a tool that isn't perhaps the best, but it the best that society can afford? One-on-one tutoring with experts and fully-equiped laboratories would be wonderful, even better than electronic education, but that was never the offer. Historically progressive educational authorities are literally rejecting an educational opportunity that requires nothing except open minds.
P.S. An irrelevant but interesting nit-pick: the article mentions that you have to hold each word in memory as you read a sentence of English text, but this is untrue. Readers create a mental, semantic and emotional image while they read; dyslexic readers might struggle with the concept of a 'word' itself yet are still able to understand the meaning of a sentence.
I read this as I was waiting for unit tests to compile and run. Such a paradox.
Just my two cents, not claiming this is groundbreaking, but hoping to provoke insights from smarter and more experienced folks here:
- Education should be a blend of virtual and physical, working with both individuals and groups.
- Kids should be able to set their own pace but also have structured routes to accelerate when possible.
- Curriculum could be streamlined into core components: today, you can learn subjects like chemistry, physics, CS, math, and biology through various Python packages. So, why not start by learning a programming language?
Lots of this stuff gets built with very little thought on how it's supposed to integrate into a classroom setting. None of it even attempts to integrate with the student grading or scheduling system(s).
We expect public school teachers to be:
* Very well educated. * Emotionally mature and able to understand/handle emotionally immature students. * Very good at their jobs. * Able to understand the dizzying array of laws and regulations around education. * Handle the politics of education(around what can be taught or not, what books can be used, etc.) * Having students who were promoted from the previous grade, even if they can't do previous grade level things(like say HS students that still can't read). * Teach to a test. * Teach to an individual up to their ability. * Teach 30+ students at once at the lower grades. * In Middle School/High School teaching over 200 unique students in a day. * Dealing with unreasonable demands by some parents. * Some students having special needs, diets. * Having little to no classroom level funding. * Understand and be educated in the latest tech. * In some states teach students that are hungry. * In some states carry guns to protect from school shooters.
All while also being paid poorly, if not terribly.
Sure, I can totally see that working out well.
If we paid teachers like we paid any other professional job(lawyers, doctors, etc), I guarantee we will get much higher calibre teachers. Teacher pay in the US hasn't even kept up with inflation over the past decade. Not to mention salaries of all the support staff around teachers to help them thrive in the classroom.
“Degrees” not credible enough
1) that our theories about education are bad, and that we've been cargo culting traditional education and haven't made any significant changes in the process for hundreds of years,
2) our theories about how to handle the future of education with the new tools that we now have were doomed to failure because of that, and
3) with no theoretical foundation, charlatans tried to push a theory that sheer proximity to technology would have an emergent magical effect on education (while another set of charlatans push a theory that technology has a magical dampening effect on education.)
It's the same situation we're in with governance, or law. The English accidentally and clumsily developed a Parliament that worked, and the people who wiped the King's ass developed into a cabinet. It was productive. We then formalized it by examining what had been done and simply writing it down and sometimes streamlining it. We also do that explicitly in the common law, where we assume that every judicial decision ever made was correct, and concentrate on when they contradict each other to make changes. It's productive, but it's not theory; they're descriptions of history.
Covid was a test for Edtech, and it failed horribly. We need to ground education in reality: we're trying to force unwilling children to remember things. We need to focus on their wills, and their memories, and to come up with theory. We can experiment on adults, although the difference between adult education and children's education is that adults are self-motivated, so this would concentrate on memory methods. When focused on children, how can we give a child the discipline to feel like they want to participate in and contribute to the world? Does that have to do more with social services, the safety net, and giving children real responsibility earlier than with educational theory?
Recent interesting read for me was a failure and partial success trying to use spaced repetition in the classroom. His partial answer was that it was better when everyone shared the same screen and answered together, you move slower than you wish you could, and you don't demand that they remember forever. Also, from my reading, the expected schedule of schooling completely disrupted what he was trying to do. Schools have to be redone, not tweaked. People knew this in the 19th and early 20th century, even if they didn't manage to come up with a formula that worked.
Warning, lots of filler, but also lots of content: "Seven Years of Spaced Repetition Software in the Classroom" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F6ZTtBXn2cFLmWPdM/seven-year...
> Seeing as the great majority of students spend over 80% of their digital device time using these tools to multitask, the automatic response for a great majority of students using these tools has become multitasking.. Unfortunately, when we attempt to employ digital devices for learning purposes, this primary function quickly bleeds into student behavior.
> This is why, when using a computer for homework, students typically last fewer than 6 minutes before accessing social media, messaging friends, and engaging with other digital distractions. This is why, when using a laptop during class, students typically spend 38 minutes of every hour off-task. This is why, when getting paid as part of a research study to focus on a 20-minute computerized lesson, nearly 40% of students were unable to stop themselves from multitasking. It’s not that the students of today have abnormally weak constitutions; it’s that they have spent thousands of hours training themselves to use digital devices in a manner guaranteed to impair learning and performance. It’s also that many of the apps being run on those devices were carefully engineered to pull young people away from whatever they were doing.
> And perhaps this is the key point: I’m not saying that digital technologies can’t be used for learning; in fact, if these tools were only ever employed for learning purposes, then they may have proven some of the most important academic inventions ever. The argument I’m making is that digital technologies so often aren’t used for learning that giving students a laptop, tablet, or other multi-function device places a large (and unnecessary) obstacle between the student and the desired outcome. In order to effectively learn while using an unlocked, internet-connected multi-function digital device, students must expend a great deal of cognitive effort battling impulses that they’ve spent years honing - a battle they lose more often than not. (of course schools do often try to implement blockers and restrictions, but this opens up an eternal cat-and-mouse struggle, and the mice are very good at finding ways to evade the cat.)
In the case of Fukushima - getting entry and information on the inside of the reactor core eventually required U.S. developed robots, built for much more challenging and pragmatic environments.
With EdTech, for decades we knew that it was a backup option to solid in-classroom, instructor led, education. AFAIK, measured outcomes on non-traditional learning have nearly always lagged the classroom. But more and more institutions were turning to it because, quite frankly, its cheaper -- with student flexibility as the trailing, but strongly upsold, benefit.
The 100%, digital, EdTech event that was COVID has forced a reckoning. We finally have, at massive scale, real data (and not small or unusual situations) that comprehensively shows the tech either isn't ready, or never will be.
I personally don't understand why this seems to be such a surprise. Ever since I went through school, there was an attempt to shove technogadgets into classrooms that offered very minimal educational value over a teacher using their judgment, training, and experience to work with a student to learn a topic.
There's a part in this article that I think is the key problem:
> What he found was equal parts surprising and predictable: nearly everything has a positive impact on student learning.
I remember a specific "training" I received years ago as an adult. The instructor put each student through a comprehensive skills assessment. Then the students spent 8 weeks in a room with the resources we should have used for learning -- books, video, software, and so on -- but without any instruction of any kind. At the end of the 8 weeks we were all assessed again and voila! nearly all students had shown progress. Great success! and the instructor was free to continue doing next to nothing and doomscrolling Facebook most of the day in his best job ever. Providing no education whatsoever, but just access to resources, had a demonstrated positive outcome.
A lot of EdTech falls into this same sort of bullshit pile. It doesn't really do anything in particular, but will sometimes show the promise of improvement. Fingers are pointed to improperly trained educators, or lack of time with the technogadget, or some other reason other than the tech when searching for what's holding the tech back. What the deployers of EdTech are really measuring is not educational outcomes, but improvements to the bottom-line. If they were really focused on education, then EdTech would only be used where it should a learning effect at least as great as classroom instruction. But we know it generally doesn't, and yet here it is in our classrooms.
Source: Developed adult learning curriculum in advanced technical areas and delivered material to over 2,000 students who were required to have had at least an undergraduate degree and significant other job-specific training as prerequisites. Was also a "cursed" gifted kid in K-12.