'Beware Silicon Valley's Gifts To Our Schools' (nationalreview.com) 140
schwit1 shares a National Review report: After three years, there is no proof that Apple's, Google's, and Microsoft's infiltration of the classroom is producing actual academic improvement and results. Take Facebook's efforts for an example. The company -- under fire for privacy breaches worldwide -- is peddling something called "Summit Learning," a web-based curriculum bankrolled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Last month, students in New York City schools walked out in protest of the program. "It's annoying to just sit there staring at one screen for so long," freshman Mitchel Storman, 14, told the New York Post. He spends close to five hours a day on Summit classes in algebra, biology, English, world history, and physics. Teacher interaction is minimal. "You have to teach yourself," Storman rightly complained. No outside research supports any claim that Summit Learning actually enhances, um, learning. What more studies are showing, however, is that endless hours of screen time are turning kids into zombies who are more easily distracted, less happy, less socially adept, and less physically fit. Standing up to the Silicon Valley Santas and asserting your family's "right to no" may well be the best long-term gift you can give your school-age children.
Er ok (Score:2, Interesting)
Michelle Malkin and National Review? Thanks msmash
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Michelle Malkin and National Review? Thanks msmash
It's no worse than 99% of the political stuff that he posts. It's just from the side you don't like.
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It's no worse than 99% of the political stuff that he posts. It's just from the side you don't like.
Yeah, the stupid side.
Re:Summit Learning Sounds Good (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA is just a smear piece that doesn't even pretend to present a balanced view.
From TFA: What more studies are showing, however, is that endless hours of screen time are turning kids into zombies.
Yet NONE of these "studies" are cited, and TFA does not give any scientific criteria for what constitutes a "zombie".
I have no idea if Zuck's program works or not, but TFA is garbage journalism that sheds no light. The editors at National Review should be ashamed of themselves for publishing it. They are better than that.
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Arguably, if I was going to start a 10 year old out with programming, I wouldn't use an IDE. Start them with something simple and build up from there.
With that said, when I was 10 I was playing around in QBasic which is an IDE, though a simple one compared to what we have now.
Re: Summit Learning Sounds Good (Score:5, Informative)
TFA was written by Michelle Malkin [wikipedia.org] who is a Filipina-American clone of Ann Coulter.
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TFA was written by Michelle Malkin [wikipedia.org] who is a Filipina-American clone of Ann Coulter.
National Review is an opinion journal, on the right. Think of an analog to something like Mother Jones or The Nation or CNN (ba dum ching) on the Left.
It's writers are no more whatever than similar writers on the left are. You just think that the ones on the left are justified in being that way.
In any case, NR has for quite awhile been thought by harder core conservatives to be a bit squishy and ivory tower (for just one thing, its current editor in chief is pro gay marriage). It's not monolithic in anyth
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Liberal tolerance and hypocrisy rolled into one.
How does supporting a corporate takeover of education make me a "liberal"?
Re:Summit Learning Sounds Good (Score:4, Interesting)
How about some REAL life skills: like how to grow and prepare food, how to build and maintain machinery, how to build a house, how to drill a water well, how to build and maintain a sanitary sewage system, etc? Basic life skills have been completely left blank in favor of creating a helpless clone army of future tax paying mules that are 100% reliant on the system for all their essential needs.
You're looking for vocational education, which many schools still offer, but it's a different track than college level education. In my school, in 9th grade you could choose to go to the vo-tech program to learn what you call a "Real life skill". Though you still had to choose a specialty, the program wasn't designed to create a general renaissance man who can farm, fix machinery, build a house, drill a well, etc.
And it's not even clear why you think it's neccessary -- I spent summers from age 12 to 18 helping out on my uncle's farm, I can drive a tractor, run a combine, milk a cow, kill and butcher a hog, etc.... furthermore, while I haven't built a house myself, but helped my brother build his, I can set concrete, hang drywall, sweat a copper plumbing joint, install electrical, etc. And while some of the homebuilding skills have come in handy while remodeling, most of the skills I developed haven't really helped me.
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The US has actually built a system for training people in everyday skills like these. You might have heard of it, it's called youtube.
You can't learn to lay brick (well) from a youtube video -- trust me, I've seen it attempted, and then he paid a real brick layer to tear it out and replace it with something servicable. The guy brought his son who was learning the trade.
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You can't learn by doing it once either. There's a big difference between a skilled craftsman, a acceptable craftsman, and an apprentice. Nobody thinks someone who took a class once is going to do a great job, but they can leverage the ability to learn.
That's why in most high school vocational programs, it's not just a one semester program, it's a couple years of coursework and hands-on practical experience, then for something like masonry, you don't graduate as a mason, but you qualify for an apprenticeship where you get the real hands on experience.
You're not going to get the same experience out of a youtube video -- you might learn how to build a brick fireplace in your backyard that looks decent, but you're not going to lay a 40 foot chimney.
Re: Summit Learning Sounds Good (Score:2, Insightful)
THOSE are your examples of "REAL life skills"?!? THOSE?
You could have said budgetting/banking, cooking, cleaning & tidying, critical thinking, running a business, taxes, knitting, job interviewing, public speaking, ethics, voting/government, life sciences (camping, fishing, etc), wood/metal/construction shop, electronics, etc.
All of which are far more useful and things most people run into everyday!
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Whose "REAL life"? Your list seems to be based on yours.
I long ago recognized that the real life of those born in the past 30ish years is vastly different than my real life as someone born in the 60s. Most in these younger generations cannot relate to my experiences when I describe them. Their world is different in the extreme.
Even the simplest things have changed. For example, I have no trouble with dogs running around fighting each other and have been bitten in a manner that caused puncture wounds several
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Judging from the criticisms, Summit Learning sounds far better than regular education.
"You have to teach yourself," Storman rightly complained
Being able to learn yourself is the most important skill you can have. Unfortunately, many people never acquire that skill so have to be constantly spoon fed information, are left unable to do anything if it's not explained to them, and can't work through problems themselves. If children become more capable of learning on their own, it will greatly empower them and give them far more opportunities in the future. Teaching them that they don't need a teacher to learn, and can learn on their own initiative, is a very good start.
That will not happen. People that can teach themselves are already doing it and the others will not be able to do so. It is not a learned skill by all accounts. It is something in the "talent" class, and you either have it or not.
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Berkley ended the Vietnam war in similar fashion.
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"You have to teach yourself," Storman rightly complained.
Being able to learn yourself is the most important skill you can have. Unfortunately, many people never acquire that skill (...)
I found out that school is not very efficient in transferring knowledge, at least not for me. What school was good for, was shaping my neural networks, learning to think, and actually being able to teach myself new things.
Unfortunately this insight only came to me when my educational years were in the past. I wish someone had told me that school is not for learning 'durch, fur, gegen, ohne, um, entlang, bis' or 'poteram, poteras, poterat, poteramus, poteratis, poterant', but for making your brain see struct
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Learning is rarely fun
Oh wow you had some shit teachers.
Re: Summit Learning Sounds Good (Score:2)
Brought to you by Michelle Malkin, (Score:1)
The same author behind such enlightening articles [nationalreview.com] as:
* The Authoritarianism of Silicon Valley’s Tech Titans ("Silicon Valley is imposing its own form of sharia.")
* Say No to Nanny Bloomberg ("Michael Bloomberg, the soda-taxing, gun-grabbing, snack-attacking control freak, should keep his nose out of our lives and out of the 2020 presidential race.")
* Look Who’s Back: Obama Crashes the Midterms ("Thanks, Obama, for reminding America of your miserable legacy.")
* How Google Co-opts Our Schools to C
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We seem to be getting story after story about San Francisco and the bay area.
Of course it isn't. (Score:5, Interesting)
*Disclaimer: I used to be a technology director for a school district.
Throwing technology at a social / political problem isn't a panacea. Never has been and never will be. The tech adds very little benefit to the learning process unless the teachers actively incorporate it into their existing lessons. Where many get it wrong is using the tech as a replacement for textbooks and paperwork and nothing else. Yes it's less paperwork to manage, and that's good for the teacher in multiple ways, but it harms the student when done incorrectly. Case in point: Auto-graded assignments.
Yes, many teachers would be up in arms over the idea of taking away auto-graded assignments, but most of those assignments are poor quality by necessity of the auto-grading system. I.e. Most are Multiple Guess. There are a few systems that accept fill in the blank answers, but many of those are very specific about what answers they will accept, and often just encourage the teachers using them to move to Multiple Guess only as a time saving measure. As for why Multiple Guess is bad: If you know the answers will be on your test, why bother studying beyond being able to pick the answer out of a group? The answer is always given to you, and even if you don't have the slightest clue as to what it is when presented with the choices, the answer can be lucked upon by the simple roll of a six-sided dice. This is one of the reasons younger generations cannot deal with complex issues in the workforce. They expect to be told exactly what is expected of them, and if exact instructions are not given, they often cannot come up with an answer on their own due to lack of practice and / or knowledge.
Another problem is the funding that tech eats up. Many school districts have their own budget for IT that is separate from their general fund. In some cases a school may not be able to afford safety equipment for science classes, but has plenty of money for the latest iPad or Chromebook. In other cases, the school may choose to replace working tech with the new shiny, even though it will cost the school more in the long run to support and maintain it, for nothing more than trying to one-up or emulate neighboring districts.This encouragement of tech being a separate budget drives funds away from areas that need it. Causing deficiencies in other areas of teaching, and in some cases can be dangerous. Like not being able to afford having a nurse on staff during the day. Or failing to pay for proper security.
Worse is when said school cannot afford the more expensive new shiny and buys it by the truckload anyway. In some worse case scenarios a school may not have a technology instructor, but is inundated with tech and clueless teachers / leadership. In those cases the tech is always a waste of money, because the students gain very little from it due to the clueless teachers' / leadership's inability to integrate the tech correctly. This last bit also causes the students to pick up bad computing behaviors as security and proper use always gives way to making something work during class.
Finally, most of these efforts made by the various companies are designed to lock-in the students to their products at a young age. Most of these schools won't be teaching technology as a general subject. Most of the time a task or goal that must be completed on tech is explained to a student as a series of menus or button presses. If you've ever encountered a student that could not make a slideshow presentation with anything beyond obviously cut and pasted bullet points in no particular grouping, or a student that couldn't manage their own files, this is why. When students are trained to specific programs / devices, they are fundamentally challenged when moving into the real-world outside of the classroom. As they go from being "experts" to "novices" simply by choosing a company to work for that uses a competing tech vendor as their primary provider, or by the vendor's latest revamp changing too much for them
Re: Of course it isn't. (Score:1)
+1 interesting
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+1 Insightful.
Anecdotal, but I used to be a network admin for a school district and this exactly matches my experience with tech in schools.
I remember, back in 2004 when I went to Digipen, how many programming students didn't even know how to manage files and directories. Or didn't know you could hit <TAB> to get from one input box to another (for instance, in the Windows XP logon screen...they'd use the mouse every time).
My nephew (2 years old) can navigate the shit out of YouTube, but if he br
Um? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only did you pen one of the most opinionated pieces of "journalism" ever, but you used a filler-word, um, in a formal written document.
People who use this phrase never show any, nor are worthy of any.
What are all these wires? What the hell's a mouse? How do I windows?
So much bias it's like all I have is a right speaker.
———
In short, go back to journalism school.
In long, how about you title opinion pieces accordingly and not pretend they are in any way news. Also, go back to any school you attended and demand a refund, then learn how to write a formal document.
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Not only did you pen one of the most opinionated pieces of "journalism" ever,
"National Review was founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley Jr. as a magazine of conservative opinion [nationalreview.com]."
but you used a filler-word, um, in a formal written document.
I think it's lazy, but it's typical conversational style.
With all due respect
People who use this phrase never show any, nor are worthy of any.
With all due respect, you're not Slashdot's arbiter of what is worthy of respect.
mumbo jumbo
What are all these wires? What the hell's a mouse? How do I windows?
Mumbo jumbo [wikipedia.org] is meaningless or confusing language, with the possible connotation that it is deliberate. "The use of the term
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In short, go back to journalism school.
In long, how about you title opinion pieces accordingly and not pretend they are in any way news. Also, go back to any school you attended and demand a refund, then learn how to write a formal document.
Er, National Review is an opinion journal. Has been for decades, since being founded by William F. Buckley. It's not exactly obscure.
I'm sorry (I guess?) that the crusty old mean fuddy duddies there didn't have a Slashdot welcome mat explaining that.
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What are all these wires? What the hell's a mouse? How do I windows?
Hmm, that's your two word out of context quote. But then there's what she actually wrote:
She's not calling the tech "mumbo jumbo", she's calling the idea that tech toys are “personalized learning” mumbo jumbo.
You may not agree with that, but your attempt
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You mean by publishing them in a magazine founded to provide a place for conservative opinions?
Yeah, you definitely lost that air of superiority you were going for.
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Sad but true, I used to be able to read NR to understand the logical motivations for gop positions, lately it is like watching a contortionist attempt to match a Dali painting, completely separated from reality
Sounds like nothing has changed to me. GOP justifications have never been reality-based.
Screen-minimalist parent (Score:5, Insightful)
My kids are 5th, 7th, and 9th grade. We've felt that 2 hours of screen time (Netflix, computer/console gaming, tablet usage) was a healthy upper limit per day. This idea was based on how my wife and I were raised during the 80's and 90's where most of our childhood was spent outdoors with friends. I know it's quaint these days, but it seemed to work for us; our kids can hold a real conversation with adults while maintaining eye contact, and despite fighting amongst themselves like cats and dogs, we are always complimented on how engaging and polite they are. Not a brag, just context. Maybe they're just good kids and us limiting screen time has nothing to do with it.
...but...
Now that the school has them on Chromebooks 3-5 hours per day during instruction time, then an additional 30-minutes of them just watching Youtube during Resource/Study Hall, then doing "homework" on the Chromebook for an hour at night...screen time has exploded from 2 hours per day to 6.5 hours per day.
They don't have smartphones (yet), but they are literally in the 1% of kids in their schools that don't have smartphones. I think beyond a reasonable amount like 2 hours, time that children spend looking at a screen is time they are not learning how to interact with the world with their senses. Some of their peers can't string 3 sentences together in a single conversation without drifting into looking at their phone or talking about what they saw on their phone.
I may be a minority even here, but I think the school (and these organizations) are doing a huge disservice to these kids...and for what, automated learning with built-in KPIs and a fatter bottom line?
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I'm similar age to you and my wife was absolutely adament from the get-go that our daughter would have the social skills were a little short of. My wife was bullied at school so she became a recluse and I was a typical only-child, 1980s computer nerd. So we packed our daughter off on all sorts of outdoor clubs and activities like Scouts, swimming clubs, etc, involved her in as many family get togethers as we could even if we sometimes felt a little uncomfortable ourselves and it worked. A teenager now, she'
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I agree with you except for one thing, just because you did it when you were young doesn't mean it will work now.
Culture is different.
Other than that you know your kids more than I so it might be a good idea.
I was also brought up in the '90s and it seems weird that phones are everywhere.
I even have a "dumb" phone only used for actual calls.
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This idea was based on how my wife and I were raised during the 80's and 90's where most of our childhood was spent outdoors with friends. I know it's quaint these days
Particularly when stranger danger hysteria [wikipedia.org] causes neighbors to report free-range parents as neglecting their unaccompanied children.
Learning programming without screen time (Score:2)
My kids are 5th, 7th, and 9th grade. We've felt that 2 hours of screen time (Netflix, computer/console gaming, tablet usage) was a healthy upper limit per day.
If your older ones end up taking up an interest in learning to program, do you plan to limit how much time they can spend on self-study of computer science on weekends and school vacations? When employers expect college graduates to have known more than one programming language before finishing high school [slashdot.org], such a move could limit your kids' careers.
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My kids are 5th, 7th, and 9th grade. We've felt that 2 hours of screen time (Netflix, computer/console gaming, tablet usage) was a healthy upper limit per day.
If your older ones end up taking up an interest in learning to program, do you plan to limit how much time they can spend on self-study of computer science on weekends and school vacations? When employers expect college graduates to have known more than one programming language before finishing high school [slashdot.org], such a move could limit your kids' careers.
So what, because one person on slashdot says that you think its an industry trend now? I can’t say that I have ever asked an applicant that. If they did projects while in high school. Great. That doesn’t mean they are a good programmer. I happened to start working in the software field in high school as an intern. Do you want to know how many of my previous employers cared about that? None. Even when it was on my resume. They were more concerned about the things I learned and did at univer
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kids learned programming by reading magazines and books
Buying the book in the first place requires either a parent's money or perfect school attendance and outstanding grades to qualify for a work permit. Trying the exercises in the book still requires screen time. Or what am I missing?
employers expect college graduates to have known more than one programming language before finishing high school
take a class in college
How can this be done "before finishing high school"?
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> kids learned programming by reading magazines and books.
As someone who was a teen in the 80s, I can say, "sort of". For books about Commodore 64-related topics in the mid-80s, you're kind of right. If you lived in a big city or a college town, you MIGHT have had access to good books about computers and programming (at least, if you were talking about the Commodore 64, Apple II, or MAYBE "PC"). If you lived in a small town whose book store situation could be fully described as, "Waldenbooks and B. Dalto
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And that's not factoring in the data Google is gathering on them (they've claimed not to in the past, but then gotten caught doing it.) Or the fact that the webcams can often be turned on remotely. Or the fact that they're only learning how to function mediated by Google products.
That said, there's no reason to disparage kids talking about what they saw on their phones. After all, if that's how you're reading the news, or getting information, talking about it is normal.
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This could be extended a bit. For instance, your parents could use the same phrase. As could your grandparents. And great-grandparents. Wouldn't it have been great if YOU were educated with only the tools & information available in 1755?
Or are you arguing that YOUR childhood education and development were the zenith of human accomplishment in that regard?
Screen time (Score:1)
Giving people who won't and cant learn more free stuff is not going to "teach" a generation to a better IQ level.
Calculators, computers, laptops, tablets, robot kits, new type of computer "code", new codes of conduct for computer code are not making average people more educated.
Where transcripts are still base on tests and merit, generations of extra support results in mot much improvement over generations.
IQ over a
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What US prestigious universities have to do is send a message to all students.
Want to enter a prestigious university? Study hard, pass your exams and show you can study.
Want a job after completing a software engineering degree at a prestigious university so that you can pay off student loans incurred at a prestigious university? You'd better have had enough screen time to study programming before graduating from high school [slashdot.org].
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The results are the same over generations. Tests show few improvements for average students for all the tax payers money used every decade.
A new computer lab cant teach everyone to a new IQ level.
More computers for all did not work.
Better teachers? New buildings? Same failed results every generation over average groups.
The "internet" for all in education did not give great results.
Robot kits with an advance GUI? A
One thing it does enhance (Score:1)
Those tax cuts don't pay for themselves. No, really, they don't.
Now "news." (Score:4, Interesting)
ITYM 40 years, because that's how long that story has been spun . Tech can be a useful adjunct, same as a library. But it does nothing to actually educate. Setting someone down in the Library of Congress doesn't educate them, despite the volume of knowledge present. Medium vs. content.
Preparing our youth for their future (Score:2)
"It's annoying to just sit there staring at one screen for so long," freshman Mitchel Storman
Welcome to your future job. The annoyance is slightly alleviated because you're paid to stare at a screen all day.
What school won't prepare you for is endless hours of pointless meetings, and political machinations that have no basis in reality.
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What school won't prepare you for is endless hours of pointless meetings, and political machinations that have no basis in reality.
Ah, someone else who works at a university!
The objective (Score:2)
Get computers out of the school!! (Score:2)
Use notebooks, pencils and textbooks instead. And a whiteboard/blackboard for instruction during the classes. It's the most effective way to actually train the mind.
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While I don't think your claim is entirely correct, certainly hurling computers at everything is not going to help. They've been reading that for nearly 40 years on and off with the same results every time.
Pencils, textbooks and boards are still startlingly effective. I think computing could reasonably pervade a lot more. But not how it's currently done. For example teaching it hand in hand with maths, it's a lot easier to experiment and toy with the concepts in a concrete form in a program.
That doesn't inv
Beware Geeks Bearing Gifts (Score:4, Interesting)
There's an endless parade of 'tech solutions' for education, most of which are shameless cash grabs.
However, an educational system which encourages self-learning isn't inherently bad. For example, Sudbury schools [wikipedia.org] use this model. In old schools that didn't use the 'grade' stratification of students, older students would help teach the younger students. It's said that you need to comprehend a topic three times as well in order to teach it rather than merely understand it, so encouraging students to teach one another would likely improve comprehension.
Furthermore, self-learning allows for an ideal version of the 'track' system used in Germany and elsewhere, where thinkers learn about more abstract subjects, whereas those who prefer to work with their hands learn more practical hands-on subjects. It's very easy for someone to say "all children should know X", and different people will have different opinions on what X is. Add those all together, and students end up with a bloated curriculum of stuff they really don't want or need to know in order to be effective and happy citizens and workers.
That said, there are so many models/ideas for education, that A/B testing and frequent reference to the What Works Clearinghouse [ed.gov] should be utilized in order to determine efficacy, rather than ideologues saddling students with their pet system even if it never works.
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"...encouraging students to teach one another would likely improve comprehension...."
Except you can't really COMPEL that behavior, and woe betide the poor little bastard that has to learn from the kid going through the motions.
Basically the kids who would benefit from this (and I agree, it would be a good idea in limited implementation) are ALREADY good students likely maximizing their value from school.
Frankly, (we had 4 kids who recently departed their teens) what I've seen in public education is that the
So.... (Score:1)
Open Source, (Score:2)
...in moderation (Score:2)
In this and many other topics, people have become way too bi-partisan to be taken seriously. Either you're in one camp, or the opposite.
But truth be told, in most cases where there are two diametrically opposed camps, they are both full of shit.
What do Zuckerberg and Gates and other drop-outs know about education? Did they study it? Do they have teaching experience? Why do we assume that rich people know something about the world? The only skill we know they have is getting rich.
But likewise, there certainl
The article is a hyperbolic rant... (Score:2)
...but the main point, that EdTech isn't helping children to learn is true.
The OECD commissioned a review of the research evidence and concluded that there was in inverse correlation between ICT use in classrooms & academic performance. I expect a few "no true Scotsman" arguments to follow: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c... [yourlogicalfallacyis.com]
To anyone who works in education, studies cognitive science, &/or epistemology (i.e. theories of how we learn), this comes as no surprise. Children simply don't learn in the ways
Virgil warned of this 2,000 years ago (Score:2)
"Beware of Geeks bearing gifts", Virgil's Aeneid, circa 20 BC.
Missed opportunity (Score:2)
It doesn't matter.. (Score:2)
AI is going to solve everything and allow the new generations to be stupid.
Re: black people (Score:2)
Re: black people (Score:1)
*You're