
Do Laptops Help Learning? A Look at the Only Statewide School Laptop Program - imartin2k
http://peoriapublicradio.org/post/do-laptops-help-learning-look-only-statewide-school-laptop-program#stream/0
======
analog31
Back in 1984, I got a summer job at a computer center that served the public
schools in a large county. They had a room with pretty much every possible
desktop computer, and large amounts of educational software for teachers to
try out. Two observations:

1\. Most of the software was glorified flash cards, a complete waste.

2\. The medium strongly influenced the message. The sheer effort required to
create software that supports a varied and interesting curriculum was (and
probably still is) staggering. As a result, the software was typically one-
dimensional, e.g., a single lesson structure varied by changing the
parameters.

I've seen my kids use "educational" software today. In my view it suffers from
the same problems, though it's graphically more sophisticated. A history
lesson consists of looking at a screen, clicking on items, and reading the
text that pops up for each item. A math lesson consists of choosing steps in a
derivation from a menu of options.

Most of what they do using "educational" software is busywork, or drill work
for the standardized tests.

On the other hand, I've also seen them use what I call "real" software, which
is just general purpose stuff intended for a wider audience. For instance they
write papers and engage in genuine collaboration using Google Docs. There's
some really killer real software out there, that kids could be turned loose
on, such as Jupyter/Python, Arduino, Scratch, any of the Office apps, Blender,
etc. Also, kids need to be taught how to do real research via the WWW,
especially the challenge of separating fact from bullshit.

~~~
mjevans
Playing /modded/ Minecraft (specifically packs based around TerraFirmaCraft
and with tech mods that try to semi-model real metallurgical and other
processes as well) has probably been /the most/ educational experience that
I've had with a computer that couldn't be replicated by some combination of
books and videos.

The educational aspect of the mod reminds me of visiting one of those 'pioneer
living' re-enactment places. The game is setup to force you to bootstrap up
from being a cave (person) through farming and livestock and basic metal
working, to actually achieving something that resembles medieval tech. The
ores are actually named what geologists call them, you have to actually
prepare the leather somewhat like in RL. Things aren't exact, but for a game
that's just a mod it's pretty close.

Oh, and never forget the tedium of applied statistics that is Forestry
bees/trees (breeding and Punnett squares). :(

As you point out, producing a new /type/ of educational product is very
difficult. There need to be experiments in that space and some of the ideas
will work better than others.

Contrast this with that recently linked story about how electricity did in
factories. At first it wasn't that disruptive. It was changing the model of
how a factory worked that allowed the true potential of electrification to
shine. Today, at /best/, the most effective use of computers is as office
software and assignment submission tools. In that use model a student might be
better served by a cheaper or more powerful fixed station in their room and a
portable 'notepad' (or large cell phone) for field use.

~~~
analog31
_Today, at /best/, the most effective use of computers is as office software
and assignment submission tools. In that use model a student might be better
served by a cheaper or more powerful fixed station in their room and a
portable 'notepad' (or large cell phone) for field use._

Agreed, with the proviso that "office software" includes some sort of
computational environment. It bugs me that "school math" is so radically
different than how adults -- possibly including mathematicians -- do math in
their work and lives. Don't get me wrong, I breezed through school math, but I
rarely use it now.

I open up a Jupyter notebook. It's not doing math for me. It's doing
computations that are guided by my math knowledge, which is often coupled with
empirical data.

Many people use Excel, including those who claim to be bad at (school) math,
yet they are capable of doing useful computational work, even if it is
relatively simplistic.

I'd like to see students learn math in more of an exploratory fashion, aided
by real world software. For instance I think that probability and statistics
would be a lot more intuitive if it were approached through modeling via
random numbers. Problems that are hard to grasp via equations might be easy to
grasp by modeling to predict an outcome.

~~~
abecedarius
Example of the latter:
[http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Probabili...](http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Probability.ipynb)

I don't know if any youngsters have learned probability from there first.
Would be interesting to hear.

------
ben_jones
In high school we got really good at minimizing the windows of games and
social media sites as the teachers actively circled the room looking for bad
behavior. In college if you sat near the top of a large lecture hall you could
usually see the majority of students with laptops were on facebook, netflix,
or youtube, and not actually taking notes on the device.

Companies like Apple try to convince high schools that every student needs an
iPad or parents that if they don't send their to college with a mac book pro -
they aren't good parents.

It would take one hell of a peer-reviewed article to make me believe constant
computer presence in classrooms did anything but harm students. Are their
situations that rely on constantly looking up information on the internet?
Probably. But we have to weigh that value of constant internet access (which
students already have today with their smart phones) against two decades of
manipulative practices by software and hardware vendors finagling their way
into already ineffective and poorly spent education budgets.

~~~
kirsebaer
Perhaps the real problem is forcing students to sit through lectures they
don't care about in order to get information that is easily available in books
or videos.

~~~
Buldak
Most people are not cut out to learn like Good Will Hunting.

~~~
sannee
I don't think you need to be exactly a genius in order to watch videos on the
internet. It requires even less effort than attending a lecture, and has many
benefits (cheaper, you can literally replicate the best lecturer in the
universe for everyone, you can rewatch inifinite amount of times...).

~~~
jbergens
Videos are generally much more boring to watch than a live teacher. I
definatley don't expect students to watch the same 1 hour video twice.

------
archildress
I find this issue very conflicting.

On one hand, I disagree with the current governors assertion that the program
is a failure. Change in standardized test scores seems like the wrong metric.

Kids need to use computers because it's a societal standard. Low income
students may not have access at home and gaining familiarity is crucial. It's
a form of literacy.

On the other hand, I've seen tech become the tail that wags the dog in
schools. In my home school district, there was a huge purchase of Smart
Boards. A year later, they were universally used solely as projector screens.

Very interested to see the comments evolve here so I can hear others'
experience with edtech.

~~~
AJ007
Computers definitely lowered my test scores as a kid. I spent most of my class
time thinking about being at home using my computer. Studying and doing
homework was an exercise in doing the bare minimum as fast as possible

As an adult, I'm sure that the thousands of hours I spent trying to diagnose
hardware problems, get games to run, mod games, create graphics (of all
types), write software, and playing strategy games ended up giving me a
tremendous advantage over my friends who finished their homework and watched
TV or play console games.

~~~
dawnerd
Same here. Spent all the time at home learning web development. Skipped
college and I've been full time salary for about 10 years now. If it wasn't
for that computer, I wouldn't be on HN today.

~~~
jbergens
You mean that the reason to use computers at schools is to get the students to
quit school as soon as possible ;-)

------
johnminter
> ...the writing wasn't as fluid as it was when the students were putting pen
> to paper. "You could also see an increase in copy-and-paste," he says.

The laptop is a tool, albeit a very useful one. Eliminating the laptop is not
the solution. Most universities have already addressed the issue of
plagiarism. One sets explicit, written standards, explains that it is self-
deception as well, and then use software that can detect it. Warn the first
time, fail the second. Actions have consequences in the real world. The sooner
students learn and accept this, the happier and more productive their lives
will be.

Having grown up in an era where we wrote essays by hand and later used
typewriters, computer word processing is a very useful tool. Abandoning it is
foolish. Start by requiring drafts, encourage revision, and hold students
accountable. If they are old enough to use laptops, they are old enough to use
them properly.

------
zachlatta
This article is infuriating.

#1 problem with education is that nobody is building for the student. The
student is never the user.

Think about all of the companies and institutions that make up the experience
of the modern student.

Think about who they are serving. Who are they building for? Who are textbook
publishers building for?

It's probably not the students. Tools will not fix this. Laptops will not fix
this.

Until students' experience affects schools' bottom line, education will not
change for the better.

~~~
ivan_ah
Very true. In many contexts (ancient, current, and new) the students are
painted as an empty receptacle to be filled in with knowledge from some
external source. In that world view, innovation is about "filling" students in
a more efficient, more controlled, or more measurable way.

Did anyone ever ask what students actually want to learn? Did anyone ever talk
to them like adults, and put them in charge of their own learning process?

I think for primary school there needs to be some sort of structure and
"guidance from above" but starting with high school, students need to be put
in charge. Sure we'll still need some sort of standardized testing and "proof
of knowledge," but learning will be so much better if we let students follow
their interests and their own pace, possibly working in small groups.

~~~
mjevans
There's also the "core" curriculum that needs to be covered, however I see no
reason why this can't be paired with the student's actual passion. It's
important to give relevance to the work so that it actually matters to the
student. In higher education (high school / college / beyond) it would be nice
if the work were actually productive to society instead of just busy work.

------
_caw
I attended middleschool and highschool in Maine. Those laptops are one of the
reasons I ended up enjoying programming so much.

In middleschool, when the laptop program first rolled out, we were so excited
to try the sleek new machines. I have distinct memories of asking a relative
for an AppleScript book as a present. We would make simple "MadLibs" scripts
with text-to-speech, scripts to animate windows and draw ASCII art in
accordance with user commands, and even fake "viruses". We also attempted to
use Xcode, but only got as far as making toy web browsers with the default UI
toolkit.

Keynote was an amazing program because it allowed us to create full games
using tens to hundreds of slides. These were mostly point-and-click, but we
did attempt some fast moving action games. By fast moving, I mean a few frames
per second. I also remember using Keynote to make a presentation about the
Fukushima Daiichi disaster; it had an animated reactor, and interactive
buttons to show what would happen with certain water levels, and so on.

When we switched to Windows in highschool, the computers temporarily lost some
of their magic and we ended up playing Halo during lunch. Very soon we
discovered Scratch[0] and Phun[1], and we were back at it again creating even
better games, or sketching and dreaming up physics simulations on the bus ride
home. One of the greatest benefits of these programs - I'm not sure if this is
still the case - is that we could take the laptops home over summer break.
This lead to many late nights of programming while putting off those summer
essays.

Sometimes we could use online textbooks for a class, but most classes forced
us to carry around heavy textbooks, so we ended up painfully lugging bags
containing a laptop and 2+ textbooks between classes. I haven't mentioned
class much, but we used them for news, for studying language, for creating
music, and for math. Above all, we used them as an outlet for our curiosity,
and that was their greatest strength at the time.

Now I understand many students receive iPads.

[0] [https://scratch.mit.edu/](https://scratch.mit.edu/)

[1] [http://www.algodoo.com/download/](http://www.algodoo.com/download/)

~~~
valuearb
When I was in middle school, we wrote games in CPM Basic. iPads are great
consumption devices, but they don't open the same doors that were opened for
you and I.

------
jrs95
A laptop is just a tool. If what you have students doing on the laptop isn't
any good, that's not necessarily because the laptops weren't worth it

------
LarryMade2
From my experience - early 80s, the school had probably a dozen computers.

This limitation allowed us kids a very limited time to work on the computers,
during that down time I and those who "got it" would be scribbling away on
paper, reading books, magazines or whatever to plan what to do next when we
had computer time. If there was some programming that needed fixing, we'd be
working on solving these problems. Back then it was BASIC and assembly code on
paper. Now its some pseudocode, simple flowcharts, and wireframes I pen down.

This similar might be a good thing for todays' students is to also limit
computer time, (some will work at home, but the schools have a computer lab
for those that don't) in the down-time (most of the school, day), they would
be working using traditional methods with the final being word processed or
whatever. Now they would be taking notes, and as they get to enter it in,
during the downtime they'd be editing whatever they've written and printed
out. Would make them more aware of what a great tool the computer is, afford
them time to plan their projects the resources to maximize what access they
have. This also gives them time to actually think of about what their project
will be without some errant web sites distracting them along the way.

------
gnicholas
I work in edtech and have been surprised to learn how few edtech companies
care about efficacy.

Some popular apps/platforms have millions of users and tens of millions in
venture funding, yet they haven't done any efficacy research. Or perhaps
they've done it privately and gotten results that they didn't want to
publicize...

------
tejas1mehta
A laptop with an internet connection in today's age can be more educational
than attending college. Think of Coursera, EdX, Wikipedia, Google, Online
Tutorials, Pragmatic Software etc.

~~~
rxhernandez
Perhaps for computer science. From what I recall it lacked a large amount of
the content, at least in coherent form, for the majority of my physics classes
and a few of my electrical engineering classes.

~~~
davidzweig
I'm not sure why I never see NPTEL mentioned anywhere. nptel.ac.in or
www.nptelvideos.in

Very comprehensive video lectures for many fields of engineering, set up by
Indian universities/government.

------
e12e
This is absurd. Of course laptops can be powerful tools - but their use as
glorified word processors isn't enough.

Have the kids write their own curriculum modeled after Wikipedia and/or
wikibooks. Have them review each others work. And have them use smart
notebooks like Jupyter to explore economics, math and physics.

Solving the "copy and paste" problem is about finding re-mixing techniques
than strengthen learning, in a similar way that writing notes does. Maybe
making visual collages to go with the wiki-essays is a better approach than
forcing "re-writing in your own words". The point isn't the technique itself,
but the result - are you able to acquire, internalise and in turn express new
knowledge?

I think it's also notable that "professional" tools encompass spreadsheets,
text editors, desktop publishing packages, version control (with reviews),
photo and image editors and drawing programs - but not really word processing
or powerpoint-like presentation tools.

Yet that seems to be the focus: the laptop of the 1950s - a smart typewriter.

------
z3t4
I don't think laptops are ergonomic. Schools should have proper work stations
with adjustable seats, screens and tables. I use a laptop for reading articles
and HN, lying down in a sofa. I can't imagine how you guys are able to do any
serious work on a laptop without ending up with chronic back pain.

------
freech
"Go into history class and the teacher says, 'Open your computer. We're going
to go to rome.com and we're going to watch an archaeologist explore the
Catacombs this morning in real time.' What a learning tool that is!"

I think that hints at the error. Computers aren't made for the "read/watch
this thing" model. When we used computers in school it was to research some
subject, answer some questions and that worked great.

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no_wizard
Every time I see these things I always can't help but wonder: what if we got
rid of the mandates that everyone have "x" and ___gasp!_ __let parents and
school districts and teachers decide what is best. Give the people who do the
teaching the flexibility to deploy these things. I also feel strongly that
standardized testing harms students in the long run. I don 't think it's smart
to keep kids up to date just unwise to not allow more local autonomy

------
Rjevski
Results at test scores don't mean the programme is a failure - I'd bet a lot
of those kids couldn't care less about the class and only did the minimum of
work required to pass.

There's also the issue of diminishing returns - if you need to spend one hour
to get a 75/100 grade but need to spend 3 hours more just to get 80/100 it
won't be worth the effort for a lot of kids - it sure wouldn't have been for
me.

------
gozur88
Computers are very efficient at cementing facts as a memorization aid. Other
than that they're mostly a distraction.

~~~
valuearb
I would strongly disagree with you, except I wasn't paying attention to you
because I was text-chatting with a co-ed I want to go out with.

------
j45
Expecting laptops without relevant and engaging content to expecting education
is a failure due to a pencil and a blank sheet of paper.

Laptops and pencils become learning tools when they are used with
appropriately engaging experiences that are relevant to help the student learn
and develop new competencies.

------
nso95
If all you do is switch from paper to Word, computers aren't going to improve
learning outcomes. If, however, those computers are used with individualized
learning systems, where students can learn at their own pace, outcomes would
improve.

~~~
Avshalom
Is that a thing that actually exists with actual demonstrated outcomes or are
you just guessing?

------
imtringued
Do those laptops have other benefits? Like not having to carry around heavy
books?

~~~
mjevans
They didn't two decades ago when I was in one of the earlier 'pilot programs';
at that time it was apparently VERY costly to get 'PDF' copies of the books on
CD-ROM.

If we had an open educational stack we might have actual free content and then
it might be possible to use the laptop like an e-reader. However, still, in
that use case the student would be better off with a fixed main workstation
and more of a consumption and quick-scribble-notes device for portable use.

Plus, books are a different kind of reading experience and a more tactile
feedback. It might improve learning retention to read a book relative to
reading a tablet or laptop. Having said that, /using/ that content in a trans
formative way was always MUCH stronger for me.

------
valuearb
I think teaching helps learning, and that a laptop is just a tool.

------
sabujp
my kid starts kindergarten this year and will be using some site called
i-ready.com through their chromebooks, anyone know what this is like?

