Is Early Childhood Education Technology Moving Backwards? 290
theodp writes "Four decades ago, the NSF-sponsored PLATO Elementary Reading Curriculum Project (pdf) provided Illinois schoolchildren with reading lessons and e-versions of beloved children's books that exploited networked, touch-sensitive 8.5"x8.5" bit-mapped plasma screens, color images, and audio. Last week, the Today Show promoted the TeacherMate — a $100 gadget that's teaching Illinois schoolchildren to read and do math using its 2.5" screen and old-school U-D-L-R cursor keys — as a revolution in education. Has early childhood education managed to defy Moore's Law?"
Re:Going backwards? (Score:1, Interesting)
I agree. I’m a techie and my wife and I home-schooled our children (up to various grade levels depending on the child) — I didn’t consider them technologically inept until we put them in school A calculator required for 7th grade math?? The one that went into 6th grade didn’t know how to create a powerpoint oops. Way too much dependence on electronics.
Re:Strange... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Simple Rugged Durable = Better (Score:4, Interesting)
Me too. Those of us born in '56 could only read about computers in sci-fi and Popular Science, and then it was Univac. I don't think IBM built the first EDPM system until the mid-50's.
When I'm in a quiet place and think about the changes brought about by technology in my lifetime, my head spins. Shit, when I was watching Avatar last week, I briefly recalled that when I was born not all movies were even shot in color, yet.
I think I got my first "personal" computer about the same time my now-21 year-old daughter was born. I suppose it's a good thing I didn't have a personal computer before I met my wife and my daughter was born. There's a good chance that neither of those things would have happened, otherwise.
Huge problem (Score:4, Interesting)
You mention "help people become more than physical laborers". The problem with society today is there are easily two groups of people that can easily be recognized: those that can manipulate abstract symbols and those that cannot. This is purely a mental capability - education has no role in it. If a person doesn't have the ability, you might be able to train them sufficiently to put on a pretty good show and fake it but they aren't going to be successful or happy about it.
Today we are quickly reaching the point where working on an assembly line is no longer an option in the Western world. If someone can be a computer programmer, great - but what about all of those people that would have been happy and productive being an assembly line worker ca. 1950? There are few jobs remaining for these people. The educational system doesn't seem to understand this division either - you simply aren't going to be able to manage a classroom of 10 children that can do abstract symbol manipulation and anther 10 that cannot. The result of trying is often the Lowest Common Denominator or some kind of group effort where half the children are helping (or trying to help) the other half. End result is a lot of frustrated kids because they are either being held back or pushed to do things they can't do.
We need to recognize this and deal with it on a societal level, and pretty soon. Building the world so that only people that can do higher math, program computers and other things that involve abstract symbols will fit in is a disaster in the works.
Re:Simple Rugged Durable = Better (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a great reason to support all local business as much as possible. The more local it is, the better.
Just look at all the middlemen involved when you buy from national and international sources. Most of those middlemen are people working far from their homes in order to take jobs from people who are trying to work close to home.
Technology HAS NOTHING to do with READING (Score:4, Interesting)
Grammar and spelling are important, especially at the beginning before the start recognizing longer words as Gestalt.
Once they can read feed them all the interesting, to them, books you can. Done right it can be amazingly fast, my 10 year old daughter taught her 2.75 year sister to read English in about 6 months to a reading age of ~ 7. Then she started teaching basic French but by the time she was 5 she could read, and talk simply in French.
Keep away from computers, the fonts and resolution are poor, and most width is too wide to read quickley, and if you make the lines narrower they are too short.
Finally they are not intelligently reactive to the student's needs and progress.
Gadgets may not help. (Score:3, Interesting)
The US education system is troubled in such a way that devices may not help at all. Teachers are under serious pressure to aim their teaching at the middle and lower achievers which causes better students to be neglected. It is the only way to meet compulsory testing goals. After all the brighter students will do well on such tests despite being neglected whereas the mediocre middle and down right lousy students will score poorly. These days those scores can cost a teacher their job.
Really we need to aim our teaching at the brightest students and get the lesser students into work training programs and out of the way of the better students. Parents are the real problem in this regard. They bombard every official when their kid does poorly. And elected types tend to think in terms of the number of votes a position on an issue will get them.
England actually had a form of the draft that sent many young men into the coal mines. Others were directed into the armed forces. These were people not deemed able to succeed at higher callings due to poor school performance. It kept coal cheap and the armed forces populated. Other European nations weeded out lesser students after sixth grade and subjected them to real training as cooks or industrial workers.
If school courses are designed to strain the straight A students a bit the quality of school graduates is excellent. Try to redeem the mediocre middle and the schools fall apart.
My wife is a 4th grade teacher (Score:3, Interesting)
I just showed her this video and she is very interested.
Let me tell you why. What I hear from her is that the biggest problem is the kids who sit through the lessons and the material just goes in one ear and out the other. It's not necessarily that they're stupid or that they don't care, it's that they aren't engaged. What you need for those students is either massive support from the parent(s), or you need to interact with them on a one-to-one basis. My wife doesn't have the bandwidth as a teacher to provide that one-on-one interactivity while still teaching the material to the rest of the children who are on track and are learning in the traditional model.
This sort of technology can provide that one-on-one interactivity. What it needs, and what she's looking into, is whether it also provides some way that she as a teacher can monitor progress live while the children are using the devices.
Re:Huge problem (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with society today is there are easily two groups of people that can easily be recognized: those that can manipulate abstract symbols and those that cannot. This is purely a mental capability - education has no role in it. If a person doesn't have the ability, you might be able to train them sufficiently to put on a pretty good show and fake it but they aren't going to be successful or happy about it.
I am sorry, but [citation needed].
In my experience, every person that does not understand abstract symbols will understand them once you explain the logic in detail. Sure some people are better at it than other people, but everybody I met was able to understand it.
parents are the doom of the nation (Score:2, Interesting)
Parents will be the downfall of the U.S. in terms of tech education and performance. Most parents have simply given up on learning and in doing so doom their children to educational mediocrity. They think if they didn't have to learn number systems and formal logic, then their children don't need that either, then wonder why all the technology jobs are shipping overseas or why we're taking jobs away from their kids and giving them to foreigners with H1-B visas. Furthermore, the public school system routinely resorts to teaching the use of simple gadgetry and office apps as "technical" education, watering down the education kids do receive and inflating grades in the process to make parents happy -- because without grade inflation all the parents do is email the teachers complaining that "their kids are A students!".
Actually I would go as far as to say that parents willfully hold their kids back in most cases because if their kids did manage to beat them in terms of logic and general common-sense, that would be a real burden on their egos, right? Anyway, in a country where academic performance is continuously watered down and sports make you more popular than learning real skills, it's no wonder we can't provide a good technical education. I had to re-learn all the math I ever learned in my life when I got to college, and I hope at some point kids don't have to suffer that any longer.
iPhone for my 3 year old (Score:3, Interesting)
I gave my old 1g iPhone to my 3 year old daughter. She's been using one for a year now to play games and take photos and listen to music. it no longer has a sim card and is set up with just apps and content for her now.
I sincerely hope the schools she attends can do better than what I'm hearing or she is gonig to have a tough time adjusting to the low fidelity expectations.
Re:Teachers Colleges are not teaching technology (Score:2, Interesting)
I really don't mean this as a troll, but, really, do Teacher's colleges (or Education departments) really teach anything significant at all? I was an undergraduate 40 years ago and education majors were not exactly considered the brightest on campus then and, as far as I can tell, still aren't (from my kids in college).
Personally, I believe that when women with intelligence could become anything they wanted, the teaching profession lost its most reliable source of decent practitioners. I hasten to add that I don't think we should turn the clock back on that, but it would be nice if teaching attracted more of the highly competent women that now go into business or other professions. How to do that is another issue and there are serious cultural as well as financial problems to overcome here.
And yes, I will plead guilty to holding the probably sexist notion that intelligent women are better at handling younger children (say before middle school, at least) than equally intelligent men, on average. That's just the way it is (in my not so humble opinion).
Re:Simple Rugged Durable = Better (Score:3, Interesting)
Those suckers were bulletproof.
Amen, Brother. A-fucking-men.
Back in 1973-74 I worked part-time teaching the TUTOR language to profs at U of I Chicago, and part-time driving around Chicago working on these things at places like Malcom X. Jr. College. These terminals were built like tanks and weighed about the same. The most vulnerable part was the random access audio device, which was a phenomenal kludge that was sort of a turntable that you could put a big, floppy piece of recording material on and it used pneumatics to move the record/playback arm in and out and also to advance/retreat the position of the turntable to reduce seek time. Fortunately, very few courses used these abominations.
The terminals were also dangerous as hell to work on. None of the metal stampings had had their edges smoothed and so you could slice yourself open just sticking your arm in there. You could also kill yourself if you weren't careful around some of the mega-capacitors that were inside. I accidentally shorted one with a screwdriver and it basically melted it. Try doing that with one of your wimpy little LCDs.
Remember, kids: if it can't kill you, then how the hell can it be any fun?
Re:Simple Rugged Durable = Better (Score:3, Interesting)
In Texas and Alaska, I heard "We wanted to keep them out of the secular humanist religion pushed on them in public schools" as the *only* reason given in the more than 20 people I know home schooled. And yes, they all said "secular humanist religion" and they were all Christians. I've met people online that say other things, but everyone I've ever met in person who was homeschooling their children said that.
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:2, Interesting)
When I went to school calculators had only been out for a couple of years. I think the big thing was a TI-59(I think it was a 59). Anyway, if any student had taken a calculator into a lesson it would have been a very serious matter. if it had been taken into a test it would have been immediate expulsion. I was recently flipping through some up to date math textbooks and though I do not have my old books to compare against I suspect that the math they are doing now is not as difficult as the math we used to do. I also met someone a few months ago who had managed a good pass in their HSC(year 12 leaving certificate in NSW, Australia) and had very little grasp on how to do math without a calculator(their multiplication and long division where totally abysmal). When I queried them on this they told me that being able to do long division on paper wasn't really very important as that's why they have calculators.
You really have to wonder what would happen to most people with a modern education if they suddenly had to rely on their own abilities rather than the gadget-enhanced abilities that they take for granted.
Then again I also think that computers have a time and a place and that place isn't the classroom. In an IT class is OK but IMHO that is about the only time is should be necessary(note to smarties don;t talk about disabilities as i am purposefully excluding them for the sake of brevity)