Can Radio Really Educate? | Hacker News Reader

Can Radio Really Educate?

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55 pointstintinnabula20 comments

Very related: Education Automation: Freeing the scholar to return to his studies by R. Buckminster Fuller

We had the technology even in the 1950s to do mass education that would arguably be better than status quo in many subjects.

https://www.amazon.com/Education-Automation-Freeing-scholar-...

The historical review was very interesting.

On the hook of the article:

> In the 1920s, radio was an exciting new mass medium. It was known for providing entertainment, but educators wondered if it could also be used for education.

With every new technology, there is a furry of people coming out of the woodwork to tout it as a way to "revolutionize education" or try to guess if it can be used efficiently. Invariably, the dusts settles after a while to restate that:

- kids who self-educate will use whatever mean is at their disposition to learn, be it books, radio, VHS, youtube, the metaverse. Better technology is better, but it's mostly on the convenience part.

- kids who need guidance on what we want them to learn will need a human teacher follow them, see what works and doesn't, and bring contents/explainations for them to digest the concepts.

- mosts kids aren't self-sufficient in all subjects, and will need guidance to go through everything we want them to learn (basically every kid falls on both above categories, it just depends on the subject). Thus whatever the technology at hand, we need a trained human being to help them learn at some point.

Australia has 'School of the Air' for remote students that used radio for education.

I work with some people who did it as a kid and thought it was great.

https://www.australian-children.com/school-of-the-air

https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/history-cultu...

https://www.assoa.nt.edu.au/

There's even a School of the Air photo, about half-way through the article (although the article text itself is about America).

Back in early 00's I listened to a Spanish radio programme with biographies and historical battles and facts. It was full of sound fxs, truly amazing, 1000x times better than reading a book.

In the 60's people could get the GEP equivalent for Spain (Actually in The Canaries) thanks to a radio broadcast.

EDIT: Holy sh|t, it's still alive!! (Spanish): http://www3.radioecca.org/

Trivia: the model wearing the "radio hat" is Academy and Emmy Award winning actress Hope Lange, at the age of 15.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_Lange

Trivum: the singular of "trivia" is "trivium".

And "trivia" is appropriate to an article on education, as it is from the Trivium, which is to say, the first of two parts of medaeval scholastic education: the trivium and the quadrivum, together comprising the seven liberal arts.

The trivium is grammar, logic, and rhetoric. You might think of these as input, processing, and output.

The quadrivium is arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Or quantity, quantity in space, quantity in time, and quantity in space and time.

And now back to our regularly scheduled broadcast ...

https://www.etymonline.com/word/trivia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education

Unrelated question: does every single reading time estimate lie to us in attempt to entice us to stay or am I just slow?

There is no way I can read this in 10 minutes.

I generally find estimated reading times to be significantly longer than it actually takes me to read an article.

Good question. I tested it. 5 minutes to read it for me. Was expecting longer than the 10 but I was in "fast mode" where I selectively skipped placenames, small details I know I'd never retain without masses of unwarranted effort. I read fiction slowly, but when browsing for information I plough through texts. Do you skim read ever?

Retention-wise it still feels like I could tell you a rough outline of the article. It might help I'm a radio amateur/ham so have a strong interest in the subject anyway. Let me see, it was something like this, you'll have to take my word I'm not switching tabs (too fiddly on mobile anyway);

- invention of radio

- mass enthusiasm

- mass hysteria

- mass education (Wisconsin? I'm not American so my mental map of midwest is weak - Ohio though)

- rebroadcasts via larger station for wider reach

- I'm blanking on the outro, but now at least I know radio education was a thing over large tracts of land in the US and Australia too, but isn't this how China and Korea are making superstar teachers online now?

If the "final event" ever comes, I'll maybe find a way to keep powering the radios to entertain and educate the willing.

You're not slow, you're probably just taking it too seriously :)

I don't really consider myself a fast reader, but I was able to get the broad strokes in about 1 and half minutes (timed it). Articles like these are 80% filler and the first sentence of two can generally tell you what the rest is about. If you can find the keywords in those first couple sentences, hint, they're typically the long ones, you can get the gist of everything very quickly. It's typically an idea or group of ideas that is interesting, not a specific line or word, and if I find something curious, it's at that time I'll choose to go slow or even stop to think about it.

If an article only merits that form of "reading" I'd rather spend my time with something else.

Which is why I don't read the articles the vast majority of the time. It's rare that I find an article worth reading slowly, but when I do, I slow down and read it. I come to this forum for the comments, not for poorly written articles with low amount of substance. Certain blogs or websites I'll read at a slow pace, because of historic experiences showing the quality is high or will spur interesting comments. Pg is a good example, I'll read those slowly as I find the writing to have a large amount of interesting ideas. Contrasted to the article in this thread, the idea isn't very new or interesting to me, and the signal to noise ratio isn't exactly good. When the signal to noise is bad so often, I want to spend my time with something else as well, and why I choose not to waste 10 minutes reading it when only a couple will suffice.

Might be a little slower than the estimate they're calculating. I timed myself at nine minutes, but others were faster than me. You should time it, though.

I wouldn't worry about the time so much as the comprehension and retention.

Anecdatapoint: It took me a little under 3.

And we keep reinventing mostly broadcast forms of instruction--which are fine as far as they go and are very useful for many purposes. But, especially for classroom-type lectures, it's largely incrementally polishing up the part of education (big lectures) that mostly works and for which we've had the tools to listen/watch remotely for decades.

Internet Radio has a few educational sites:

Science Zone http://amber.streamguys1.com:4200/live

Astronomy F.M. http://radio.astronomy.fm:8111/live

Star Talk http://tunein.streamguys1.com/StarTalkRadio?aw_0_1st.playeri...

Jupiter http://n06.radiojar.com/0uk94cu0xrquv?rj-ttl=5&rj-tok=AAABbx...

Radio Newark http://streamer.radionewark.com:8000/

Broadcast radio has morphed into a political propaganda tool.

The May, 1924 issue of Scientific American mentioned in the article is available (without reservation) for download from the Internet Archive.

If you'd like a peek at what views of radio were at the time, much of the issue is dedicated to the topic.

https://archive.org/details/sim_scientific-american_1924-05_...

(Ironically: LibGen's afficiated popular magazines site doesn't have this particular issue of SciAm. Yet.)

Yes. In 1978 I learnt from the radio that the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is '42'

Can very much remember listening to HGTTG in 1978.

Was via 2JJ on the AM broadcast band from a thousand miles away, amongst lots of static.

(this was before 2JJJ migrated to FM, Australia wide)

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