Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

I've got two kids in school (grades 8 and 10, relatively affluent district in the US), and I'm not shocked by this result. Anecdotally, whatever the possible upsides of computer use are, they are mitigated by some severe downsides:

* While promising the potential to be a learning tool, the computer is also an addiction. I've observed that it's almost impossible for some kids to manage their time, and to maintain their focus, while doing lessons on the computer. This has been a huge setback for one of my kids. Fortunately, math is still done on paper, so he gets something out of that.

* I've looked at the online lessons. My impression is that the effort of programming the interactive environment for online lessons tends to limit the breadth and depth of those lessons. Math instruction has abandoned proofs. A huge amount of the computerized lessons are busywork.

* There's no limit to the amount of homework that can be pushed on kids.

This is nothing new. Roughly 30 years ago I had an internship at an educational computing center that had almost every kind of computer and educational software title in a demo lab, for teachers to try out. The vast amount of apps amounted to glorified flash cards.

How great it could actually be is lost on the teachers. Instead of working through canned lessons, or surfing for stuff to paste into a report, kids could explore "real" software such as (just listing some of my favorites), Scratch, iPython Notebook, Arduino, etc.

Humanity is suffering from a collective ADD epidemic under the spell of computers and internet and children are getting the worst of it. Computers are the last thing that kids under 12 need in a classroom. Teach them something that involves quiet focus, like 19th century cursive writing.

Humanity is suffering from a collective ADD epidemic

No, it's not. The US and a few other developed countries are suffering from an epidemic of ADD diagnoses. Unrestricted computer use is certainly not a good education policy, but there's no evidence that it causes ADD.

Oh, it causes ADD, alright. Without a proper way to use it, the Internet just leads people to jump between pages, bits of information and topics, which often devolves in distraction on the many entertainment bullshit resources out there...

You can't read a book properly when you know you can just jump to the middle or the end to see the most interesting bits.

"People reading on the Internet are easily distracted" is not the same as "having ADD".

Well, if it looks like ADD and acts like ADD, it is ADD.

Asperger's, for example, has been pushed under "autism spectrum disorder". And Pluto is not a planet.

I could see Internet overload/distraction be diagnosed as some ADD-like disorder, or the main cause of it...

Books just leads to people to jump between books, bits of information and topics, which often devolves in distraction on many of the entertainment books out there. Oral tradition was so much better because you had to be focused on the expert who was giving the information and you had to learn it to a great enough detail you could recount the information yourself. With a book you can just jump to the interesting bits, but with oral tradition you have to stick around for the whole story.

And lest you think I am just being facetious, this was a legitimate criticism of writing back in the day.

>Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.

http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/482...

Yes, exactly.

The largest use of computers in schools (let's stick to the educational software, even though classes may not always)

By far the biggest use is in doing what computers are good at : automating manual, repetitive tasks.

So instead of a teacher teaching spelling, the kids use a spelling program where an annoying animated characters zips around saying 'great job'.

This is just automation of the teaching that needs to be done, but without the added ability of the teacher to see who is engaged and who is not. I have first hand experience of children who don't know / don't feel comfortable on the computer and as such get zero out of the automated lessons.

Any use of computers which relies on the person being a passive recipient of the output, instead of being an active determinant of what the computer does (ie programming instead of consuming ) is just automated teachers. Fine, but let's call it what it is.

Alan Kay's "Dynabook" report is such a refreshing look at what computers could be, in the hands of kids. There may be better links, but here's one:

http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html

To think it was written in 1972.

> kids could explore "real" software such as (just listing some of my favorites), Scratch, iPython Notebook, Arduino, etc.

Go to any UK school and you'll see this happening as part of the CS Curriculum. It's probably less relevant to an English Lit lesson on To Kill A Mockingbird.

Some software that provides large banks of questions for students to work through (particularly in Maths) is actually extremely useful. Not for instruction, but for assessment. It is an automation, but it saves the teacher a huge amount of time in marking and analysing results to identify areas of strength and weakness within a class and further inform teaching.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com