Children and Computers

[judith]

Here's a little different take on the subject of children, computers, education: a talk given on Ted.com by Professor Sugata Mitra (of the Hole in the Wall experiment in Delhi) titled "Child Driven Education".

http://tinyurl.com/2do97cb

[jackdaw version]

I don't have time to watch the whole video right now, but I feel compelled to mention that there is a lot of research showing that computers and children and education don't necessarily mix very well. Of course, it's probably easier to ship a few computers off to some village in India or Africa that actual live human teachers.

I've just finished reading The Shallows — What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, mentioned by Hugh over here, http://www.charliegillett.com/bb/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=15548 — and it is quite fascinating A) what effects computer media have on your brain physically and B) what a load of crap is spouted by digital-media enthusiasts without any data to back up what they're claiming; crap that is later contradicted by experimental results. The book is well worth reading. Lots of data presented. It would probably take a little longer than watching the video, however. But, I have to say, I spent a fair amount of time among the TED types and I'm far from convinced that each and every idea they spin off is worth paying much attention to. It's a bit of a mutual-admiration society.

[judith]

I've been meaning to watch the TED stuff as it has been recommended, but I haven't as it seems to be all on video and I prefer to read articles rather than watch videos when it comes to the subjects I have seen presented on the site. I welcome your assessment, Jonathan. It does validate the sneaking suspicion I had from what little I had seen, that the presenter's personality had as much to do with it as the subject. But maybe that's me being lazy.

The difficulties that first come to mind with computer instruction, in my case, are obvious for I have done much teaching of children, as well as adults in a university setting. And, that which I have taught relates to working with one's hands and body. For example: spinning, weaving, herbal lore, working with tools such as pencils and pigments, needles and thread - learning to see how and why things are made and, most importantly, inspire/give options for and freedom of creativity - eye hand co-ordination (it's positive benefits with learning disabilities) as well as self-worth and consequently the respect for the works of others... Oh, I should mention I also helped teach Aikido to children and the improvements in some of their learning/social difficulties was astounding. Also, my mother was a music teacher, my father taught industrial arts. So, it is always with great sadness when I see education viewed as merely that which provides verbal information be it by computer or otherwise, isolation by default. However, what intrigued me while watching the video, I recollected an experiment out of Harvard years ago where, basically, children were given the option to eat what ever they wanted and after several months, every single one of them in the end turned away from 'junk food' and selected the 'more healthy' foods. It caused an uproar at the time.

[Hugh Weldon]

Interesting seeing this in the light of what the Carr book on the internet is saying. But my initial reactions are one of showbiz and self-advertisement on the part of the presenter (and I've had to sit through plenty of these sort of presentations).

This guy is a professional educationalist, not a teacher. Faced with a class of kids and no computers I doubt he'd last ten minutes.

Very big doubts about the value of any learning achieved. The Pythagoras question for example - obviously the kids are clever enough to find some fact page about Pythagoras, but challenged to prove the theorem with pen and paper, could they do it? I doubt it.

My feeling remains that learning technologies are being very over-hyped. Or more cynically, it's fine if you want to prepare them for a working life of staring into screens. And it seems to be largely about information retrieval, not thinking.

[jackdaw version]

[ . . . ]
My feeling remains that learning technologies are being very over-hyped. Or more cynically, it's fine if you want to prepare them for a working life of staring into screens. And it seems to be largely about information retrieval, not thinking.

Pretty much exactly one of Carr's major points.

[Pete Fowler]

As someone who spent twenty years in the arcane world of education and the new technologies, I always had to spend so much time crap detecting; and so much time suggesting so much more mundane solutions to problems that simply did not require a technical response.

My epithany came in a Liverpool estate infant school. Anyone of a certain age who’s been in such schools – and they’re in all cities, somewhere – is stunned by the complete lack of behavioural or environmental understanding of so many of the five year olds: they do not know why they are in this strange place; they have no concept of ‘learning’ in any traditional sense. Some of them can hardly talk in sentences understood outside of their own families.

I was shown, as a visitor from a University, the great breakthrough that had been made by the use of computers. The naughtiest children, those who were causing a systematic mayhem, had been placed in front of screens. The software being used was called something like an Integrated Learning System.

‘Look how quiet they are!’, said a beaming Headteacher.

Quiet they certainly were, absorbed in a routine that was part and parcel of their everyday life. Staring at moving images on a screen. Just as, at home, they stared at DVDs and stared at MTV (or whatever).

I was never really sure if they were ‘learning’ anything, because the ‘tests’ were of that meaningless sort in which the examined could score something that might appear reasonable by a random pressing of the keys. Only a few months before, at the University in which I worked, I had managed to pass a first year Chemistry assessment by not even looking at the questions, but simply by pressing keys haphazardly. Since I had dropped Chemistry as a subject at the age of thirteen, I was quite proud of my apparent ability to sail through a first year degree assessment.

But, much more important, was the silence, in the infants’ school, of the five year old troublemakers. What they needed, more than anything else, were situations in which they learned to converse with others, learned to relate to others, and learned to behave and act in a manner appropriate to the situations in which they found themselves.

They were being ‘taught’ in a way that was the precise opposite of meeting that need. Very modern, as Tony Blair would say – using the very latest technologies.

But very familiar in a more historical sense: hiding the malcontents in a corner, or in another room, and finding a means of shutting them up; and breathing a huge sigh of relief at the end of the year when they move on up.

‘So quiet!’

[judith]

Thank you so much for this beautifully written account of your experiences, Pete. The silence you write of through the truthful clarity of your perception quiets the babble by showing it for what it is. It most certainly does. And it makes me want to cry.

[jackdaw version]

Thank you also from me, Pete, for that insightful piece of writing. It's good reading something from an experienced pro in the field.

Television has been called "the electronic babysitter." Perhaps interactive learning software as you describe it is "the electronic detention center."

It's a little strange to think back on my own first days in school — about 1957. No computers, but we were required to be quiet. Given books and told to sit in the corner of this massive classroom. I couldn't read and only knew to hold the unaccustomed-to-me things the right way up by looking at the pictures. A convent school in Wellington, New Zealand. Later, after some typical Jackdaw behaviour, I was told to go and sit on a bench in the school playground until they were ready to throw me into the furnace for my sins! I must have flown away somehow.

[Des]

Yes wasn't that great from Pete - and I'm not normally interested in children - wonderful.

[CantSleepClownsWillGetMe]

It's good reading something from an experienced pro in the field.

It certainly is. Thanks Pete.

I wonder if I might ask whether the scene you describe was very recent? I'm asking this because when my son was at primary school (2000 - 2006) they had only one interactive-type learning aid for the entire school, which had to be shared by two children (both boys, who had problems with fine motor skills). Also, because it was costly for the school to buy it, and a lengthy process to apply to the Education Authority for approval, they had to request the machine a year in advance!

[Martin Owen]

Firstly, Carr's book is pure unsubstantiated hokum. It will make him money. It is worth reading the Guardian review:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/se ... -way-think

Secondly for every anecdote Pete cares to give I can probably give a counter one.

As with any medium or teaching method there is good and bad (as this is a music forum there are plenty of people to testify that there is crap music.... therefore all music is crap).

Plenty of good examples to those who ask.

[jackdaw version]

Firstly, Carr's book is pure unsubstantiated hokum. . . ..

But have you read the book yourself? Or are you just going on what Steven Poole thinks of it? I have already described his characterization of the book as inaccurate, and don't see any reason to change my mind so I wonder if you're bringing anything new to the table or just slinging words. I can assure you that the footnotes in Carr's book are extensive and to call it "pure unsubstantiated hokum" indicates that you know not whereof you speak.

[Hugh Weldon]

Great contribution Pete. I am sure the picture you paint is a true one, I can easily picture the sort of place, Netherley or Stockbridge Village or Croxteth perhaps. Kids barely socialised, perhaps not even toilet trained. I think Martin's

for every anecdote Pete cares to give I can probably give a counter one.

might be based on the experiences of other places. Anglesey? A different world. Also Mr Version has already provided a pretty robust rebuttal of that Guardian review. But I will hold off any further comment till I've read the book, which I have on order.

I do not doubt that digital learning technologies have some educational value. But not with 5 year olds from those sort of backgrounds. It sounds like an alternative to Ritalin (another scandal). I suspect those with little experience of inner city schools have misconceptions of the sort of problems many of those children present. But it's as much a crisis of parenting as of schooling to a large extent.

[Martin Owen]

Yes, I have read the book when it was in proof.

I declare my interest - I work in the application of information and communication technologies and learning..... which means that I read a lot of original research and also judge a lot of original research.

I also spend a lot of time in classrooms and other learning places. This means I have seen a lot of crap teaching with ICT. I have also seen a lot of good stuff. But then I have seen a lot of crap and good teaching without ICT too.

Carr's line is not new. I think Theodore Roszak probably said it more eloquently - but just as erroneously in the Cult of Information in 1986. However anything I say was probably said more eloquently by Marshall McCluhan in the 1960's. The error lies in their failure to grasp anything about socio-cultural psychology.... and especially the socio-cultural psychology mediated by older technologies. The changes Carr and Roszak have lived through were quite profound - its just that they did not notice them. I could, but won't, go on at length about the introduction of aeroplanes, radio or the photocopier.

And if words like social and psychology don't chine with readers, the cognitive neuroscience, although there are some contradictions, seems to show that we are still humans.

My examples do not necessarily come from Anglesey - although there are some good examples - like children working directly with other children in Pearl Lagoon in Nicaragua (English speaking east coast - strong on reggae influenced music). However there is medical education across Africa, the role of the mobile phone is village vet science in central Africa, games giving HIV/AIDS information in Xhosa, Mapuches children in Chile - having access to news beyond their village for the first time. The world is getting cleverer.

To put myself on the line... I have spent a lot of time lately developing smart toys to help the teaching of reading - although my income has largely been derived from a Careers education project Http://www.icould.com/ - where we have 1000 stories to raise young people's aspirations and stimulate them to think about their future. My former role as Director of Learning at Futurelab (http://www.futurelab.org.uk/ ) has many good examples of learning in the twenty-first century.

I am with Des on this one. I have been in voluntary exile from London for some time. However the internet has allowed me to carry on listening to Charlie's shows , discuss my minority listening habits with others, find out about new stuff and often get access to it from close to source cutting out trips to a Virgin store. It has been a two-way education. My L plates get bigger rather than smaller. If it has been good for me why should I make any assumptions that these practices a bad for other people? Am I really dumber? Is my son, the rocket scientist, or my daughter, the brain surgeon, more stupid because they have always lived in houses where there have always been computers (actually they are Cosmologists and Geriatricians)?

Seriously, the internet is bad stuff? Bah, listening to jungle music rots the brain or....

“[Writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have came to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.” (Phaedrus 275a-b) Plato

[Pete Fowler]

Martin Owen said

Secondly for every anecdote Pete cares to give I can probably give a counter one.

I know, Martin - and, whatever the tone of my piece above, I'm certainly no technophobe. After all, these technologies liberated the way I work, and added enormously to the way I live. When I think of slaving away in the NME offices in 1972, tortuously writing down every bloody entry in their charts from '55 to '69; and then, with countless sheets of A4, spending what seemed like an eternity on simply getting the artists' names into alphabetical order, and then spending days typing away with a prodigious use of white-out, and cursing because I'd forgotten to insert a carbon at one point...I cannot believe I did that. Even though Charlie was, as you can imagine, both so beautifully encouraging and yet, at the same time, rather sternly insistent on deadline keeping. I can still feel the sense of shame that, despite all of that cruel effort, mistakes were made that would, actually, have been less likely using computers. I remember sheepishly ringing Charlie to tell him that one of my awful errors - in 'my' charts, in Rock File, Heartbreak Hotel didn't quite make it to No 1 - had just been repeated by Johnny Walker on Radio 1, obviously with the book on his desk...

That was not meant to be so lengthy a diversion, but you know how it is when the keys start dancing. No, Martin, you could quote countless examples to the contrary - but the point I'd make is this: sometimes, in an educational setting, computers become a panacea; and sometimes, in a school classroom, the ability of IT to still the noise of the disenchanted is used in exactly the same manner as the Mum at home, who, worn out with working, cooking, cleaning, counting pennies, looking after the kids, washing, finding ties and bits of school uniform, worrying about the way she looks and fretting the days away, plonks the whole crowd of brats down in front of the tele. And silence suddenly take over; and she can sit in the kitchen and, fag still in Croxteth hand, worry in peace. Lives of quiet desperation, indeed.

I ought to read that book on the other thread, the Carr. But someone's just nailed that as well - the answer lies in the middle ground, but the publisher wants the angle.

I say I ought to read the Carr, but, now I'm suddenly past the work stage, I can't get over Tony Judt's history books and there's so many of them to get through.