Posted by novaRom 6 days ago
The older teachers often would rather retire than learn yet another ed tech system. They just want to teach kid not be screen dispensers.
Really feels like all the ed tech is snake oil. Education outcomes are dropping. Elite college are needing more and more remedial classes. Obviously there are multiple factors at play but we should remove complexity unless it delivers decisive results.
[1] Even investing extra time in thoughtfully crafted test papers, focusing on word problems, proofs, and complex derivations, could make a world of difference. How hard is that? China and USSR did it when they were dirt poor. France has been doing it and still produces world-class scientists and engineers. What the fuck is wrong with the American educators? Yeah, I know I know. I'm being emotional. I just don't get how dumbing down education can ever help kids.
AFAICT, meta-analyses tend to find a positive effect of tech in education: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...
There is no indication that the current opposite move is evidence-based either, so it's basically your typical vibe shifts. Might revert back to "digital basics" in another decade or so with identical quotes?
Then again, by comparing new techniques against old ones, presumably the old ones get studied indirectly as well. Guess the glass could be half full with this approach
If the goal is actually to do a better job teaching kids, we need to better align incentives/minimize bureaucracy/measure outcomes better/etc. My sense is that there isn't an appetite for those sorts of changes. Largely because they hold children, parents, and teachers accountable in ways that make people uncomfortable.
That said, we had some vision of learning with tailored gamified learning apps, and that has come to be in a certain cases but imho it sometimes also provided a sense of "false" accomplishments as it mostly helped with rote memorization rather than principle understanding.
The apps are in summarization often a rote thing rather than something making for deep exploration, that very forward kids might've benefited from something more "free" but a majority will end up not benefiting.
And often the practical outcome of "digital learning" in Sweden instead ended up being schools trying to save money on books by splashing random PDF's about subjects into teams folders.
Trying to help my kids on subjects often ended up being scouring those teams folders and try to reverse-engineer what the important parts and dependencies of a course has been and then go through that, with a textbook you can just flip through the relevant pages of the chapters they're working on to test my kid and go through what they were having trouble with.
Now a _very_ good teacher might build up a useful corpus (but it takes time/work) and worse teachers/schools (sadly a consequence of Swedens education privatization) often create an worse outcome than with books.
To summarize, Good real textbooks thus gives a far better chance of holding a good baseline level for education, whilst digital tools potentially could do good but in practice creates a risk for a really bad baseline without _all_ parts of the education system being good.
For the rest: yeah there's nothing more entrenched than the mindset of the people that run schools. They conceive of their school as the epicentre of all problems and solutions with respect to kids education. They cannot imagine they might be simply irrelevant on some issues.
Allegations without evidence.
The more senses you engage while learning a thing the deeper and more effective the learning is pretty accepted knowledge at this point.
This is the right decision and should be to go back to the basics, instead of full computer everywhere including iPads, phones and laptops.
Remember the big tech founders / CEOs do not give their kids access to social media, iPads, phones for a reason.
There's a major issue though, which is that course material get designed for use on computer screens first. But I have good hope that llm-based pipelines should help fix this issue.
