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.
i think part of the reason computers swept into classrooms so quickly is that we had a generation of old folks seeing their jobs get computerized and they (correctly) felt that computer-literacy would be essential for a huge swath of the workforce.
however, this group also had a very hard time learning how to use computers later in their career and felt "wow, this is really hard. we need to be very proactive about teaching this to kids".
it was well intentioned, but i think they really REALLY
overestimated the need for 'teaching computer literacy' because:
a) we've gotten a lot better with UX so computers are easy to use
b) the older generations difficulty was more related to unlearning old ways and transitioning rather than difficulty inherent to computers
You should Google "marc prensky digital natives". You'll see this hype is over two decades old now.
> Unfortunately for our Digital Immigrant teachers, the people sitting in their classes grew up on the “twitch speed” of video games and MTV.
> They are used to the instantaneity of hypertext, downloaded music, phones in their pockets, a library on their laptops, beamed messages and instant messaging.
> They've been networked most or all of their lives.
> They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and “tell-test” instruction.
There's a lot more cheerful predictions:
> My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content.
> After all, it's an idiom with which most of them are totally familiar.
I think the core fact that learning is fundamentally about curiosity and motivation, not "engagement", was (and continues to be) glossed over, or intentionally ignored by a lot of tech-pushers.
> need to be studied for at least ten years, then rolled out slowly with much more skeptical study.
If you have ever been involved with education students doing studies you know that methodology here is the pretty lacking, and it’s hard to consider what could be done better (other than stop pretending these surveys mean anything).
I think we need to stop pretending that there is some magic technique that’s going to 5x performance.
>> need to be studied for at least ten years, then rolled out slowly with much more skeptical study.
> If you have ever been involved with education students doing studies you know that methodology here is the pretty lacking, and it’s hard to consider what could be done better (other than stop pretending these surveys mean anything).
I don't know exactly what you mean by "surveys," but I thinking the decision should be a default no, and whatever "innovation" is being pushed should get rolled out slowly enough that public debate can nip bad ideas in the bud. I'm specifically thinking of an article I read awhile back where a parent (who knew she was a bad reader) was flabbergasted that her kid was actually being explicitly taught the same bad reading strategies she used as part of a "balanced" reading curriculum.
I under if you had no more than 10% of schools using something like "balanced reading" for 20 years, before it could be rolled out. I'm hoping their underperformance and criticism from parents and dissenting educators could get the idea scrapped before it became the mainstream, saving the students in the other 90% of schools from being harmed by it.
> I think we need to stop pretending that there is some magic technique that’s going to 5x performance.
Yeah, and I think we also need to stop pretending new is better. The idea that kids being subjected to "innovation" may be getting harmed more than they're being helped, needs to be made prominent in these debates.
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.