New York City Bans AI from Elementary Schools
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
also, LLMs are great at summarizing knowledge, which is likely a better fit for earlier stages of education, rather than later forms, to instill some sense of interest.
are students actually having issues discerning real people from LLMs in NYC? did they explore that before coming up with this program or is this signaling? the article is scant on these details, which is unfortunate.
"The new mandate also includes restrictions on the use of individual laptops and tablets. Students in preschool through second grade will no longer be able to use individual devices at all, while older elementary school students will face time limits of 30 to 45 minutes a day. But exceptions will reportedly be made for students who are actively learning English or are living with disabilities, as well as for the use of coding software."
without citing evidence that does anything at all, that comes across as luddite levels of hope that putting kids in information jail will do something special that'll make them "better" somehow.
pretty much anyone on this forum who is older than 30 should remember these dumb jails that did nothing but frustrate students when they attempted to get access to information.
i was writing "code" when i was in 4th grade >30 years ago, and if i had these restrictions in school, relative to what exists today, i wouldn't have been.
you cannot fight the future this way.
I suspect the former probably used the same “short sighted” motivated reasoning to excuse what, with the benefit of hindsight, looks like laziness. In return, their kids are neurologically stunted to the point of having little to no functional attention span.
> without citing evidence
For devices? We have tonnes of evidence in kids with versus without devices. Especially at the elementary-school age.
If you want a starker contrast, it’s this: rich communities don’t have devices in schools. Poor ones do.
We don’t yet have the long-term data for AI. But the same folks who were pushing laptops in classrooms and smartphones for five-year olds (and NFTs for poor people) are now pushing this FOMO.
this is about banning existing technology for material in teaching.
> We have tonnes of evidence in kids with versus without devices
that is a blanket statement, wrt to device time (i assume without you specifying), and is not what is being discussed in this article, and more of the fear mongering that leads to these outcomes
It’s a very clear trend line that isn’t disproven with individual counter-examples. (Poor communities don’t have the student-teacher ratios to enforce bans, for one.)
> many have "banned" personal devices, but that isn't really meaningful for this discussion
How isn’t banning harmful, novel devices not meaningful to a discussion about another novel technology being pushed into classrooms by the same people who pushed the devices?
> this is about banning existing technology for material in teaching
…devices are existing technology.
> that is a blanket statement, wrt to device time
I’m making an analogy. Lots of parents unwittingly compromised their kids because they were afraid if they didn’t have a phone in elementary school they’d get left behind. There was limited evidence of benefits in a sea of FOMO. The situation with AI looks similar, down to the people arguing for putting AI in classrooms.
It is absolutely not Luddite to note that pretty much no technological revolution privileged elementary-school aged kids who had exposure over those who did not. That divergence starts manifesting in the teenage years, after basic cognitive functions like information absorption and processing and self-motivated curiosity have set in.
When? Which decade between 1970 and today?
Show me the study or tell me the keywords to look up, because I cannot reveal what you are hinting at.
The best data illustrating the point are for home internet access on educational outcomes.
In early development, we see a negative effect [1]. Young kids with more home internet do worse than those with less of it. In middle and high school, that effect reverses [2]. (There are better studies on this in the EU.)
Bill Gates absolutely benefited from having a terminal at his high school when others didn’t. There are lots of similar examples across America and history. I know of no similar anecdotes for any technology when it comes to young kids since we banned child labor. (If you start laboring at 8, yes, getting familiar with and locked into the tools of your trade at 5 will advantage you.)
The burden of proof in early education should not be on parents and policymakers to prove harm. It should be on proponents of novel tools and methods to prove benefits.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3614074
that first paper is on academic outcomes in uraguay, with a particular set of testing that i am not familiar with. if you could fill me in, that would be great.
i am also not following how they arrived at this:
'We find no statistically significant effect of FTTH exposure on children spending more than one hour per day in front of a screen – the threshold recommended by health institutions – nor on caregivers' acceptance of using screens to entertain children without supervision. We interpret this as insufficient evidence to confirm the direct channel with our data, rather than as evidence that it is not operating: our measures of screen time have significant limitations, and we cannot rule out that direct exposure is also playing a role.'
but i can't see the whole paper from where i am at the moment.
the other paper looks more like a magazine article, but i will try to take a look at it.