Can Students Have Too Much Tech?

I've got kids in middle and high school. And I worked in a large county educational computing facility in the early 80's, that had every kind of computer and piece of educational software for teachers to try out. My observations:

1. The computer is the "distraction machine." It is just vibrating with distractions. Even the supposedly educational websites have things that move, different colors, links, and so forth. Keeping my kids focused on their lessons requires constant supervision. Most of the time spent at the computer is recreational.

2. I think the content tends to be superficial, possibly because making the underlying mechanics work detracts from actually creating content. A lot of the software that I saw in the early 80's was glorified flash cards, and I'm not sure it's much better today. I'd estimate kids spend twice the time on half the content.

3. The bright side is, I think there's some tech, that is qualitatively different than a textbook. It tends to resemble "real" software that grown-ups use, such as programming tools, computer algebra systems, and so forth. Schools rarely use this stuff.

I think it's most useful to think about these questions in terms of the quality of the technologies involved. Technology does not just include computers and the Internet, but also books, paper, writing utensils, chalkboards/whiteboards, workspaces, etc.

Taken from that perspective, we should then judge each piece of technology on how well it does its job. A high-quality textbook with a good index, good writing, good editing, and good organization is extremely valuable and useful. A poor quality textbook with an incomplete index, errors, and poor organization is not nearly as useful.

How does this compare to computer tools for learning? Well, we can't just judge the tablets or laptops as hardware. Computers are only as good as their software and the content available. And how does that fare? In my experience, it's universally terrible.

In general, content on the Internet is poor to counterproductive in terms of quality. Some sources are good, but the general trend towards massively huge variety served up by completely automated tools, not to mention the inevitable spam that shows up in low-barrier-to-entry zones reveals itself across the board. Current search technology is woefully insufficient to make sense of the surfeit of content. This is obvious on Google, but even in narrower cases like Amazon.com or the various mobile app stores, there's just too much content out there, 99% of which is junk.

That doesn't even begin to address the terrible user interfaces. Compared to a book, which is far less flexible but light-years easier to use and interact with, most software fails miserably.

Virtual textbooks, for example, are easier to search, but harder to use in every other way, from just reading to browsing, to perusing indexes or sharing with classmates. And that's assuming the licensing and access issues don't cause you problems. My daughter's online history textbook was taken away a week or so ago because of a mistake somewhere between the school administration and the textbook company in renewing the license. So now the kids just don't have a textbook until someone resolves the problem. This doesn't happen with actual books.

Books and lecturing have had centuries to be perfected. We take it for granted, but it's true. Computers and the Internet are newborn tech by comparison. So long as we fall for snake oil pitches and pour money into this new tech indiscriminately in the hopes it will solve our education problems, we're just encouraging the already horrific state of the technology. Let's focus on the stuff we know works and let the flashbang tech mature a bit more.

Can students have too much tech? Probably not. TV didn't ruin kids, and neither will the Internet. But this article is completely correct that more technology is not a panacea. Putting more technology into classrooms does not, by itself, improve learning outcomes.

Science and engineering, at the university level, are still largely taught the same way they have been for 100 years. This has not hampered the ability of engineers to dream up and create amazing and innovative products, nor the ability of mathematicians and scientists to push the boundaries of their respective fields. If (when) an engineering student takes a course on differential equations and doesn't grasp the material well enough to apply it to their future work, that's much more likely to be because:

a) They didn't understand how these concepts would be applied to practical engineering work and thus failed to apply themselves; or b) They found lectures difficult to follow and didn't have any resources to fall back on (e.g. professor office hours; teaching assistants)

not c) There wasn't enough technology in the classroom

Technology is needed for vocational training - whatever technology would be used to do the job needs to be present in the classroom. But in primary/secondary school and university, you need to teach fundamental, abstract skills and a chalkboard is perfectly adequate for that.

I feel like the roots of this movement were to make a more computer literate society, when access to technology was a larger hurdle than it is today.

Kids of all economic classes are currently exposed to technology daily, so the aim has to shift. Can we create software that helps children learn faster than a traditional environment? Can we teach them things that are not available without technology?

Slapping a kid in front of a computer to play some stupid vocabulary game might have been useful in 1990, when learning to type, use a mouse, navigate an operating system, was a useful skill. Not so much now.

Can we teach them logic and problem solving skills through coding? Can we create software that makes them eager to learn and explore? Become Critical Thinkers?

The physical devices are only part of the issue. The curriculum has to be targeted and useful.

I suspect that technology can be a great learning tool if:

1) The computing environment encourages kids to practice problem solving, critical thinking, and systematizing.

2) The kids are intrinsically motivated to spend their "screen" time using software that encourages the above, as opposed to any of the myriad distractions on computers.

#1 is a problem of finding and identifying the good software in the haystack of diversions. This was easier in the pre-internet days because computers simply had far fewer consumer-oriented features.

#2 requires that kids actually be interested in and disciplined about thinking deeply about problems. It also really helps if kids have a problem that they personally want to solve, which motivates them.

Who cares? Let them figure it out for themselves for once, self control is only learned through binging and gorging on the sweet stuff until it hurts.

I loopholed my way out of school in grade 7, and for two years after that, I did nothing but watch anime, the crudest and sickest misogynist anime you could lay your eyes on; you would assume I learned nothing from that, but you'd be wrong.

Turns out that if you watch enough anime, you start picking up Japanese whether you like it or not. That binge taught me a skill that helped me, in addition to the computational skills required to pirate so much anime on mere ADSL, get a first job at 17, with income competitive to that of both of my legal guardians, and every last one of my contemporaries.

No matter how much you think they're just loitering around with no aim, they have passions, and soon they'll have developed pre-frontal cortices that can bring them closer to what they love.

It won't have anything to do with your strict prohibition of everything they enjoy. What will save them is those precious daylight hours they spend truant from your mind-numbing institutions.

Absolutely. Technology has evolved computing to the least common denominator, as it it supposed to do. This 'easiness' has nothing to do with critical thinking, analysis, and other thinking skills humans need to develop. There is certainly a place for computer-based learning; I learned more about Linear Algebra and Continuous and Discrete Signal Processing from machines than I did from any professor...but expecting to place elementary level kids in front of a machine and expecting them to emerge as Karl Gauss is idiotic.

Sure. I've got like 6 different source of calendar info inflows... None of which sync properly. And I'm willing to bet that is fairly modest by Western standards.

It's a complete fkin mess.

And it gets worse once most of the info is confidential...no you can't make a note of that thing on your phone... It would get syncd to an unencrypted cloud. Fk...

Books, not iPads. That's what I say!

And you know what, students say so too --- see related discussion about the effectiveness of eTexts vs Print books: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8882481

Rediscovering Koblitz (inventor of ECC ) two decades later ?! http://www.math.washington.edu/~koblitz/mi.html

> Never forget that the human race with technology is like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine.

Dr. Ted Kaczynski (social critic, mathematician)

This is Steven Pinker's sister, if anyone was wondering.

Well, prior to the writing of this article, the answer was indeed yes, as the article discusses. However, thanks to the magic of Betteridge's Law, which as we all on Hacker News know is UTTERLY UNASSAILABLE, the answer is now "No!"

Thanks for solving this problem so handily, New York Times! May you use your powers only for the force of good.