[HN Gopher] Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for boo...
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Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the
classroom
Author : novaRom
Score : 707 points
Date : 2026-04-02 10:50 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (undark.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (undark.org)
| smatti wrote:
| A very similar development is going on in neighboring Finland.
| There are schools that use almost exclusively paper books
| (instead of digital ones) again. The overall consensus among
| parents is that books are way better than screens for kids, all
| the way up to high school. Hand-writing and free drawing with pen
| and paper provide many advantages to fixed screens. You cannot
| open a new tab to Youtube in a book. The significance of these
| things is finally recognized now. Parents are also worried about
| the short video brain rot and psychological "capture" of our kids
| by social media companies.
|
| Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And
| personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their
| studies. Learning AI should be its own subject but that should
| not ruin the way kids study other subjects where there are proven
| old ways to get to great results.
|
| Source: I have 10 Finnish kids
|
| Edit: FYI: an old (2018) link to an article about a finding about
| the matter: https://yle.fi/a/3-10514984 "Finland's digital-based
| curriculum impedes learning, researcher finds"
| Gigachad wrote:
| As much as I would have disagreed as a kid, I very much agree
| now. Laptops were used more for flash games and reddit than
| learning in the classroom in my experience. And likely the act
| of reading physical books and handwriting is better for
| learning.
| BostonFern wrote:
| That anecdote sounds like a problem with discipline and
| ethics, not with technology.
| Gigachad wrote:
| You can put a candy bowl in front of kids and tell them not
| to touch it. Or you can just not put it there. Ultimately
| kids will be less distracted when you remove the source of
| distractions. Phone bans in schools are showing this
| already.
| BostonFern wrote:
| Are we talking about laptops in grades advanced enough
| for students to waste time on Reddit, or smartphones in
| the hands of young children?
|
| My contention is that it's feasible to use laptops in
| classrooms productively, especially considering the value
| in applications like word processors. Of course it's
| necessary to balance the educational value with the
| potential for distraction. A way to minimize the latter
| is to extend classroom management to address device use,
| e.g., instilling discipline. I've personally seen it done
| well and done poorly (often not attempted at all), and
| given an otherwise healthy classroom setting, it comes
| down to discipline and ethics that address device use.
| That comes after tailoring the specific device format
| (e.g., tablets lending themselves more to entertainment,
| socially and habitually) to the appropriate grade level
| (maturity, responsibility, and technical potential
| increasing with age).
|
| Some classrooms are too disruptive for device use, but
| that's not inherently a tech problem, even if you blame
| disruptive classrooms on broader cultural problems
| stemming from tech's role in society. Other classrooms
| exist in cultures that reject the necessary classroom
| management strategies.
|
| It's not my contention that any device format should be
| used at any grade level and that distractions can be
| managed by simply saying "don't" and expecting success.
|
| To address your other point above, yes, reading a book is
| different, often better, than reading on a screen, even
| for adults, so I'm also not arguing that devices should
| replace books.
| gritspants wrote:
| I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'. I am in
| the US and there seems to be a FOMO plague infecting our school
| system when it comes to technology. In practice it seems more
| destructive to the child.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I keep hearing this at work but so far no one has explained
| what "learning ai" actually means. It seems to just be
| nonsense like those people selling prompt recipes or claiming
| to be prompt engineers.
|
| No one needs training in prompting AI. I could understand if
| they meant a deeper layer of integrating tech with systems
| but all they ever mean is typing things in to a text box.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| Especially since kids these days aren't even very good at
| using computers:
|
| http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-
| co...
|
| It seems to me that if someone can read and think
| critically-- they can RTFM and get much better much quicker
| at computers and AI than people who spent all their time
| tapping an ipad to watch the next video.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I'd think really the only AI skill you need is the
| ability to think independently and be able to verify the
| results you are getting or spot when something is wrong
| in the response.
|
| It would take a few sessions at most to take someone from
| 10 years ago and get them fully up to speed with AI tools
| since they have zero learning curve.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think exercises when student is given pre-generated AI
| output and told to identify as many issues or mistakes as
| possible might be sensible. Not sure how long creating
| such exercise would take and what should be the tools or
| sources to verify the output but that might be helpful
| excersise.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Similar to Google and Wikipedia lessons back in my day.
| graemep wrote:
| You also need to understand the limits of AI and that it
| has limits that a human that gives you usually correct
| and authoritative answers does not have.
|
| I think it comes easily to the sort of people who comment
| here. Moat people have a very vague understanding of
| computers in general.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| I suspect that, in practice, what many enthusiastic
| advocates mean by "learning AI" is actually "learning to
| need AI".
|
| In other words, the aim is to get kids used to using AI as
| soon as possible, so that they do not learn the skills to
| function without depending on it.
| justonceokay wrote:
| If you're smart AI saves you time getting to something
| you could probably achieve anyway. If you're... not
| smart... then it will be a necessary crutch for you to
| get through life.
|
| I can see the angle for making sure kids start using it
| before they develop the skills to become independent of
| it.
| duskdozer wrote:
| Presumably prompting skills like https://github.com/califio
| /publications/blob/main/MADBugs/CV...
| TingPing wrote:
| I'm not sure anything was clarified. Nothing about that
| conversation is special or unique?
| pesus wrote:
| Are these supposed to be the "skilled" prompts? This just
| reads as a basic conversation and not as particularly
| well-written or well-defined prompts. So far everything
| I've seen about prompting "skills" has just come down to
| being able to articulate and critically think a bit.
| 3yr-i-frew-up wrote:
| As someone who sells AI... You'd be shocked at how bad
| people are at using AI.
|
| My 6 year old kid who watches me is a better prompter.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You absolutely need prompting skills to use AI usefully.
| You need to know how to eliminate sycophancy, how to ask
| for and check primary sources, and how to use follow-up
| questions.
|
| I've been using AI for some legal issues, and it's been
| incredibly good at searching for case law and summarising
| the key implications of various statutes - much more
| efficient than web search, with direct links to the primary
| sources it finds.
|
| I'm still the one gaming out "What if...?" and "Does that
| mean..?" scenarios and making sure the answers are grounded
| in the relevant statutes, and aren't mistakes or
| hallucinations.
|
| It's not so much a prompting problem as a critical thinking
| and verbal reasoning problem.
| Jensson wrote:
| > It's not so much a prompting problem as a critical
| thinking and verbal reasoning problem.
|
| And that means you have to learn without AI to understand
| when the AI is wrong. This is just how its dangerous to
| use a calculator without knowing math since you wont spot
| when you entered things wrongly etc.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| Learning those prompting skills was very useful for you,
| but in the context of schools it's a lot more difficult
| to make the investment worth it.
|
| Schools are slow, by the time the teachers get around to
| teaching the sophisticated techniques you use today,
| those techniques will be obsolete, the new AI models will
| require completely different style of prompts.
|
| As for critical thinking and reasoning, those are even
| harder to teach. How can teachers teach what they don't
| know?
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| It would probably be useful to learn how the models work
| under the hood - particularly about high dimensional vector
| spaces - as a counter to magical thought. But I doubt
| that's what is meant.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| It's not FOMO. The line level people actually educating the
| children don't give a crap about the technology. They will
| generally make the best of whatever resources they have and
| procure wisely. Like everything else in government it's an
| administrative racket and all the suppliers fan the flames
| because they make money. Ain't no different than how your
| local building or environmental inspector finds himself
| screwing people doing nothing wrong and approving absurd
| stuff because that's what the rules big business ghost wrote
| and paid to have the government adopt say he must do.
|
| Kids are using crappy subscription education services for
| homework and doing all their reading on screens (and
| educators are toiling away to work with these systems)
| because the people who make money off the services and
| screens paid to have the incentives distorted such that
| buying their products is the least shitty option.
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| I don't think they need to learn 'AI workflows' (whatever
| that means). But I think it makes sense to use the LLM's as a
| resource.
|
| I've used them when studying new languages (human languages
| not programming languages) and ML algorithms and they've been
| really useful.
|
| Learning to check the citations it gives you is a useful
| skill too. I wish many adults were more sceptical about the
| things they are told.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It's true that you can use LLMs as a learning resource and
| to unblock you. But students just aren't. They are using
| them as a way to avoid thinking, avoid research, and just
| spit out an answer they can paste in to their homework.
| jjgreen wrote:
| They should at least require handwritten work, the kids
| will still be AI-stupid but will at least be able to
| write.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| You remember better when you write, too.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I assume "AI workflows" means knowing how to split up a
| task to create a chain of agents that can complete a
| specific task reliably.
|
| A bit like software development.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| The problem is that the task you've defined "split up a
| task to create a chain of agents" has changed
| dramatically in just the last six months, nevermind the
| last two years.
|
| You're wasting effort and teaching an obsolete technology
| if you try to make primary/secondary education too
| topical. Students can learn how to decompose a task and
| how to think critically without ever touching a Large
| Language Model.
| ontouchstart wrote:
| AI "workflows" share the same addictive characteristics of
| web surfing online virtual media, which can be counter
| productive. In this regard, we do need some serious learning
| at all the levels in the workplace. Otherwise we will become
| addicted to the slot machines.
|
| Addiction is a much harder problem than distraction.
| doikor wrote:
| > I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'.
|
| This would be just the modern version of "Computer class"
| back in the day when we learned to use word, excel, etc. Just
| another tool among others that is helpful to learn but should
| be limited to that specific class.
|
| Though actual sad thing learning from friends with kids is
| that the modern "computer class" does not actually teach kids
| to use computers much these days.
| AdamN wrote:
| Yeah I'd be happier if they learned how an Apollo computer
| worked (even though it has virtually no relevance) than how
| to use Excel.
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| This reminds me of Harvey Cragon's intro to computer
| architecture textbook...
|
| When it introduces Harvard vs. Von Neumann architectures,
| it doesn't invent some dumb RISC computer to illustrate
| the difference... No... it makes you learn the actual von
| Neumann machine! Also Conrad Zuse Z machine.
|
| Cragon's argument is that students will not learn the
| concept of engineering trade-offs, if presented with a
| clean "textbook" architecture.
|
| I hated MIX for various reasons, it's sort of in-between
| simple and kludgy.
|
| [0] Cragon was professor at University of Texas Austin ca
| 1980. Also the architect of TI's ASC in the 1960s.
| logicchains wrote:
| >I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'.
|
| Eventually everything that can be learned from a book will be
| done much better by machines, so for humans to have any
| chance of being employable they'll need to develop the soft
| skill of working with intelligent machines.
| randcraw wrote:
| Just as "there is no royal road to mathematics", no AI can
| do your learning for you. The need for memorization of
| essential math identities (like multiplication tables and
| use of fractions) or rules of grammar (like verb
| conjugation or use of anaphora) will never be enhanced by
| AI. There is an essential role for good old fashioned rote
| learning that can't be avoided. To pretend AI will not
| impede that learning is a fool's errand, literally.
| graemep wrote:
| I do not see the point of either of your examples of rote
| learning. What do you lose if you do not know the? You
| will pick up enough of multiplication tables through
| doing maths, native speakers of a language will conjugate
| correctly without memorising (you do need to do it if
| learning foreign languages). Anaphora is a technique
| which cannot really be rote learned - and most people to
| try to use it do so badly and just sound repetitive.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > You will pick up enough of multiplication tables
| through doing maths
|
| You will not do maths casually until you have memorized
| enough multiplication to make it not torture. You will
| not _pick up_ multiplication from using a calculator any
| more than you will pick up programming from using a
| computer.
|
| > native speakers of a language will conjugate correctly
| without memorising
|
| They do not. They _have memorized_ , through massive,
| constant, and forced practice, and now they conjugate
| correctly. The alternative of consulting a computer every
| time they need to speak is not a realistic one.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If AI is still too stupid to show people how to work with
| it, and to notice their lacks and anticipate their needs,
| it can't have become that indispensably useful.
|
| The entire point of AI is to accommodate the user. AI
| doesn't do anything that people can't do, is worse at most
| of those things, but is a lot faster at some of them
| (basically looking up things.) The point of AI is natural
| language UI.
|
| Teaching people how to use AI is just teaching people
| enough about the world to give them something to ask AI
| for.
| 3yr-i-frew-up wrote:
| Luddite move.
|
| Buddy AI is here to stay. You remind me of my 2nd grade
| teacher who said 'we wont have calculators in our pockets'.
| AdamN wrote:
| AI is important but we don't know what skills will be
| relevant in 10+ years to harness AI (I can't imagine prompt
| engineering is much the same). Anyway, would a typical
| teacher be ahead of the curve on what pedagogical tack to
| take here even if it was appropriate?
|
| The best thing to do is to set the kids up to learn the
| most important thing - which is how to teach oneself. If a
| kid can read about something, and then understand what was
| important from the reading, and then write about it, and
| then know where to go next they will be well served in the
| AI world.
| randcraw wrote:
| And s/he was right. Most students who were brought up with
| calculators in math class cannot do basic math without one
| today. When shopping in groceries, they have no idea if one
| product costs more than another by weight. They're easy to
| bamboozle with the simplest misrepresentations of numbers.
| Is one choice of product really better than another,
| fractionally, or corrected for a shifted baseline? They
| don't know and can't use basic algebra to find out.
|
| This is bad -- an F grade for the education system that let
| them slide by without learning an essential skill. The
| chinese aren't this lazy. And if we persist in not learning
| this, America's future will regress to us asking them, "Do
| you want fries with that?"
| graemep wrote:
| That is poor teaching. My kids were almost always allowed
| calculators (always after the age of 8 or 9) and they can
| do all that and a lot more (my older daughter is an
| electronics engineer, in R & D).
|
| For one thing you do not need to do much arithmetic to do
| algebra, for another estimating and getting a feel for
| numbers is not the same skill as learning a bunch of
| arithmetic techniques. No one is going to do long
| division while shopping.
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| Um... there's always exceptions.
|
| I can keep enough digits in my working memory to do long
| division in the grocery aisle.
|
| I also compulsively factor numbers on license plates..
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| AI is here to stay. But learning to copy-paste homework
| into a chatbot is not really a skill one needs to learn.
| willio58 wrote:
| Had a buddy who works at a prestigious university teaching
| film history tell me their big boss is basically forcing all
| classes including his ones on film history to incorporate AI
| education in some way. So silly.
| kzrdude wrote:
| About "all the way up to high school", what about the rest? I'm
| in the camp that it's better for all people, regardless of age
| actually.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Well in university you are typically an adult and so what
| your parents think about the study material isn't a great
| concern, except for the case they are a subject matter
| expert.
| brabel wrote:
| Most university students still behave like kids. I don't
| think you can expect under-20 students to behave as adults,
| honestly. I went to university again around 30 . And my
| wife teaches first year students. Maybe I am just old now
| but those students are just kids and behave like large
| children.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Transitioning to adulthood but there is still a long way to
| go for most.
| supersaw wrote:
| The same thing is happening in Norway now too. The general
| attitudes have shifted quite a lot in the last few years. In
| recent months the Department of Education has committed to
| reducing screen usage across the board, but particularly in
| grades 1 to 4.
|
| https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/endrer-skolehverdagen-...
| [link in Norwegian, no English source available]
| graemep wrote:
| "screens" can be great for research and there is a lot you can
| learn online.
|
| The main problem mentioned in the article you link to seem to
| be distraction from what they were supposed to be doing.
|
| Distraction is not always bad and kids can learn a lot by being
| distracted by something that catches their interest. it depends
| on the approach and its more of a problem following a fixed
| curriculum in a classroom. Probably more of a problem for
| uninterested or younger children.
|
| I think video can be a big problem, particularly given the
| tendency of sites to try to keep you there.
| teekert wrote:
| Well, the school of our kids blocks a lot of urls. Now they
| play the games via some url that goes like
| https://unblocked.something.something. These kids are not
| crazy.
| jasonmp85 wrote:
| This is written with what feels like the peak understanding
| of my kid's school's IT department: "well, they're just so
| smart, we can't find any way of stopping them!"
|
| An allowlist might be a good place to start.
| mentalgear wrote:
| ~20 years later on all the "Digitalisation of Schools" brought
| us is waning attention spans for children but billions of sells
| to Big Tech for software, and e-devices that after a few years
| become electronic waste to be shipped to a poor country
| stripped for rare earths and finally ending in landfills in
| Africa or Asia to poison the ground water.
| gambiting wrote:
| But think of all the shareholder value that was created,
| surely that makes it worth it /s
| zigman1 wrote:
| That's because our idea of "Digitalisation of Schools" is
| putting a textbook into pdf form, let student use a computer
| to open it and call it digitalisation.
|
| I am somehow involved in this field and am yet to see an
| actual paradigm shift anywhere in Europe. Going back to books
| just mean that we will continue using old methods, because
| those same old methods moved onto screen didn't bring
| improvements we though they would as we labeled them
| digitalisation
| rimliu wrote:
| if you need to "learn AI" - your AI sucks.
| KurSix wrote:
| It's clear that there's growing recognition of the drawbacks of
| too much screen time
| szmarczak wrote:
| > The overall consensus among parents is that books are way
| better than screens for kids
|
| Any scientific backing that _screens_ are at fault? I don 't
| think so. E-ink tablets do exist. When I'm having children, I'm
| buying them a remarkable with all the books scanned. Sure, they
| still need physical sheets of paper and a pen, but they don't
| have to carry 2-3 kgs of literature.
|
| The major reason against digital literature is that it's free,
| book authors wouldn't get paid and books wouldn't get sold
| (Wikipedia / OpenStax / pirated books). Money. It's always been
| about money.
| SSLy wrote:
| remarkable also, as the name implies, can be used as a
| notebook ;-)
| szmarczak wrote:
| Yes, but you aren't going to give your teacher a remarkable
| to take home. Hence a sheet of paper comes in handy :)
| darkwater wrote:
| It's not that simple, at all. Any kind of electronic device
| adds a complexity that many HNers tend to underestimate.
| Giving an e-ink device would probably be the best approach
| but you have to manage them at scale, and I don't think there
| is any solution out of the box right now. But to give a
| general computing device like an iPad or a Chromebook to
| teenagers was going to end like this from day 0.
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| See Hana Goldin, MLIS: What Scrolling Did to Reading.
|
| Lots to think about there.
|
| https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-
| scro...
| duskdozer wrote:
| >Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And
| personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their
| studies. Learning AI should be its own subject
|
| What? Why? And why "naturally" as if this is an entirely
| uncontroversial statement?
| something765478 wrote:
| Absolutely. When I was in college, I had to stop using my
| laptop to take notes, as I would just always end up scrolling
| reddit for half the class. I switched to pen and paper, and
| while I almost never ended up looking at my notes, just the
| fact of manually writing them down helped me remember them.
| eviks wrote:
| > You cannot open a new tab to Youtube in a book
|
| If such a basic distraction in a digital device isn't fix, it
| means the experiment wasn't even tried!
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| Even with books, stuff happens, you can skip ahead a chapter,
| consult the index, follow a footnote... or put another book
| on the table.
| luqtas wrote:
| there's no evidence on scientific pedagogic literature that
| "analog ways" are better than digital when you control
| variables like "your kid being able to open a tab to watch a
| non-related Youtube video". you can't use your sample of 10
| kids to say anything, nor use poor journalism done into the
| topic, which cites single research with less than thousand
| participants and bias from the author by other scientists on
| the field
|
| no meta-analysis done into this topic could conclude anything
| beyond the digital medium being a bit more efficient on reading
| speed. and these studies do not account when comparing one way
| to the other on the plethora of ways a digital medium can
| expand knowledge (videos, gifs, images, interactive
| visualizations and so on)
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| You _assert_ a pretty strong view, on what basis? but your
| hypothesis is directionally wrong, as found in these trials:
|
| Screen readers take longer.
|
| Feis A, Lallensack A, Pallante E, Nielsen M, Demarco N,
| Vasudevan B. Reading Eye Movements Performance on iPad vs
| Print Using a Visagraph. J Eye Mov Res. 2021 Sep 14
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8557948/?utm_source.
| ..
|
| Another
|
| https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~srikur/files/HCII_reading.pdf?ut.
| ..
|
| Tangential: One study finds few significant effects of
| disruptions on just on-screen reading, no printed books.. htt
| ps://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
|
| Cited in Card Catalog , Hana Goldin, "What scrolling did to
| reading" here:
|
| https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-
| scro...
| hk__2 wrote:
| > Source: I have 10 Finnish kids
|
| Wait what?
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| This guy alone is trying to raise Finland's birth rate.
| postscapes1 wrote:
| That Source: drop of 10 kids is one of the best I have ever
| seen on the Internet. Sending respect your direction as a Dad
| of 3
| walthamstow wrote:
| On this and Video Assistant Refereeing in football/soccer, the
| Swedes seem to have just the right approach. We'll use it, but
| only if it's good, and if it isn't good any more, we'll stop. How
| simple!
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| I think it's better to use books and not have so many
| distractions in the classroom.
|
| But equally it's really helpful to be able to ask ChatGPT or
| whatever for a different explanation when you get stuck - but
| that is probably better done at home when studying the homework.
| It stops you getting frustrated and helps keep you making
| progress and in the 'flow state'.
|
| I guess a big problem for schools now will be how to get them to
| use AI to help them learn rather than simply getting it do to
| their homework so they can go and play video games or whatever. I
| know if I'd had it as a kid I would've been tempted to do the
| latter.
| nalekberov wrote:
| > But equally it's really helpful to be able to ask ChatGPT or
| whatever for a different explanation when you get stuck - but
| that is probably better done at home when studying the
| homework. It stops you getting frustrated and helps keep you
| making progress and in the 'flow state'.
|
| Yeah sure, then get a (sometimes) wrong answer with high
| confidence and believe it?
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| It's quite rare that it gives a wrong answer nowadays. Even
| more so if you ask it to use the internet etc.
|
| But yeah, it's not infallible and sometimes even when it
| gives you a source it will incorrectly summarise it, but you
| can double check the information in the source itself.
|
| It just makes it a lot easier to do quickly rather than
| having to go and find the right Wikipedia article or dig
| through lots of documentation. Just like Wikipedia and online
| docs made it easier than having to go to the library or leaf
| through a 500-page manual etc.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Only if you are asking surface level questions. There are
| also certain topics that seem to be worse than others. For
| asking about how to do things in software guis modern LLMs
| seem to have a high rate of making up features or paths to
| reach them. For asking advice in games I've seen an
| extremely high rate of hallucinations. Asking why something
| is broken in my codebase has about a 95% hallucination
| rate.
|
| If you are just asking basic science questions or phone
| reviews then its pretty reliable.
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| I've used it for languages and studying some
| reinforcement learning stuff, including examples in
| PyTorch. I haven't had many problems with it really.
|
| Once when I asked it some questions about a strategy game
| (Shadow Empire) it got them wrong, but the sources it
| cited had the correct information.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| > Only if you are asking surface level questions.
|
| I find it pretty accurate well beyond that level. How
| much of that is actually a problem in K-12 education?
| rimliu wrote:
| using AI for education is one of the worst ideas for education.
| tgv wrote:
| Why do you think children will learn anything from a remark on
| a specific problem? If it were that simple, teaching would be
| easy. (Notice that teaching smart kids _is_ easy).
|
| Much of education requires making errors until you get it right
| a few times in a row, and paying attention of the errors.
| Getting an explation of your errors is only part of that
| process. No LLM can provide the rest of it.
| artakulov wrote:
| [flagged]
| mixermachine wrote:
| Fully agree. I went to school in Germany and many of our
| textbooks were free there. Sometimes you would get a textbook
| that is already >= 10 years and out of shape but who cares?
| Especially the basic knowledge does not change often. Buying
| all these textbooks new every year feels like a scam to me as
| they are then only used for one year by the pupil.
|
| Btw when you damaged a book beyond repair, you needed to pay
| the full price. Only the exercise books needed to be bought
| freshly as they were "used up" fully after the year. Still,
| they were often seen as optional.
| Gigachad wrote:
| You could sell them after too. Now the book is the same price
| but it's a 1 year license. The platform we used was so
| restricted that it would block access the moment your network
| connection dropped.
| SSLy wrote:
| the other part nobody talks about is hauling that bloody
| fuckton of paper to between house, its bus stop, the school,
| and its bus stop either.
| dmd wrote:
| > sits on the shelf for the next kid.
|
| Maybe in a post-Soviet country they did. In my school they
| shredded them so the next class had to buy a new set.
| zigman1 wrote:
| What? Are you serious?? :o Sorry, this is the saddest
| sentence I have read in a long time.
| dmd wrote:
| Yep. A public school in NY suburbs in the early 1990s.
| zigman1 wrote:
| Well... I am sure someone made good money out of that.
|
| In Slovenia, a post-Yugoslavian country, the school
| library coordinated a textbook borrowing scheme, where
| they would own all the material and lend it to students
| each year. Parents would pay a small "subscription", so
| each year or two one subject would get new books.
| lstodd wrote:
| That's how it worked in USSR in 80s. The school supplied
| the books and they were the ones that the previous grade
| used. If they got busted beyond all repair only then
| they'd be replaced with new.
| graemep wrote:
| Why did they do that?
| dmd wrote:
| Presumably because the school district got a slice of the
| money from the publisher.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| This has been a shocking discovery for me too. The library near
| us recently said it's cheaper for them to buy a book then an
| ebook.
|
| It's absolutely insane.
| presbyterian wrote:
| It's significantly cheaper! A physical book can be loaned
| endlessly, as long as the binding holds up, and even if it
| gets damaged, it can be repaired. The contracts for ebooks at
| libraries often limit it to X number of circulations before
| the library has to pay again (this is how Overdrive/Libby
| works), or they have to pay per circulation (Hoopla). It's
| ludicrous.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Yeah that's a shitty model. We desperately need digital
| ownership rights.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments to
| HN [1]. You're welcome here, but only if you write in your own
| voice [2]. The community feels strongly about this.
|
| [1] see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079
|
| [2]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| mentalgear wrote:
| I remember that - even though Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a
| replacement to the 'heavy schoolbooks kids had to carry all day'
| - he never allowed his children to use iPads.
|
| I bet Zuckerberg doesn't allow his children to use social media.
|
| And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI
| chatbots.
|
| What does that tell us?
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| That the US and by extension the West is ruled by corrupt
| individuals that knowingly harm their fellow citizens. However,
| especially the US, few people will parent their children in a
| way that will protect and strengthen their kids. The schools,
| which gave up on success years ago, will continue to harm the
| children. The community with do nothing since they view the
| parents and the schools as the guardians of children, not
| themselves. Almost no one wants to be the childless crank that
| shows up at a PTA or school board meeting demanding that tech
| be removed from the daily lives of the children.
|
| So the kids will continue to be harmed. EdTech will get money
| because this time they will do it right. AI will lead to a new
| thoughtless generation.
| econ wrote:
| >Almost no one wants to be the childless crank that shows up
| at a PTA or school board meeting demanding that tech be
| removed from the daily lives of the children.
|
| I had never even realized.
|
| As a bonus I now also see cranks proposing to raise other
| peoples children in some kind of sweatshop calling it
| education and schools. As if that was ever the goal.
| rvz wrote:
| He (Zuckerberg) doesn't. It tells us that they know that kids
| should not be using any of this technology as it is extremely
| addictive to kids who are none the wiser.
|
| > What does that tell us?
|
| It tells us three things:
|
| 1. Do not give a child access to iPads, social media or ChatGPT
| until they are old enough and are aware of their addictive
| nature.
|
| 2. Get them to read books as an alternative.
|
| 3. Being unable to restrict access to iPhones, ChatGPT to a
| child is a parenting skill issue and not the responsibility of
| a government to impose global parental controls on everyone for
| the purpose of surveillance.
| leksak wrote:
| 3. When your net worth is measured in billions you have other
| opportunities in your parenting not necessarily afforded
| equally to every other parental unit.
| microtonal wrote:
| I was nodding along until the third point. As a parent it can
| be _really hard_ to deny your kids to smartphone /tablets
| when other parents don't care and all their friends play
| Roblox, use WhatsApp to communicate, or watch YouTube.
|
| Your kid will be the odd one out, missing some shared
| culture, left out of conversation or meetups they arrange in
| IM, etc.
|
| The government should absolutely forbid social media and
| addictive games to kids under 16, otherwise it's _very_ hard
| as a parent to escape these little addiction machines and you
| can only try to limit damage.
|
| Of course, we have to find a way that is not damaging privacy
| at the same time.
|
| (If you don't have kids or have kids that are under ~10, you
| do probably not know what the pressure is like... yet.)
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Part of being a parent is saying no when your children
| pester you for something you know is bad for them.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Well how do you tell your kid "no" when he asks for
| candy, when he can get as much as he wants at friend's
| houses, school, the library, or basically anywhere
| outside your house?
|
| Edit: better exaple would be cigarettes, since that's
| something we as a society recognize is bad for kids and
| generally require proof of age if there is any doubt.
| Imagine if all your kid's friends smoked, and there were
| cigarette vending machines at school, and all you could
| do was say "no."
| microtonal wrote:
| Did you read my comment? The issue is not being able to
| say 'no'. The issue is basically Sophie's choice: it's
| saying 'no' but then your kind misses out on a lot of
| social interactions with their peers vs. saying 'yes',
| but then your kid has a risk of getting addicted to this
| crap.
|
| Missing out on social interactions weighs heavily on kids
| too.
|
| Making everything harder is that even primary schools
| sometimes allow kids to play kids to play Roblox or use
| ChatGPT. For parents it's an uphill battle if even their
| role models think it's fine to play addictive games or
| make Tik Tok videos. We picked plenty of battles of not
| allowing videos of our kid to be uploaded to
| Youtube/Facebook, etc., luckily there are consent forms
| now, but you have to be constantly vigilant, because
| sometimes the consent forms are ignored or you get
| e-mails saying 'if you object, react by the end of the
| day'. If they play at friend's houses, they typically
| have access to the same games as well. Do you also want
| to say 'no' to playing at other kids' homes?
|
| It has been shown scientifically that social media,
| certain games, etc. are bad and nearly as addictive as
| heroin. Maybe it's time to make a law to forbid use by
| kids, just like we have laws that you cannot sell
| alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes to kids?
|
| And again, we should find a privacy-preserving way to do
| it.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Missing out on social pathology is a good thing, not a
| bad thing. You should absolutely teach your kids to defy
| any peers or self-proclaimed authority figures who are
| expecting them to engage with that crap. It's called
| having healthy boundaries.
| duskdozer wrote:
| You've fallen for the false framing. "companies have free
| reign to engineer as much addiction as they want" and
| "government enacts universal age verification surveillance"
| are not the only two options.
| mentalgear wrote:
| > And that much of Silicon Valley's leadership (and the world's
| rich, for that matter) send their own kids to Montessori,
| Steiner, and other educational institutions that prefer pencil
| and paper to digital tablet, conversations to smartphones,
| modeling clay and outdoor imagineering to online gaming.
|
| > In their book, 'Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose
| How Technology Overuse is Making Our Kids Dumber,' educators
| Joe Clement and Matt Miles write: "It's interesting to think
| that in a modern public school, where kids are being required
| to use electronic devices like iPads, Steve Jobs's kids would
| be some of the only kids opted out."
|
| "The Battle for Your Kids' Hearts and Minds"
| https://kidzu.co/parent-perspective/the-battle-for-your-kids...
| Raed667 wrote:
| you're assuming zuck or jobs kids have anything resembling
| "normal" children lives
| shevy-java wrote:
| The key message that poster before tried to convey was that
| they themselves do not believe into their own products, not
| that rich kids are privileged royal kings today. This ties
| into e. g. Facebook trying to addict people into using it -
| infinite scrolling as an example. The latter can be quite a
| problem on youtube or people using smartphones while riding
| in a subway, jumping from pointless video to pointless video
| - this is quite addictive.
| roysting wrote:
| The telescreens are for you, not for them.
|
| On another totally unrelated note, this guy [1] that is not at
| all connected to the Epstein class whatsoever (he is) and is
| only an advisor to the leader of some some small little
| organization called the world economic forum says you and your
| children should be kept "happy" with drugs and video games.
|
| Skip to the very end for the statement or listen to the whole
| little clip to hear how the demigods think about you and your
| children "worthless" children.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/QkYWwWAXgKI
| loa_in_ wrote:
| The kids you mention likely have multiple VR, AR and other
| gadget setups in their own home. Too much of a good thing is
| just that.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| I think you are right, and your "bet" about Zuckerberg checks
| out, at least according to media reports about his family.
| Still, asking someone to draw an inference based on three
| pieces of evidence, of which two are a bet and an assumption,
| seems hasty.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| For a random individual plucked out of general population,
| you would be correct. Three is hardly anything. However, for
| individuals that effectively determine what actual average is
| to a population ( by shaping tech that shapes said population
| at the very least ), it does not seem hasty. It may be a
| proxy, but it is not hasty.
| al_borland wrote:
| It seems wise to be wary of a salesman who won't let his
| family use the product they sell. This seems very common in
| the modern tech industry.
| bombcar wrote:
| If I were a billionaire I'd have servants who would use
| social media _for_ my servants, to be fair.
|
| Why have social media when you can have Jeeves "do it" for
| you?
| al_borland wrote:
| Unless you're a public figure who is posting as part of
| your "brand"... why use it at all at that point?
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| > And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use
| AI chatbots.
|
| I doubt that, but the others seem reasonable
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Yeah Sam Altman's kids will use chatbots but here's the
| difference, your kids no matter the amount of money you're
| willing to spend will never ever get to use the chatbots Sam
| Altman's kids will have access to to build their legacy.
| gibolt wrote:
| Everyone has access to the same models. Even the best
| internal builds are only a month away from public access.
|
| The ones a year from now from all companies will likely be
| better than the best today.
| brookst wrote:
| Are Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Altman generally seen as experts in
| childhood development and education?
| hananova wrote:
| No but they are experts in engineering their garbage to cause
| maximum damage.
| compounding_it wrote:
| Engineering or marketing ? I doubt Zuckerberg or Altman
| have much involvement in engineering after their products
| took off. After a certain point they were no longer
| engineers of their products.
| jumpkick wrote:
| This seems to be a distinction without a difference. The
| buck stops with them.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| That is worse.
|
| _" The product is disgusting, but there's nothing I can
| do; I'm only the CEO"_
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| They absolutely decide whether to have people employed in
| moderation or safety. Or what gets done with what those
| teams learn.
| Argonaut998 wrote:
| Do they need to be? If I was a billionaire surrounded by the
| most educated and competent people in the world I wouldn't
| even spare a thought for the "Whole words are better than
| phonics" crowd.
| brookst wrote:
| So it's kind of an appeal to authority, without any
| evidence of authority?
|
| I'd be super interested in the panels of experts that Jobs,
| Zuckerberg, and Altman (assuming GGP's "asssumption" is
| correct) convened when making these decisions.
|
| Absent that, this isn't any more persuasive than saying
| that Coca Cola is good for infants because I assume Coke
| execs feed it to theirs.
| Argonaut998 wrote:
| You are making an argument from authority too though.
|
| Even ignoring my point, these people have more insight
| than anyone into their own products and their
| harmful/beneficial nature.
| brookst wrote:
| No, I am making no such argument.
|
| I am saying that tech execs have no special knowledge,
| and their actions should not be used to inform one's own
| opinions or social policy on the topic.
|
| There IS tons of data in this area. Please, do yourself a
| favor and read it (pay attention to the population of
| studies --- many use adults in their 30's or older as
| proxies for children).
|
| You can absolutely find real data supporting your
| position. And it will be more persuasive (albeit less
| dramatic) than imagining what Altman probably does.
| Eldt wrote:
| They quite literally have insider knowledge that others
| wouldn't
| brookst wrote:
| You think Jobs had insider data in the childhood
| development impact of iPads right when they were
| released?
| bell-cot wrote:
| No - but they could hire full-time panels of such experts,
| and never miss the money.
|
| More to the point - if the CEO of DogFoodCo won't let his own
| family pets eat any of his company's flagship products, then
| _maybe_ smart dog owners should follow his example?
| Koshkin wrote:
| Parents do not have to be "experts in chilhood development"
| to know what is best for their children. Especially experts
| in their fields like the manufacturing of alcohol, guns or
| other products universallly considered dangerous.
| brookst wrote:
| So, if parents can rely on a a century of more of science
| showing the negative impacts of guns, tobacco, and alcohol
| on children... they can rely on vibes and politicians for
| evidence of harm from screens?
|
| I'm not even arguing with you. I'm just disappointed in how
| quickly so many on HN throw out all pretense of being
| interested in data as soon as a personal hot button issue
| comes up. It's human nature I guess, but still depressing.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Screens are harmful for adults too. Everyone knows this
| through the personal experience of doomscrolling hours of
| one's own life away. Why would they be any better for
| children?
|
| Or do you imagine that there's a study out there that
| will reveal that arguing on Twitter with someone called
| Catturd2 is good for your mental health?
| jerf wrote:
| The existence of science does not obligate us to either
| receive a double-blind study of massive statistical
| significance on the exact question we're thinking about
| or to throw our hands up in total ignorance and sit in a
| corner crying about the lack of a scientific study.
|
| It is perfectly rational to rely on experience for what
| screens do to children when that's all we have. You
| operate on that standard all the time. I know that,
| because you have no choice. There are plenty of choices
| you must make without a "data" to back you up on.
|
| Moreover, there is plenty of data on this topic and if
| there is any study out there that even _remotely_
| supports the idea that it 's all just hunky-dory for kids
| to be exposed to arbitrary amounts of "screen time" and
| parents are just silly for being worried about what it
| may be doing to their children, I sure haven't seen it go
| by. (I don't love the vagueness of the term "screen time"
| but for this discussion it'll do... anyone who wants to
| complain about it in a reply be my guest but be aware I
| don't really like it either.)
|
| "Politicians" didn't even begin to enter into my
| decisions and I doubt it did for very many people either.
| This is one of the cases where the politicians are just
| jumping in front of an existing parade and claiming to be
| the leaders. But they aren't, and the parade isn't
| following them.
| mekoka wrote:
| You feel pain? Doctor says it's probably in your head
| because statistically you shouldn't. -- Based on
| countless true stories.
|
| Data is map, not terrain. It can explain some of the
| quantifiable world, not all of it. Common sense can also
| fill some of the gaps, some of the time. And there
| remains plenty still that's too entropic for our grasp.
| Waiting for data to speak is not always the best move.
| Heck, it might even sometimes be the worst. It seems this
| is a lesson we collectively keep forgetting over and
| over, despite the endless list of data-backed "facts"
| that, in hindsight, it turns out we were wrong or short-
| sighted about. Apparently, that too is human nature.
| graemep wrote:
| You need science to realise that guns are a danger to
| kids?
| brookst wrote:
| No, but I believe that science and quantifying the
| specific danger leads to better policies than going on
| vibes. For instance, laws to require safe storage are
| based on data quantifying reductions in harm to children
| [1]
|
| Data beats vibes, even when vibes are qualitatively
| correct. I'm surprised this is surprising.
|
| 1. https://journalistsresource.org/health/child-access-
| preventi...
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| No need for the leading question/bait when you know what
| they're saying. No one said they're experts on childhood
| development, they're saying "it's telling they won't even let
| their kids use these services when they swear it's safe for
| our kids to do so."
| abenga wrote:
| They are experts in their products.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No, they employ those.
|
| In Zuck's case especially, in order to use what we know about
| childhood development and education to get kids addicted
| early.
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| There is the Stanford Persuasion Lab study on infinite
| scroll... rather than take it as a cautionary finding, tech
| has embraced the infinite scroll. Because incentives.
| functional_dev wrote:
| exactly, makes me think... if person who makes the bread does
| not feed his own family, something is wrong
| renewiltord wrote:
| Also a good reason for why one shouldn't have one's child
| raised through the policies of people who don't want kids. If
| they don't have any skin in the game...
| raverbashing wrote:
| TBH the problem is not the iPad here.
|
| An offline iPad with a limited set of educational apps/books
| would be a good classroom aid
|
| Of course, an iPad without those limits is bad
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| Are you certain about that being "good"?
| dagss wrote:
| It is not just about what you can access.
|
| The biggest problem is you get conditioned to instant and
| constant dopamine hits, which works directly against a lot of
| the things one is supposed to learn in school.
|
| Kids learn the A-Z in record speed in 1st grade. But they
| don't learn to concentrate or that learning things can
| sometimes be challenging and the value of perseverance and
| that understanding eventually comes.
|
| So in later grades they pay for learning the A-Z too fast
| through the iPad. Because they didn't learn how to learn.
|
| The net effect in Norwegian classrooms over past 5 years of
| iPad education seems to be negative and it is not about what
| kids are exposed to. It is about not learning to concentrate.
| noosphr wrote:
| That we shouldn't take child rearing advice from the man who
| killed himself with fruit juice.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| It tells us nothing. People act like this is some big hypocrisy
| or revelation. First of all, Jobs DID allow his children to use
| iPads, but it was limited. People take a single quote from the
| Isaacson biography out of context, assuming that he never let
| his children have access to iPads at all, forever. Other
| interviews he gave talked about limiting access - like ALL
| families should do.
|
| Jobs was literally just parenting. Limiting screen time is
| something all parents should do. We also limit access to sugary
| foods and other things that can be damaging in excess. Calling
| tech executives hypocrites for having common sense parenting
| limits is not really a dunk.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > We also limit access to sugary foods and other things that
| can be damaging in excess.
|
| Maybe you do, but not everybody does. 19.7% of American kids
| are obese. The hypocrisy is that tech executives promote and
| lobby for excessive use of their products (even manufacturing
| addiction), but know better for their kids.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Yup - intentionally creating something that you _know_
| harms others for profit. Tech is looking more and more like
| tobacco companies every day.
| zigman1 wrote:
| Bingo! I think in 50 years time, we will laugh at
| advertisements and fake addiction research these
| companies are funding the same way we are now laughing at
| how bizarre the tobacco propaganda once was
| dominotw wrote:
| atlest buffet himself drank 6 cans of coke per day being a
| big investor in coke.
| hbn wrote:
| Not to mention the iPad was only on the market for a year and
| a half before Jobs passed, in which there was no time for
| real educational software with traction to make it into
| schools.
|
| He was talking about a future he was aiming for. I know it's
| hard to remember the tech optimism we still had heading into
| 2010, but most people still viewed things as getting better
| at that time. When Jobs announced the iPad, the iPhone had
| been on the market for 2.5 years and we basically only saw
| the conveniences of how cool it was to be able to check
| Facebook on the go with a cool futuristic touchscreen
| experience.
|
| It's really easy to see how misguided Jobs was with 15 years
| of hindsight.
| muskyFelon wrote:
| Its a luxury that affluent people have to limit these things.
| When you're at your limit after a long day of work and still
| have stuff to do at home the kid gets the phone, iPad, or
| whatever while parents do the needed to run the household.
| Wonder why obesity is such a problem for poorer families.
| Convenience.
|
| Yes, tech companies are liable for pushing this technology
| that they know to be addictive.
|
| There is no apologist revisionist history for billionaires
| that are actively making the world a worse place. People act
| like Jobs was some kind of hero. Dude was a snake. Made some
| damn good products, but you don't achieve that level of
| wealth by being a kind person.
| arjie wrote:
| > _Wonder why obesity is such a problem for poorer
| families. Convenience._
|
| Assuming this were to be the case, one would need to
| explain why this doesn't happen to men.
|
| > _Among men, the prevalence of obesity was lower in both
| the lowest (31.5%) and highest (32.6%) income groups
| compared with the middle-income group (38.5%)._
|
| And among women, one would need to explain why it doesn't
| happen to Black women.
|
| > _Among non-Hispanic black women, there was no difference
| in obesity prevalence among the income groups._
|
| It also needs to explain why no statistically significant
| result happens for Asian women
|
| > _Among women, prevalence was lower in the highest income
| group (29.7%) than in the middle (42.9%) and lowest (45.2%)
| income groups. This pattern was observed among non-Hispanic
| white, non-Hispanic Asian, and Hispanic women, but it was
| only significant for white women._
|
| Without looking deeper into the issue, the natural thing
| the income vs. obesity thing overall shows is a population
| blend issue (Simpson's paradox). It gets too tortured
| otherwise: yeah, Black women always have inconvenience,
| Asian women mostly don't have more convenient lives as they
| become richer, and White women get massively more
| convenient lives as they get wealthier. Men until 2008 got
| less convenient lives as they got wealthier and then their
| lives got neither more convenient nor less convenient but
| stayed the same.
|
| That's pretty rough number of epicycles to stick into this
| convenience angle.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6650a1.htm
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db50.htm
| graemep wrote:
| So how did people manage before we had these things?
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| bible study and alcoholism
| rfrey wrote:
| Tobacco executives probably prevented their children from
| smoking, especially as evidence emerged. That's just
| parenting.
|
| It doesn't forgive them for lobbying ferociously against any
| regulation of marketing to children.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| This meme where people liken electronics with tobacco is
| foolish. Smoking is physically harmful in any significant
| dose. Screens are perfectly fine in moderation and can even
| be beneficial when used correctly.
| mentalgear wrote:
| If the fact that these CEOs responsible for propagating
| disruptive technologies - CEOs exposed to the effects every
| day, have unprecedented insights (internal analytics) and the
| best staff around them to assess the tech's potential
| positive and negative consequences - DO NOT want to their own
| to partake in it even though advertising it to anyone else,
| then - if that tells you nothing - you are just plain
| ignorant or vested in their companies.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| a non-trivial number of HN is, in fact, literally
| (in)vested in their companies.
|
| lotta folks here with FAANG pedigrees...
| tshaddox wrote:
| Except that the supposed views held by these CEOs (iPads,
| social media, AI, etc. can be bad for kids) are also widely
| held mainstream views. That's the only reason people are
| bringing the views up here...because they already agree
| with them!
|
| There's absolutely nothing insightful about CEOs with
| "unprecedented insights" coming to the same conclusions as
| everyone else.
| shimman wrote:
| Is this the same Jobs that famously denied paternity of his
| daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, and was only forced to accept
| her as his daughter when a US federal court forced a DNA test
| on him proving she was in fact his daughter?
|
| Yeah, something tells me we shouldn't be taking advice
| regarding children from this man.
| gjadi wrote:
| Well, it does tell us something if they limit screen time
| like they limit sugar but don't limit book time.
|
| I'm sure almost no family have an upper limit on book time.
|
| Thus aiming for screens the replace books is a bad aim.
| deanc wrote:
| It's probably more nuanced than this. Would I have let my kids
| use Facebook in the height of its popularity. Absolutely. It
| was fun, engaging and user driven.
|
| Now it's just an absolute cesspit of paid content, ads and
| boomers posting in groups.
|
| I don't even think it's appropriate to call it social media
| anymore. It's barely social.
|
| Not a single friend of mine posts anything on there.
| graemep wrote:
| I am only on FB for a group I admin that is useful and helps
| people. its more like forum hosting for me.
|
| Almost all my friends have stopped posted. The only social
| thing I see from most people is wishing people happy
| birthday.
| KurSix wrote:
| It's also a reminder that there's often a gap between what
| technology companies market to the masses and what the people
| behind those technologies actually endorse for their families
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| You are assuming they all act as wise and with the foresight of
| Jobs.
|
| Jobs was a products guy that had an intricate understanding on
| the relation of people and technology. The others are just
| finance bro's dressed up in tech clothes.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a replacement to the 'heavy
| schoolbooks kids had to carry all day'
|
| This is largely an American phenomenon. If you visit some other
| countries, students don't walk around all day saddled with what
| look like Medieval tomes in backpacks that come comically close
| to dwarfing the student. There is no reason for them to be so
| thick, so heavy, so expensive, hardcover, or even loaned. And
| there is no reason to lug them around all day either.
|
| Frankly, teachers should be relying more on delivering material
| in class without a textbook.
| duskdozer wrote:
| In many places it's the teachers who move around all day
| while the students remain.
| bko wrote:
| I agree that we shouldn't have iPads and similar electronics in
| the classroom. But I would advise into reading too much into
| the societal beliefs of inventors and how their tech will play
| out.
|
| Consider Lee de Forest, one of the early pioneers of radio. He
| expected radio to act almost like a moral and intellectual
| uplifter for society. He thought people would use it to
| essentially listen to religious sermons and educational
| lectures.
| bombcar wrote:
| To be fair to the Forest, both of those did and do occur! But
| they were vastly overwhelmed by "entertainment" - similar to
| the printing press and other mass-media opportunities.
|
| The Internet allows you to get every classical work of
| philosophy or theology online immediately both in the
| original language or in translation. You can find videos
| discussion many of them in-depth. Someone in Nepal with an
| Internet connection can get an education that would rival the
| best universities of the 1800s, if they want.
|
| Or you can watch cat videos.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > The Internet allows you to get every classical work of
| philosophy or theology online immediately both in the
| original language or in translation.
|
| LLMs also do quite well at "decoding" the obscure language
| of these classic works and rephrasing it in more
| contemporary terms. Even a small local LLM will typically
| do a good enough job of this, though more world knowledge
| (with a bigger model) is always preferable.
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| No, they don't.
|
| I'm close-reading Aristotle in a Meetup group where we
| compare many translations and indulge the controversies
| in translating the Greek.
|
| When I've tried to get LLMs to bear on a topic, they
| can't even relate to the concept I'm looking at, instead
| generating a summary of the easiest parts. LLM is
| basically a beginner student.
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| Um... you'd think so... but the Perseus catalog is
| notoriously incomplete. They don't have all the key works
| of Aristotle in Greek.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| That the elite is poisoning the masses.
| bombcar wrote:
| Zucchini also thinks spending $80 billion on a failed metaverse
| is a good bet, so maybe they're not the experts of everything.
| mcphage wrote:
| How much of that was actual spending--and if so, _where did
| the money end up?_ --and how much of that was just fraud?
| lynx97 wrote:
| It tells us that you seem to assume a lot.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Yep, that's why it won't help. The rest of the time at home,
| they will stick to the screen.
| whizzter wrote:
| As troublesome digital tools are in practice, the stories of
| "tech execs refusing digital tools for their kids" is a trope
| often promoted/created by kindly put fringe actors.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 2 of your 3 pieces of evidence are your guesses ("I bet", "I
| assume").
|
| That tells us more about you than about tech CEOs.
| rvz wrote:
| Good.
|
| 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.
| macNchz wrote:
| It's kind of baffling to me that laptops in classrooms took off
| the way they did, as it seemed like a distraction machine to me
| even 25+ years ago, as a kid myself! My school got some carts of
| laptops that would move from classroom to classroom in ~2000--
| they were heavily used for flash games and other nonsense, and
| were strictly worse for that than in the dedicated computer lab
| classroom, where all of the monitors faced into the center of the
| room where the teacher could see them.
|
| When I got to college a few years later I'd sit in the back of
| classrooms and see that a majority of students who'd brought a
| laptop (ostensibly for notes) were consistently distracted and
| doing something else, be it games or StumbleUpon. I can only
| imagine these decisions were made by groups of adults sitting
| around conference rooms, each staring at their own laptop and
| paying 20% attention to the meeting at hand.
| greenbit wrote:
| Having observed a fair amount of computer based primary school,
| it seems to me anyway that the biggest problem is that kids just
| can't focus properly that way. Even if the machine is locked down
| to prevent open internet access, it's just too easy for them to
| become distracted by the medium itself. Books, pencils and paper
| may not be flashy, but isn't that actually desirable, in this
| context?
| argee wrote:
| If you open any of my middle school notebooks you'll find
| around 5-10x more doodles than notes, by surface area.
| bombcar wrote:
| It could be that the inability to doodle is actually cramping
| current students - it might be important to management of
| boredom?
|
| Digital doodling should be possible; I know I've used the
| zoom annotation feature to doodle during meetings.
| amonith wrote:
| Yup. As a kid I could "entertain" (distract is the better word)
| myself by "drawing shapes" with the cursor, highlighting random
| things, switching between random cells in Excel, or just
| like... browsing through the system without any plan or reason.
| Procrastination is hell of a drug.
|
| I'm so lucky I didn't have this in the classroom.
| andrepd wrote:
| To be fair, I did entertain myself by drawing comics on my
| notebook or playing with my pencil and rubber as if they were
| toy cars.
| amonith wrote:
| I drew a lot of doodles and did things like that as well,
| but I think that they're less visually stimulating and
| simply "slower" so there's still some brain capacity left
| for learning.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Congratulations, you were exercising your literacy and art
| skills.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Even doodling on the margin can be distracting. Or doing little
| tricks with the pencil. But these don't distract the verbal
| part of the brain as much perhaps.
| SSLy wrote:
| I was on the tail end of no-screen schools, and even then I
| could find anything to distract myself with, daydreaming if
| necessary. But mostly doodling the gutters.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| It's arguably LESS distracting, since you can lock down the
| available actions on a Chromebook, for example, while I was
| doodling away in my notebooks as a 90's kid. I don't think you
| can really make sweeping statements about which is better
| overall.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| People are saying, oh i used to doodle, blah blah. But doodling
| in the margins is very HELPFUL for the rest of your brain to
| focus and memorize what is happening in the lecture.
| strokirk wrote:
| Sounds interesting! Any good sources on that subject? I find
| results pointing both against it and for it, but am not a
| psychologist.
| goldylochness wrote:
| absolutely the right move, use books for learning. i would still
| use computers for building ie coding, but absolutely not
| entertainment, not "learning to use microsoft word"
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > Basic skills -- especially reading, writing, and numeracy --
| must be firmly established first, physical textbooks are often
| better suited for that purpose.
|
| Reading and writing, maybe, but numeracy? With a computer, you
| can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the
| math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your
| teacher.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Tbh the same applies to a lot of subjects if you discuss them
| with a sufficiently good LLM. (Socratic method)
| eimrine wrote:
| LLM is fundamentally not prone to the Socratic method.
| Socratic method requires both parts to learn something while
| the discourse. LLM will forget some shit often.
| nalekberov wrote:
| > With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately
| see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook,
| you have to wait for your teacher.
|
| Where is this rush for instant feedback coming from?
| nimonian wrote:
| I still believe looking up the answer in the back of the book
| is completely fine. It creates a moment of tension. It invites
| you to justify in your own head that the answer is right before
| checking. The cognitive dissonance when you see your answer is
| wrong and really have to challenge yourself, or ask your
| neighbour, to see why - is all really valuable.
|
| I just don't think "instant feedback" is as important as we
| think in mathematics education, and might even rob us of
| moments to practice mathematical behaviours like justifying,
| communicating and accommodating. Slow feedback does have
| benefits.
|
| I am a tech enthusiast to put it mildly. I also taught maths in
| schools from roughly 2010 to 2020 so saw the iPad/app
| revolution in my classrooms. Anecdotally, I think it made my
| lessons and my students worse. Books, paper and each other are
| the best tools (in my very personal opinion).
| zigman1 wrote:
| The problem with the back-of-the-book is that once you answer
| the same exercise few times, you remember what the result is
| and you work on memory not on skill. At least this is
| something i struggled with.
|
| Digitalization should be able to provide you with drastically
| larger number of exercises to practice, and if possible
| should also provide you with the exercise that is at the
| right level for you
| erfgh wrote:
| There are books with written solutions.
| lawn wrote:
| If you aren't sure your answer is correct then you're more
| likely to redo the problem or try to confirm it with fuzzier
| calculations. This is difficult and is great exercise.
|
| Learning math isn't just about being correct. It's about doing
| the motions and learning how to problem solve.
|
| Using the computer the way you suggest will make you lazy as
| you won't learn to do these hard things.
| eigenspace wrote:
| Is the instant feedback actually beneficial for learning
| though?
|
| I always found that rumination, doubt, and consideration took
| time and space.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Books have some advantages. I find it easier to concentrate when
| reading a hardcopy book.
|
| Nonetheless I myself transitioned primarily towards a digital-
| only style of learning. It also has advantages, such as
| convenience.
| abyssin wrote:
| A few years ago I went back to school. Hoping to manage some sort
| of Internet addiction, I bought a reMarkable 1 tablet. It did
| help me, but in retrospect I should've bought a black and white
| laser printer and a few boxes of paper. The ergonomy of paper is
| excellent after all, especially for a brain like mine that grew
| up without computers.
|
| 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.
| snkline wrote:
| I really like the reMarkable tablets, but they are still not
| quite the replacement for a paper notebook that I would like. I
| think the main problem is that the refresh-rate/software is
| slow enough that trying to "page through your notebook" to find
| specific notes is a grueling experience. The alternative is to
| just make lots of one page notes, but things still become
| difficult to find (not to mention you add a lot of stress
| coming up with good names for stuff...)
| brookst wrote:
| It's sad to see HN take this at face value and parrot the
| "screens bad" view without understanding it.
|
| I dug deep into this a while ago, starting with the "how legit is
| the science" question because I wondered if the studies had
| looked at any tradeoffs (e.g. did laptop use improve programming
| skills in ways paper books do not?)
|
| It's a rabbit hole. I encourage folks to read up and form more
| nuanced opinions.
|
| This being HN I need to assure you that my learned skepticism
| regarding harms from screens in schools does NOT mean I want to
| ban all books in schools, strap toddlers into VR for their entire
| childhood, or put Peter Thiel in charge of all curriculums.
| Intuitively I think paper allows greater focus. But the data is
| not nearly as clear as politics-driven advocates claim.
|
| Some info:
|
| - The move back to books was a centerpiece of election policy by
| the center-right government, and is at least as much about
| conservatism as it is about science.
|
| - Actual studies in this area are mixed.
|
| - A lot is made of PISA scores, which dropped from the 2010's to
| early 2020'a (when this policy became popular). But: the scores
| started dropping before 1:1 computers were rolled out, and also
| correlated with teacher shortages and education policy changes,
| and of course COVID. I could not find any studies that controlled
| for these other factors, and the naive "test scores can be
| entirely attributed to computers" view really doesn't hold.
|
| - There was a major change in pedagogy in Swedish schools that
| predates introduction of computers and seems like a better
| explanation for lower scores [1]
|
| - One meta analysis does show a very small but stat sig decrease
| in reading comprehension for non-fiction when read from screens
| rather than books [2]
|
| - Another meta analysis found zero difference between screens and
| books for reading comprehension [3]
|
| - A third meta analysis found a tiny _and decreasing_ negative
| impact from screen use, and some evidence that the effect is
| transitional as teachers and students adapt [4]
|
| - The vast majority of studies in this area use _no children_ at
| all, only adults. There are good ethical reasons for this, but it
| is a mistake to assume that a 25 year old's reading comprehension
| from screens in 1995 is predictive of an 8 year old's in 2026.
| [5]
|
| - One of the few studies that did look specifically at children
| found that paper outperformed screens... but only in traditional
| schools. Homeschooling and lab testing did not show any
| difference between mediums [6]
|
| 1. https://www.edchoice.org/is-swedish-school-choice-
| disastrous...
|
| 2. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/screen-reading-worse-
| for-c...
|
| 3.
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15213269.2022.2...
|
| 4. https://oej.scholasticahq.com/article/125437-turning-the-
| pag...
|
| 5.
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...
|
| 6. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/0034654321998074
| tgv wrote:
| Education research is really low quality. Like so many other
| fields in social sciences, the results rarely generalize beyond
| the direct findings, and only support the hypotheses in the
| mildest way. It cannot robustly guide decision making.
|
| The fact that studies on screens vs books cannot get a
| consistent answer says enough. I checked #3 of your links, and
| the amount of bullshit is astonishing. The cited articles offer
| vague, unresearched explanations for contradictory findings, or
| point at differences in the stimuli, something which should
| obviously never have happened. After some cherry picking,
| article #3 treats the remaining studies as equal and reliable
| enough to throw in a big bag, as if that solves the problem.
|
| Think of it like this: the replication crisis in cognitive
| psychology was found trying to replicate some of the better
| studies. The average education research study is several levels
| below that. It'll have a replicability of 0.1 or worse.
| brookst wrote:
| Yep. Part of the reason is the ethical problems with
| experimenting on children.
|
| And part of the problem is that there is a ton of money to be
| made in education, so there is a lot of incentive to create
| or cherry pick data promoting one's preferred (most
| profitable) policies.
| strokirk wrote:
| Not to mention it's a topic most if not all people have an
| innate strong opinion about based on their lived
| experiences!
| fedeb95 wrote:
| computers are good learning tools for adults that learned how to
| learn with books.
| fifilura wrote:
| Buying a book made of trees is very often much more expensive
| than reading on a screen. Worldreader provides books for free for
| schools in Africa where they only need to pay for a $40 phone
| once instead of spending money on books.
|
| https://www.worldreader.org/
| rsolva wrote:
| Laptops and tables are, as it turns out, not so cheap either.
| They need to be fixed or replaced at an alarming rate, and they
| lay claim to a much larger part of a school budget than books
| ever did. That is part of the reason that we revert back to
| pen, paper and books in Norway. First for 1-4 grade, but it
| will be push further up the grades as we go, I think.
| johanneskanybal wrote:
| It sounds good on paper (pun intended) but policy strikes again,
| "Can my kid bring home her math book so we can work on the parts
| she's struggling with?" No of course not it lives in a cupboard
| at school 90% of the time might get some screen shares from it.
| kleiba wrote:
| Interesting. Where we currently live, kids carry all books back
| and forth between home and school every day in giant backpacks.
| galdauts wrote:
| Back when I went to school in Germany, we had a locker at
| school, but I just took the books I needed for assignments
| home with me. I haven't heard of schools that don't let you
| take (loaned) books home.
| elminjo wrote:
| this is a problem. we make photos of the pages. i think there
| should be always a digital option when you have a physical
| book.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| It sounds like the major issue here is the access to
| information. It's not the fault of the medium but rather the
| IP rights around it. Books are expensive because the text
| book industry needs their cut. Schools need to protect the
| expensive books because children can and will impulsively
| throw one off a bridge on their walk home.
|
| The digital editions are restricted due to IP, so you can't
| have an infinitely copyable version for reference at home to
| solve the issue of children being destructive sometimes. So
| you end up with the worst of both worlds.
|
| We could theoretically teach kids to convert cubits to feet
| and give them a translated version of the same ancient
| egyptian geometry textbooks used to educate the architects of
| the pyramids. Triangles aren't new. Why has there not been an
| opensource/creative commons math textbook made available to
| all schools with a issues board for crowd sourcing
| correctness?
|
| This could be done with discrete periods of history,
| sciences, math, etc. We really don't need the McGraw Hill
| 2026 Florida Patriot's edition of the 18th century American
| history textbook.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Open content textbooks are widely available, it's just a
| matter of adoption by the students.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| > it's just a matter of adoption by the students.
|
| I don't think it's the students who are signing textbook
| deals.
| fastasucan wrote:
| Or every student have the books they need, and are free to
| bring them home.
| signa11 wrote:
| why not just buy 2 sets ? problem solved ?
| andrepd wrote:
| Screens and computers are incredibly useful in education _when
| they are used for some concrete purpose_. Just think about how
| incredibly useful it is to use Desmos or Manim to explain certain
| mathematical concepts, as opposed to chalk on blackboard or print
| on paper.
|
| Replacing a paper book with the same pdf on an ipad screen
| though, has to be one of the most stupid ideas anyone could come
| up with.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| This is all downstream of the backlash against social media and
| AI, and it's attacking the symptom rather than treating it IMO.
| You don't need to abandon digital tools entirely, you need to
| control how they're used in the classroom.
|
| Not every kid can learn concepts just by having them explained
| verbally or with simple, inanimate diagrams. Desmos etc were
| incredibly valuable for unlocking certain concepts.
|
| Also, you can't ctrl+f a textbook. Sure, you might find what
| you're looking for in an appendix or ToC.
| compounding_it wrote:
| I think Charlie Munger or Warren Buffet said once about an iPad
| for reading that : it would be terrible to read on a device where
| it was so easy to get distracted with the internet on your
| fingers.
|
| E readers work for a reason. You aren't distracted (the slow
| browser in it is hardly a distraction)
| tomaskafka wrote:
| One very important aspect is that we learn through haptics and
| precise arm movements required to write/draw things down.
| KurSix wrote:
| It's interesting that the Swedish government isn't completely
| rejecting digital tools but rather seeking a balanced approach,
| introducing them when students are ready for them
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Good for Sweden. Education really ought to be protected from fad-
| following "pedagogues" and rapacious businesses looking to cash
| in selling gimmicks. The great historical educational traditions
| of the past are as relevant today as they ever were. It is a kind
| of irrational technological big-P Progressive compulsion to think
| that technology is magical, that x-done-with-latest-tech is
| better than x-done-without-latest-tech. Technology for
| technology's sake. It makes an idol out of technology.
| dzonga wrote:
| look up what you need - print physical pages - use pen | pencil -
| have a legal pad / notebook at hand - scribble down shit.
|
| unfortunately now printing is expensive
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Dot-matrix impact printers are still being sold and still have
| the lowest cost per printed page. The quality sucks, but for
| draft-only content (like LLM answers) that you're scribbling on
| it's not an issue. B/W laser printers are not too far behind
| though, just avoid brands like HP that gouge you on toner
| cartridges.
| hackerbeat wrote:
| Was always a stupid idea to bring screens into schools.
| bjourne wrote:
| I hate articles like these. They get 10% right and the remaining
| 90% is just some random filler. I don't have time to write a
| lengthy comment but do note the LACK of SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE.
| There is no evidence that jacking kids cell phones and swapping
| digital articles for physical books improves anything. It's part
| of the perennial right-wing message: "Kids are so unruly these
| days! We need to discipline them harder!"
| 3yr-i-frew-up wrote:
| My city, the 2nd richest in our state (And our county is the 3rd
| richest in the United States)... is considering banning AI in
| schools.
|
| I am horrified at how bad this could be for the students. Imagine
| growing up without a calculator or computer. They read books,
| they do long division, they manually graph. They graduate and are
| completely unprepared for the world.
|
| I pay well over $15,000/yr in property taxes because I wanted my
| kids to go to a good school. Now I'm thinking they are going to
| need to go to a private school or we will move from what we
| thought was our forever home.
|
| AI is here, burying our heads in the sand changes nothing.
| timcobb wrote:
| don't worry, they'll have plenty of opportunity to mess with
| AI. Fun thing about AI is that you just use it and helps you, I
| don't know that there's much to learn there in terms of end
| user experience.
|
| On the other hand, the stuff that AI helps with (intelligence)
| is not something you can skip learning and expect a good
| outcome.
| theappsecguy wrote:
| Man, this is such an odd take. I don't need to imagine, I grew
| up in a country where math teachers would laugh you out of the
| classroom if you asked to use a calculator. Guess what? We did
| everything manually.
|
| I then moved to North America for my last year of high school,
| and was appalled how much behind a typical 90th percentile
| student was compared to me and my peers back home. I was
| probably about 3-4 years ahead. It also took me 30 minutes to
| learn how to use the TI calculator that I now needed, but I was
| ahead in just about every other measurable way. So I would urge
| you to think twice about this. AI won't help your children
| develop their brains, it's offloading thinking to a statistical
| black box.
| krapht wrote:
| which city is that? I want to move there with my children.
|
| If you desperately want mediocre chromebook instruction for
| your children; where your classmates turn in ChatGPT essays as
| original work, feel free to move to Virginia.
| mcculley wrote:
| An idea I have been thinking about: Increasingly powerful
| chatbots provide more teaching capacity. I think this will lead
| to counterintuitive outcomes like teaching environments where the
| human student is not allowed to use any device but is being
| taught and tested by a synthetic intelligence.
| dylanowen wrote:
| That sounds very dystopian. The ai teacher part, not the no
| devices part
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| That would have sadly be an improvement for the majority of
| teachers I've had in my life, even university classes because
| they were taught by a TA phd student I couldn't understand.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| It sounds distopian, but AI has been a big boost to learning
| at least for me personally. Of course the problem is when
| it's wrong.
| mcculley wrote:
| I never said that AI should replace all teachers. AI can help
| provide more teaching labor (more teaching capacity). Every
| child can have a personalized tutor in addition to human
| teachers.
|
| See Bloom's 2 sigma problem:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
| slibhb wrote:
| The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents
| wanting their children to have the same experiences they did,
| i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through
| the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not
| really about improving learning.
|
| 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.
| scandox wrote:
| Parents do care about improving learning. I certainly see
| better outcomes for my kids with book based learning. Mainly
| because the screen based equivalents have such bad ergonomics
| at the moment. E-learning "tools" that schools choose seem to
| be abysmally bad.
|
| 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.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| >The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents
| wanting their children to have the same experiences they did,
| i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through
| the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not
| really about improving learning.
|
| Allegations without evidence.
| whizzter wrote:
| Yes, there are a lot of people who wants it backwards due to
| their own experiences.
|
| 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.
| djtango wrote:
| What? There's been a bunch of research about how the tactile
| and 3D experience of touching a book assists in learning and
| knowledge retention, as does handwriting.
|
| The more senses you engage while learning a thing the deeper
| and more effective the learning is pretty accepted knowledge at
| this point.
| vincnetas wrote:
| yes, the distraction is real. How many times i was busy with my
| day job on some task when for some reason i had to wait for
| something (coworker reply, build to complete, approval to be
| granted) and automatically opened HN on in a new tab... 10
| minutes of blackout and i'm on some random wikipedia page for no
| obvious reason related to my day job task... And i'm 40+ year old
| adult. Im scared to think what this level of distraction means
| for undeveloped brain.
| pier25 wrote:
| I worked in EdTech about a decade ago and our education/pedagogy
| experts were already talking about this. They also talked a lot
| about how handwriting is super important for cognitive
| development.
|
| After working on that company for a couple of years I realized
| using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake. One of
| the reasons I left.
|
| In a decade or two the long term consequences of inundating kids
| with tech and then removing it will be quite obvious. This will
| be studied for decades to come. Reminds me of the Dutch kids that
| were borm during the 1944-1945 Dutch famine.
|
| https://www.ohsu.edu/school-of-medicine/moore-institute/dutc...
| fasterik wrote:
| _> I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a
| mistake._
|
| I think we should use tech in education, but in a targeted way.
| It's important that children gain basic technical literacy,
| like how to touch type and use basic software. I suspect there
| is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income students,
| whose parents are less likely to have a computer at home.
|
| The real problem is separating reading/writing skills from tech
| skills. We shouldn't stop teaching handwriting just because
| typing exists. And being able to read long books and essays
| teaches fundamental cognitive skills like attention, focus, and
| information processing.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > It's important that children gain basic technical literacy,
| like how to touch type and use basic software. I suspect
| there is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income
| students, whose parents are less likely to have a computer at
| home.
|
| Some of us "a bit older" seem to have gone through a golden
| era of tech, where we actually learned that tech en-masse. In
| a class of maybe 30 students, around 20, 25 of them were able
| to configure dial up modems, come on IRC (servers, ports,
| channels needed to be configured) and do a bunch of other
| stuff our parents mostly considered "black magic" (except for
| a few tech enthusiasts), and the general concensus was, that
| every generation will know more and be "better" than the
| previous generation.
|
| A few decades have passed.. and kids can't type anymore on a
| keyboard, can't print, have no idea what can be changed in
| the settings on their smartphone, don't know how to block
| ads, can't cheat in games anymore (except via pay-to-win) and
| have no idea where to change their instagram password.
|
| So, now you have boomers, who can't use computers and kids,
| who can't use computers anymore.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Boomers are split between a demographic that is _very_
| computer literate, having worked in /around science and
| tech for decades, and a demo that isn't remotely literate
| and may not even be online.
|
| The latter is a fairly small demo though - supposedly
| around a third.
|
| The split is more by education than by age.
|
| Kids can use computers - phones - as app appliances, but
| they don't _understand_ computers.
|
| Peak literacy is young Gen X and older millennials.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _It 's important that children gain basic technical
| literacy_
|
| They certainly will at home.
|
| > _I suspect there is a gap in the technical literacy of
| lower income students, whose parents are less likely to have
| a computer at home._
|
| In which country?
|
| I live in Mexico and even here you really need to go to the
| poorest families to find a home without a laptop. Even those
| families have multiple smartphones. Today a smartphone is not
| a good replacement for a laptop but maybe in a couple of
| years it will be.
| fasterik wrote:
| Even if they have a computer at home, that doesn't mean
| they're practicing the relevant skills. Touch typing, word
| processing, researching a topic online, etc. are things
| that need deliberate practice. Based on my own experience,
| using a computer at home 99% of the time meant playing
| video games.
|
| The following article suggests that in the United States,
| about 59% of lower income households have a laptop or
| desktop computer, compared to 92% of upper income
| households.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2021/06/22/digital-d...
| graemep wrote:
| Yes. Kids can learn a lot of they do use computers to do
| things like research things.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Leaving aside the wealth gap factor, which I do agree is
| important:
|
| When I think back to using computers as a kid, both at
| school(starting in 1999) and at home I don't think it's
| all that black and white wrt just playing at home vs
| learning useful skills at school.
|
| At some point in the early 00s my underfunded elementary
| school acquired a bunch of old windows 95 computers. We
| would have classes where we mostly did basic touch
| typing, MS Office etc. At home, my middle class parents
| had also managed to find me some old outdated clunker.
| And yes, most of my time at home was spent playing games,
| chatting with friends on msn, pirating mp3s etc.
|
| But I'd say I learned orders of magnitude more from my
| frivolous activities than from whatever we did at school.
| At home I was learning things like: online research(into
| warcraft cheat codes or quest guides for Runescape etc);
| software troubleshooting(having to reinstall windows
| because I downloaded malware on limewire or otherwise
| borked my install somehow); fast typing(from chatting
| with friends about whatever 12 year olds like to discuss.
| Probably 90% of my typing practice back then came at
| home, not at school, and there was no touch typing. I
| could type 100+ wpm on just 4 fingers by the time I was
| in middle school. Never actually learned to properly
| touch type until I had force myself into it 5 years ago
| due to RSI); English as a second language(from various
| forums, irc, etc, hard to avoid back then); And I believe
| one of my first forays into programming was trying to get
| a cracked game with a broken .bat installer off TPB to
| work. I had a friend who got into it via Morrowind
| modding.
|
| Actually, come to think of it, most of computer class was
| also in reality spent sneakily playing flash games and/or
| messing around with the computer settings just to screw
| with the next student/teacher to use it.
|
| Even generalising beyond computers, I think a remarkable
| portion of the skills and interests that end up defining
| us as people, can be traced back to stuff we did trying
| to avoid boredom as children.
|
| To summarise though, I do think computers have a place in
| school. But especially at an elementary school level, I
| think play should be a significant portion of their use,
| because play is how kids explore the world and
| themselves.
| mort96 wrote:
| Many parents don't themselves have the technical literacy
| to properly teach things like what thr filesystem is.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| > how to touch type
|
| What for? I've been writing computer programs and
| documentation since 1969 and I can't touch type. I've never
| felt enough pressure to do it. I can still type faster than I
| can think. When I'm writing most of my time is spent thinking
| not tapping the keys.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| You typed out this message by hitting individual keys as
| your eyes searched for them? Isn't that mentally
| exhausting?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| You dont need to learn to touch type to avoid searching
| out each key individually. You just need experience.
|
| I was taught touch typing as a kid. None of it took. I
| dont use the home row. I developed into the gamer home
| row hand positioning for typing.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I have an "unofficial" typing style. I tried learning
| official touch typing but it caused immediate hand
| cramps.
|
| Touch typing would probably be faster, but I've never
| found slow typing speeds a limiting factor in either
| writing or software dev.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| I guess this is technically correct in the same way that
| stenographers and highly-ergonomic alternative-layout
| keyboard users also don't "touch type" according to a
| strict definition.
|
| If you're capable of typing quick enough to publicly take
| meeting notes, then it's fine. But if you can't, I could
| see it being professionally embarrassing in the same way
| that not understanding basic arithmetic could be
| professionally embarrassing.
|
| That's the kind of (in)capability we're talking about
| when it comes to Gen Z. Like not knowing ctrl-c ctrl-v.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| My point is that there's almost nothing to teach about
| it. You just need to use a keyboard enough to build
| experience.
|
| What could you possibly teach about touch typing besides
| just telling people to do typing tests or write papers
| over and over again?
|
| People aren't bad typers because they weren't taught.
| They're bad typer because they dont type.
| Guestmodinfo wrote:
| Zen Z doesn't types to store knowledge. They would rather
| record the lecture or the meeting. I put aside my fone
| and put it on record while I am carefully listening to
| the meeting. I'm not even zen z. I would rather write
| than type
| palmotea wrote:
| > Zen Z doesn't types to store knowledge. They would
| rather record the lecture or the meeting. I put aside my
| fone and put it on record while I am carefully listening
| to the meeting. I'm not even zen z. I would rather write
| than type
|
| Recordings are one of the worse ways to store knowledge
| for later reference, except in usual scenarios. They're
| very awkward to work with. The only plus is their cheap
| an easy to make.
|
| Trust me, I work at a company where "documentation" is
| often an old meeting recording (and sometimes you have to
| count yourself lucky to even have that).
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Previously I would have agreed with you but as of the
| past year or so that's out of date thanks to automatic
| device local transcriptions becoming good enough.
| soperj wrote:
| > But if you can't, I could see it being professionally
| embarrassing
|
| I had a boss that typed with one finger on each hand, it
| was laughable, but he was an incredible programmer, so it
| didn't affect him at all.
| alecbz wrote:
| > _Although [touch typing] refers to typing without using
| the sense of sight to find the keys ... the term is often
| used to refer to a specific form of touch typing that
| involves placing the eight fingers in a horizontal row
| along the middle of the keyboard (the home row) and
| having them reach for specific other keys._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_typing
|
| I think they're referring to the latter.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| With such a strict definition the OP's comment becomes
| basically meaningless. They could be referring to using
| index fingers only. They could be using an alternative
| keyboard layout. They could mostly be using left-hand
| only. Pretty much any WPM between 1 and 200 seems
| possible with the statement: "I don't keep my fingers on
| home row in between key presses."
| nostrademons wrote:
| The strict definition of touch typing reminds me of how
| when I was a kid, my parents would always tell me that
| there's a specific way of holding chopsticks. You gotta
| hold the top one like a pencil, and rest the bottom one
| between the crook of your fingers and your ring finger,
| and make sure they're the same length and the bottom one
| isn't moving and you're just using it as a base to press
| against.
|
| And then I became an adult and visited China and met
| actual Chinese immigrants and married a native chopstick
| holder. And half of them don't hold chopsticks "the real
| way". Somehow it all works out. As long as you can eat a
| peanut with them, you pass.
|
| As an adult I learned that there's also a whole lot of
| prescriptive bullshit that basically nobody pays
| attention to. The strict definition of touch typing seems
| like one of those. If you can type without looking at the
| keys, you can touch type.
| asdff wrote:
| I will say you are far faster touch typing proper. I
| never fully learned it in school. I kind of half do it.
| Left hand is pretty religously touch typing byt right
| doesnt' stay on its home row.
|
| Just never cared to get perfect at it in school. I would
| get absolutely crushed on typing tests though with the
| kids who actually learned touch typing. They all had
| piano experience and could reach the modifiers while
| holding on to the home row still. I still can't really do
| that on my right hand, its like my pinky doesn't reach.
| dathinab wrote:
| In many cases the understanding of the term "touch
| typing" isn't just "typing without looking" but a very
| specific way of doing so.
|
| You should be able to type without looking at your
| keyboard.
|
| But the specific 5 finger arrangement taught often as
| "tough typing" isn't needed for that, some common issues:
|
| - it being taught with an orthogonal arrangement of your
| hand to they keyboard, that is nearly guaranteed to lead
| to carpal tunnel syndrome if you have a typical
| keyboard/desk setup. Don't angle your wrist when typing.
|
| - Pinky fingers of "average" hands already have issues
| reaching the right rows, with extra small or extra short
| hands they often aren't usable as intended with touch
| typing.
| AngryData wrote:
| I don't do it for every key but without looking, even if
| just sort of indirectly, I will repeatedly make mistakes.
| I also don't use proper finger placement. But never have
| I felt it limiting or slowing me down. If anything I feel
| like it gave me a heads up on screen typing although I
| still way prefer a keyboard.
| fasterik wrote:
| In general, mastery involves taking the basic mechanics of
| something and making them completely automatic, freeing up
| cognitive resources for higher level processes. Expert
| pianists don't need to look down at their hands when sight
| reading.
| kqr wrote:
| Fast typing is not about throughput, it's about latency. If
| I only needed to type fast enough to produce the
| 125-something lines of code I get into production per week,
| I would be able to work at a word a minute. Alas, that's
| not how that works.
|
| https://entropicthoughts.com/typing-fast-is-about-latency-
| no...
| dathinab wrote:
| > touch type
|
| can even be harmful
|
| IFF we interpret "touch typing" as the typical thought
| typing method and not just "typing without looking at the
| keyboard".
|
| In general key arrangement traces back to physical
| limitations of type writers not ergonomics and layout
| choice isn't exactly ergonomic based either.
|
| But even if it where, the biggest issue of touch typing is
| that it's often thought around the idea of your hands being
| somewhat orthogonal to your keyboard, _which they never
| should be_ (if you use a typical keyboard on a typcal desk
| setup) as it leads to angling you hands/wrist which is
| nearly guaranteed to cause you health issues long term if
| you are typing a lot.
|
| The simple solution is to keep your wrist straight leading
| to using the keyboard in a way where you hand is at an
| angle to it's layout instead of orthogonal which in turn
| inhibits perfect touch typing. But still allows something
| close to it.
|
| As keys are arranged in shifted columns this kinda works
| surprisingly well, an issue is the angle differs depending
| on left/right hand :/
|
| Split or alice style keyboards can also help a bit, but I
| often feel man designs kinda miss the point. Especially
| many supposedly ergonomic keyboards aren't aren't really
| that ergonomic, especially if your hand is to large, small,
| or otherwise unusual...
|
| Which brings us to the next point, human autonomy varies a
| lot, some people have just some very touch typing
| incompatible hands, like very short pinky fingers making
| that finger unusable for typical touch typing (even with
| normal hands it's a bit suboptimal which is why some
| keyboards shift the outer rows down by half a row).
| fl4regun wrote:
| Anatomy might matter if you're talking about world
| champion speed typing. I don't think it matters for just
| being competent (I say this as a man with short and fat
| fingers)
| abustamam wrote:
| I learned how to touch type in middle school with school
| software like Mario teaches typing and Mavis beacon. I
| peaked around 80wpm and I was faster than 90% of my
| classmates.
|
| A few years ago I invested in a rectilinear split keyboard
| which has a slightly different layout, but much more
| ergonomic. But interestingly I can now type 120wpm+.
|
| I think touch typing is very similar to learning penmanship
| (and I guess cursive to an extent). If I followed the exact
| rules I learned about handwriting in school, I'd have much
| more legible handwriting but I'd write so much more slowly.
| Instead I my own way, which lets me get my thoughts out
| quickly, albeit not as neat as "correct" penmanship.
| Fortunately typing is much more lenient on this front.
| cmoski wrote:
| Really? I can touch type and there is no way I can keep up
| with how fast I can think. Physics seems against you on
| this one.
| kpw94 wrote:
| That's not _using_ tech that you 're describing here. You're
| talking about literally learning some basic computer skills
| (such as word processor, excel, reading email, some basic
| website building, use printer, and some amount of
| programming)
|
| For those, obviously you need a computer and completely agree
| that those are important skills to learn... But you maybe
| need to spend 1h/week during last 2 years of middle school on
| those at the computer lab (as it's been done since the 90s in
| many schools around the world)
|
| But for any other course such as Math, English (or whichever
| primary language in your country), second languages, history,
| etc. : that's where using tech is a mistake
|
| A bit of tech is ok, but it cannot be "everyone does their
| homework and read lesson on a iPad/Chromebook"
| fasterik wrote:
| Would it be a mistake to use Desmos in a math classroom, or
| 3Blue1Brown style animations, to build up visual intuition?
| Should we not teach basic numerical and statistical methods
| in Python? Should kids be forced to use physical copies of
| newspapers and journal articles instead of learning how to
| look things up in a database?
|
| I'm all for going back to analog where it makes sense, but
| it seems wrongheaded to completely remove things that are
| relevant skills for most 21st century careers.
| graemep wrote:
| Those are great examples. Not familiar with Desmos, but
| 3Blue1Brown style animations are great.
|
| The problem is that people seem to want to go to
| extremes. Either go all out on doing everything in
| tablets or not use any technology in education at all.
|
| its not just work skills, its also a better understanding
| that is gained from things such as the maths animations
| you mentioned.
| bpt3 wrote:
| > The problem is that people seem to want to go to
| extremes. Either go all out on doing everything in
| tablets or not use any technology in education at all.
|
| I think the latter is mostly a reaction to the former. I
| think there is a way to use technology appropriately in
| theory in many cases, but the administrators making these
| choices are largely technically illiterate and it's too
| tempting for the teachers implementing them to just hand
| control over to the students (and give themselves a break
| from actually teaching).
| bpt3 wrote:
| Until most kids are about 12 - 14 years old, they're
| learning much more basic concepts than you're describing.
| I don't think anyone is trying to take intro to computer
| science out of high schools or preventing an advanced
| student younger than that from the same.
|
| I would rather a teacher have to draw a concept on a
| board than have each student watch an animation on their
| computer. Obviously, the teacher projecting the animation
| should be fine, but it seems like some educators and
| parents can't handle that and it turns into a slippery
| slope back to kids using devices.
|
| So for most classrooms full of students in grades prior
| to high school, the answer to your list of (presumably
| rhetorical) questions is "Yes."
| something765478 wrote:
| > Would it be a mistake to use Desmos in a math
| classroom, or 3Blue1Brown style animations, to build up
| visual intuition?
|
| I don't think there's anything wrong with showing kids
| some videos every now and then. I still have fond
| memories of watching Bill Nye.
|
| > Should we not teach basic numerical and statistical
| methods in Python?
|
| No. Those should be done by hand, so kids can develop an
| intuition for it. The same way we don't allow kids
| learning multiplication and division to use calculators.
| brailsafe wrote:
| >> Should we not teach basic numerical and statistical
| methods in Python?
|
| > No. Those should be done by hand, so kids can develop
| an intuition for it. The same way we don't allow kids
| learning multiplication and division to use calculators.
|
| I would think that it would make sense to introduce
| Python in the same way that calculators, and later
| graphing calculators are introduced, and I believe (just
| based on hearing random anecdotes) that this is already
| the case in many places.
|
| I'm a big proponent of the gradual introduction of
| abstraction, which my early education failed at, and
| something Factorio and some later schooling did get
| right, although the intent was rarely communicated
| effectively.
|
| First, learn what and why a thing exists at a
| sufficiently primitive level of interaction, then once
| students have it locked in, introduce a new layer of
| complexity by making the former primitive steps faster
| and easier to work with, using tools. It's important that
| each step serves a useful purpose though. For example, I
| don't think there's much of a case for writing actual
| code by hand and grading students on missing a semicolon,
| but there's probably a case for working out logic and
| pseudocode by hand.
|
| I don't think there's a case for hand-drawing intricate
| diagrams and graphs, because it builds a skill and level
| of intimacy with the drawing aspect that's just silly,
| and tests someone's drawing capability rather than their
| understanding of the subject, but I suppose everyone has
| they're own opinion on that.
|
| That last one kind of crippled me in various classes. I
| already new better tools and methods existed for doing
| weather pattern diagrams or topographical maps, but it
| was so immensely tedious and time-consuming that it
| totally derailed me to the point where I'd fail Uni labs
| despite it not being very difficult content, only because
| the prof wanted to teach it like the 50s.
| MidnightRider39 wrote:
| Fwiw calculators were banned in my school. Only started
| to use one in university - and there it also didnt really
| help with anything as the math is already more complex
| fastforwardius wrote:
| Skills are less important than foundation.
|
| And Logo or BASIC >> Python in school context IMO.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >Would it be a mistake to use Desmos in a math classroom
|
| Maybe. Back in the day I had classes where we had to
| learn the rough shape of a number of basic functions,
| which built intuition that helped. This involved drawing
| a lot of them by hand. Initially by calculating points
| and estimating, and later by being given an arbitrary
| function and graphing it. Using Desmos too early would've
| prevented building these skills.
|
| Once the skills are built, using it doesn't seem a major
| negative.
|
| I think of it like a calculator. Don't let kids learning
| basic arithmetic to use a 4 function calculator, but once
| you hit algebra, that's find (but graphing calculators
| still aren't).
|
| Best might be to mix it up, some with and some without,
| but no calculator is preferable to always calculator.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| what's funny is that they don't even teach basic tech
| literacy but just rely on kids to figure it out!
| rz2k wrote:
| I am pretty skeptical about the value of learning to build
| websites. I think it is too tempting for students to devote
| significant time to something that is not foundational
| knowledge and where they won't get any valuable feedback
| anyway.
|
| It makes me think back to my writing assignments in grades
| 6-12. I spent considerable time making sure the word
| processor had the exact perfect font, spacing, and
| formatting with cool headers, footers, and the footnotes,
| etc. Yet, I wouldn't even bother to proofread the final
| text before handing it in. What a terrible waste of a
| captive audience that could have helped me refine my
| arguments and writing style, rather than waste their time
| on things like careless grammatical errors.
|
| Anyway, I do agree with the idea of incorporating Excel,
| and even RStudio for math and science as tools, especially
| if they displace Ed-tech software that adds unnecessary
| abstractions, or attempts to replace interaction with
| knowledgeable teachers. One other exception might be Anki
| or similar, since they might move rote memorization out of
| the classroom, so that more time can be spent on critical
| thinking.
| runarberg wrote:
| re: Anki. It is not as optimized but you can do SRS with
| physical flash-cards.
|
| * Have something like 5 bins, numbered 1-5.
|
| * Every day you add your new cards to bin nr. 1 shuffle
| and review. Correct cards go to bin nr. 2, incorrect
| cards stay in bin nr. 1.
|
| * Every other day do the same with bin nr. 1 and 2, every
| forth with bin nr. 1, 2 and 3 etc. except incorrect cards
| go in the bin below. More complex scheduling algorithms
| exist.
|
| * In a classroom setting the teacher can print out the
| flashcards and hand out review schedule for the week
| (e.g. Monday: add these 10 new cards and review 1;
| Tuesday: 10 new cards and review box 1 and 2; Wednesday:
| No new cards and and review box 1 and 3; etc.)
|
| * If you want to be super fancy, the flash card publisher
| can add audio-chips to the flash-cards (or each box-set
| plus QR code on the card).
| closeparen wrote:
| The beautiful thing about programming (which also makes
| edtech such an appealing dream to chase) is that you get
| immediate feedback _from the computer_ and don 't have to
| wait for someone whose attention is at least semi-scarce
| to mark your paper.
| layoric wrote:
| Building websites, I agree has little value, but using it
| as a way to explain basics of how the web works I think
| is pretty valuable. Web likely isn't going anywhere for a
| long time, having some basic knowledge of how it works I
| think very useful for a lot of people. I hate the idea of
| any more MS apps like Excel being regularly incorporated,
| but basic usage of something similar definitely can help
| know of how to use a useful tool/computer skill. Even in
| the early 90's we had computer labs for learning computer
| skills which I think there is value. But forcing tech
| everywhere into teaching is an issue IMO.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > (as it's been done since the 90s in many schools around
| the world)
|
| I had computer lab in a catholic grade school in the mid-
| late 80's. Apple II's and the class was once a week and a
| mix of typing, logo turtle, and of course, The Oregon
| Trail.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| Touch typing is not a basic tech skill, and also pretty
| useless on the long term. I expect dictation to take over
| very soon, as finally voice recognition is getting to be
| usable, and commonplace.
| theSuda wrote:
| Just wanted to point out that you and other people who
| responded to you basically do agree on same points, you are
| just presenting it differently. I just find it
| amusing/endearing that we argue with each other even when we
| do agree on the core issue. :D
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Using tech also meant you got an iPad because otherwise
| teachers and IT would be overwhelmed. That the kids were
| already much more apt at using such devices was secondary.
|
| In the context of general education I can understand the
| strategy, it could be a useful learning environment, but
| certainly not if it is about digital education, tech knowledge
| or general engineering. Nobody becomes an engineer in a prison,
| you need to give your users freedom.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| An iPad absolutely doesn't make kids "better at technology",
| if anything it makes them worse because it just wraps
| everything up in a braindead simple package for consumption.
|
| Ironically, Gen Z was supposed to lead the way as "digital
| natives", but in many ways they are (speaking broadly) much
| less technically adapt than, say, Gen Xers, because Gen Xers
| had to struggle to figure stuff out because it hadn't been
| all wrapped up with a bow yet, and thus we got to understand
| the details of how thing worked at a deeper, more fundamental
| level.
|
| I recall reading some articles about how many Gen Zers new to
| the workplace didn't even understand how file systems or
| directories worked, because things like iPads largely hide
| those details from the end user.
|
| And to emphasize, I'm not dumping on Gen Z - they're, like
| everyone, just a product of the environment they grew up in.
| But I strongly disagree that getting access to an iPad makes
| anyone more technologically adept.
| pmontra wrote:
| 20 year olds are bewildered when they see me opening a
| computer and replacing stuff instead of bringing it to a
| shop. "Where did you learn to do that?" It used to be the
| only way, everybody with a computer did it. The strange
| thing is that it's still possible but they don't think
| about it.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > After working on that company for a couple of years I
| realized using tech in education (pre university) was a
| mistake.
|
| I have several friends who work in education.
|
| At one point there were computer labs in school, there was
| education around computing. The pervasiveness of computing
| killed these programs, along with various kinds of skill based
| classes, like wood/auto/home economics (cooking and or sewing).
|
| All of them tend to agree that the losses of these programs is,
| in hindsight, problematic. Many of them think that a return to
| computer education (and conveying deeper insight) would be a
| net positive.
|
| > EdTech
|
| To a person, every one I know thinks their EdTech platforms
| suck. One of them is in a support role as part of their job and
| often tells me stories of how lamentable the software and
| faculties interactions with it is/are.
|
| "Progress is at fault" is a tale as old as time:
| https://xkcd.com/1227/
| chowells wrote:
| "Progress is at fault" only is a criticism of the criticism
| if it's actually progress. What if actually being forced to
| slow down and think about a thing is what actually makes you
| learn it, and anything designed to optimize a process removes
| its educational value? If that were true, would "EdTech"
| still be progress?
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I imagine it would depend case by case on exactly what
| parts were optimized and how. Presumably it's possible to
| optimize for more time spent thinking as well as for
| thinking about more useful things.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > "Progress is at fault" is a tale as old as time
|
| Worth noting that all of those examples are adjacent to the
| industrial revolution. At least personally I don't know
| enough to have perspective on cottage production but I
| imagine daily life must have been quite different 1000 years
| ago.
| qurren wrote:
| > They also talked a lot about how handwriting is super
| important for cognitive development.
|
| Is it possible that there are alternative ways than handwriting
| for cognitive development?
|
| Probably in 500 BC they said you had to hack at stone with a
| chisel for cognitive development, and then someone invented the
| pen and paper.
|
| The difference is the _task_ had to change as well. People were
| able to write thousands of pages (rather than a few stone
| blocks) over their education, and making full use of that
| ability in order to "keep the brain CPU close to 100%" was a
| necessary concurrent change in order to preserve cognitive
| devolpment.
| Swizec wrote:
| > Probably in 500 BC they said you had to hack at stone with
| a chisel for cognitive development, and then someone invented
| the pen and paper.
|
| You are forgetting that in 500 BC literacy rates were well
| under 10%. Nobody optimized for anyone's cognitive
| development.
|
| The only cognitive development people cared about was for the
| rich (aristocrats, royalty, some merchants, etc). Much of
| that happened orally through hands-on tutoring by an army of
| people specifically employed to create the next generation of
| leaders.
|
| Anyone would thrive with that much resources thrown at them.
| And I'm pretty sure many of them considered reading and
| writing beneath them. They got people for that.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Is it possible that there are alternative ways than
| handwriting for cognitive development?
|
| there are countless of ways to develop fine motor skills, but
| handwriting replacing a chisel was not a step down because
| handwriting is a demanding task in contrast to the, by
| nature, impoverished interaction with digital rather than
| analog devices. I help in a maker-space and you can literally
| tell young people apart who only ever interacted with a phone
| compared to kids who play an instrument, work with tools etc.
|
| Additionally a pen and paper come cheap compared to a tablet.
| It was always the perfect example of a kind of "digitalism".
| "oh we're so cool, we use technology, let's give everyone
| tablets, we're a _modern_ country ". Just expensive nonsense
| in the absence of educational standards and physical
| development.
| graemep wrote:
| Maybe not that early, but writing did eventually undermine
| the ability to memorise things. It used to be common for
| people to memorise long works - it is one reason why epic
| poetry was popular and designed to be memorable. Memorising
| even a few hundred lines is unusual now.
|
| I wonder whether it has contributed to the evolution of
| smaller brains:
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240517-the-human-
| brain-...
| rz2k wrote:
| At least around 370 BC, in Plato's _Phaedrus_ , Socrates
| expresses a strong opinion against writing of any kind
| through a conversation between the Egyptian gods Theuth and
| Thamus discussing the invention of writing.
|
| Thamus:
|
| > "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds
| of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice
| their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external
| characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage
| the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an
| elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your
| pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they
| will read many things without instruction and will therefore
| seem to know many things, when they are for the most part
| ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise,
| but only appear wise."
|
| https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=3894
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/#Pha
| joshuahaglund wrote:
| > hack at stone with a chisel
|
| Update your mental model, except for the grand works, they
| used sticks on clay tablets similar to writing
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_tablet
| ifonlywecould wrote:
| Is it possible that the inherent inefficiency of handwriting
| in recording information is what facilitates cognitive
| development? Writing information by hand requires the writer
| to parse the information being written and become skilled in
| understanding the most important aspects of the information
| to write since it is impractical to handwrite everything
| verbatim as it comes to mind.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Kind of why Khan Academy makes me cringe.
| weslleyskah wrote:
| Tech can save you from a bad educational environment. I think
| kids need extreme amounts of freedom with guidance on what are
| the best tools to be used for learning. From visualizing linear
| algebra and analytic geometry problems to piracy. If anything,
| the teachers need to improve their tech literacy.
|
| There is no way to be done away with tech on school, but some
| balance and freedom must be achieved.
| bpt3 wrote:
| > I think kids need extreme amounts of freedom with guidance
| on what are the best tools to be used for learning.
|
| Why an "extreme" amount of freedom?
|
| > There is no way to be done away with tech on school, but
| some balance and freedom must be achieved.
|
| Yes there is. Students were educated just a couple decades
| ago without it. We can easily return to that style.
| weslleyskah wrote:
| >Why an "extreme" amount of freedom?
|
| As dangerous as this sounds, with guidance, I think it
| could be done. Government and public institutions love to
| lock the environment into something safe but useless for
| further learning and adaptability
| bpt3 wrote:
| I don't know that it sounds dangerous.
|
| I am wondering what you mean by it and why you think it's
| needed.
| dtdynasty wrote:
| I do think the general purpose screens of today are doing a
| disservice for education. There are too many possible
| distractions a child isn't prepared to resist yet. But it could
| enable more advanced workflow for personalized learning.
|
| I think the k-shaped economy where some people are financially
| succeeding while the rest go through hardship is a reflection
| of a k-shaped education system where those who are able to
| ignore the distractions and succeed are doing well. The top of
| the k can use more edtech as they just need tools for further
| educational attainment. Things modern edtech can bring. The
| bottom of the k has different needs.
| Suffocate5100 wrote:
| You're assuming tech will ever be removed.
| jb1991 wrote:
| Meanwhile today Dutch kids get these extremely large screens at
| the front of the class to stare at all day for every little
| thing, the day's schedule, everything. Huge screens, some
| stretch nearly the entire width of the classroom, with about a
| third of desks within just three meters of it. All day.
| pclowes wrote:
| Anecdotally talking to teacher friends they have significant app
| fatigue. Multiple apps, crappy chrome books in the class room,
| they are basically a low grade system admin and IT support on top
| of trying to teach. Everything is benchmarked and thus gamed.
|
| 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.
| dimxasnewfrozen wrote:
| My daughter is in 5th grade and absolutely despises iReady
| assessments. She complains how much she doesn't like the screen
| and prefers paper tests. Her scores reflect it too. She does
| terribly on iReady assessments which is used for a TON of metrics
| (I think unfairly..?) but give her the same test on paper and
| she'd do remarkably better.
| red_admiral wrote:
| I support this, up to the point where a second-grader has to
| carry four textbooks and four exercise books around on their walk
| to school; from the rucksack weight to body weight ratio they
| might as well be training for the marines.
|
| Ipads are not the solution - that gets you back to
| screen/computer mode in the classroom.
|
| e-readers/ e-paper tablets might be worth a try. (Just please
| don't make every child have a mandatory amazon account to link
| with their school kindle.) It would be interesting to know
| whether the "books+hand notes > screens + typing" comprehension
| studies have something to say about e-paper (I don't think this
| has been done yet).
|
| My own experience, even to this day, is that it's easier for me
| to learn a new language or technology from a book compared to on
| a screen, even if the digital version lets me work on actual
| code: if I can, I first read the book and take notes, then I do
| the online version.
| SJMG wrote:
| Anecdotal, but I do not think e-ink displays are as good for
| reading or benefiting from handwriting as an actual purely
| physical medium. They just don't have the affordances of
| durably occupying physical space. I say this as someone who has
| done quite a bit of review of the literature and has a kindle
| and a Supernote.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Ereaders (Kindle scribe specifically) has been a huge
| discovery! I cannot make any claims, but my daughter draws on
| it, writes on it, does homeworks on it and reads so many books
| on it (she is 7). She liked it as soon as she saw it. I decided
| to gave her my Scribe,which I deeply miss.
|
| It's essentially a notebook and a book reader.
|
| You can take notes directly on the book if you use pdf (epubs
| can only have notes on the side).
|
| I think that's the tech I want to see in school, no tablets
| please.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Yeah, I think eink displays are the happy medium for tech for
| kids. And even then, you should limit the capabilities to be
| effectively the same as working with paper.
|
| Like, maybe download wikipedia onto the device but don't give
| internet access. Let the device sync at school with required
| books and assignments.
|
| Effectively, you could give kids a pocket library but that's
| the extent of what they should have.
| toast0 wrote:
| > I support this, up to the point where a second-grader has to
| carry four textbooks and four exercise books around on their
| walk to school; from the rucksack weight to body weight ratio
| they might as well be training for the marines.
|
| I went to school a million years ago, but IIRC we kept our
| textbooks in the classroom until middle school (7th grade for
| me). Maybe one textbook might go home with math homework or an
| English project. For my kid, they would usually just send
| worksheets home; which is ok, but if you wanted to reference
| not on the sheet, too bad. Post-covid, there's a lot more
| dependence on google classroom with all that comes with it (but
| maybe that's also how the upper grades were working anyway)
|
| E-readers with textbooks loaded could work, but hopefully the
| textbooks are tuned for the medium.
|
| Anyway, isn't a heavy backpack a secret fitness program???
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| Trapper-Keeper!
| danny_codes wrote:
| Or get everyone a nice camping backpack. Still less than the
| iPad and duel purpose!
| strokirk wrote:
| The books in Swedish primary school are tiny, no worries about
| that.
| timonoko wrote:
| They forgot the ballpoint pen. In 1950 Sweden flowing ink and
| cursive was the mark of a civilized man. I remember teacher using
| magnifier to detect cheaters as evil ballpoint technology
| advanced.
| lstodd wrote:
| Evil ballpoint is evil. I remember everyone chewing up plastic
| ballpoint pens into unusablily and also using them as blowguns
| with chewed paper, whereas nothing of the sort was possible
| before their introduction. (however, flowing ink also had its
| uses :) )
| petterroea wrote:
| It's the same in Norway, and news paper chronicles are going as
| far as saying things like "Now that we learned that we went to
| far, what do we do with the generation of kids we experimented
| on?". Food for thought.
| eviks wrote:
| > whether the digitalization of classrooms had been evidence-
| based
|
| 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?
| fastasucan wrote:
| Usually you have to prove the effect of introducing something
| new.
| eviks wrote:
| which, in this case, is a paper book
| bentt wrote:
| I support this. Having a boundary around tech is a great asset
| for a growing mind.
|
| At the same time, get your kids a computer early so they can
| learn the basics. Maybe even keep it off the internet.
|
| Skip phones and tablets altogether for as long as possible.
| redbell wrote:
| Related:
|
| Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its
| schools (2023) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42715841)
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I look forward to the (hopefully) positive results and what it
| will mean for most EdTech snake oil.
|
| https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/01/22/ed-tech-i...
| ffsoftboiled wrote:
| Impossible for a Vocational Tech teacher in the networking field.
| How can I teach computers without computers?
| lysace wrote:
| (Maybe use some of those skills to figure out a way to read
| more than the headline.)
|
| I recommend reading at least the closing line:
|
| _This means introducing digital technology at later ages after
| basic reading and other skills have been achieved._
| dathinab wrote:
| Which shifts things from "before high school" to "in primary
| school and then gradual introduce aspects on it".
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I can't understand why any person at any point in time would ever
| think that computers make sense in a classroom unless the class
| is specifically about using computers.
| dhosek wrote:
| I don't know why the headline was changed for the link, but the
| headline here is misleading as it reads (to me) as if screens are
| replacing books and not the other way around. Prepositions are
| slippery things.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 100% support this. Computers in school -- except at specific
| times for specific purposes -- are a distraction. My teen told me
| he and his friends were watching Hulu in class on their
| Chromebooks because while the school district had locked down
| access to Netflix, Disney, etc., they forgot Hulu :/ The students
| also figured out ways to share links to game sites by using
| shared Google docs and using URLs that bypassed the school's
| controls.
|
| The huge drop in scores during the pandemic, during which
| everyone switched to edTech, is pretty strong evidence that in
| classroom education is essential at the lower grades in
| particular.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The same goes for college.
|
| I've advised college students to leave their laptops in their
| dorm room. Take a spiral notebook to lecture, and a couple pens.
| Write down everything the professor writes on the chalkboard.
|
| When studying, going over the notes, you'll hear the lecture
| again in your head.
|
| Of course, if the professor doesn't use a chalkboard, and does a
| slide presentation instead, that will make studying harder for
| you.
|
| The best presentation I ever gave was when the presenter didn't
| show up, and the conference asked for volunteers. I volunteered
| and gave an impromptu presentation using markers and the big
| whiteboard. The back-and-forth with the audience was very
| productive!
|
| Most conferences have no way to do this. I tried using an
| overhead projector and markers, but the conference people thought
| I was crazy. There was just too much expectation of a packaged
| slide presentation.
| emil-lp wrote:
| I'm teaching programming and algorithms at uni. Only
| blackboard.
| osmsucks wrote:
| In my university, probably because the CS department at the
| time was an underfunded offshoot of the faculty of
| Mathematics, we basically didn't have access to computers
| (and I didn't have a laptop of my own).
|
| We did almost everything on paper, even exams. I admit
| writing MIPS assembly on paper seemed strange to me at the
| time, but the effort you put in to put things black on white
| somehow made the knowledge stick into my mind more
| effectively. Some of that knowledge will stay with me
| forever, and I'm not sure the same could be said if I had
| taken "shortcuts".
| WalterBright wrote:
| I used to write code in a spiral notebook when I didn't
| have access to a computer. It was also hard to code on a
| computer in those days when the output device was an
| ASR-33, or a screen was 24x80.
| groby_b wrote:
| > When studying, going over the notes, you'll hear the lecture
| again in your head.
|
| That is a) a BS claim and b) wouldn't be a feature, on average,
| given the quality of college lectures.
|
| It seems fairly clear that manual note taking help with
| learning, over using a computer, but overblown claims like this
| do more damage than good in convincing people to do the right
| thing.
| downut wrote:
| This is hilarious. This comment would imply that the people
| who got multiple degrees and were _very_ successful through
| their careers (that would be _everybody_ in my generation: we
| started in 1980) learning from lecturers scribbling with
| _chalk_ on a blackboard, writing it all down with pen on
| paper, somehow had a less effective education than modern
| students using modern tools. Yeah, _looks all around,
| remembers training youngs_ , no, I don't think so... Actually
| sometimes it was bad because people, but sometimes it was
| fucking awesome. I lectured undergrad mathematics at UF and
| ASU using chalk and a blackboard and to this day that was
| some of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. Especially
| for the upper division classes, my students paid attention.
| They asked questions. It was glorious.
| groby_b wrote:
| That's not what I said.
|
| I'm absolutely supportive of using blackboards & paper and
| pen over computers.
|
| What I'm saying is that making unsubstantiated claims like
| "you'll hear the lecture again when you read it" is
| completely detrimental to making that point, because it's
| entirely unsubstantiated and doesn't make any relevant
| point you couldn't make in a well-supported way instead.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The relevant part is it filled in the missing parts of my
| notes. The prof says more than what he writes.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > a BS claim
|
| It worked for me. Have you tried it?
|
| > given the quality of college lectures
|
| I attended a university where that wasn't a problem. Prof
| Daniel Goodstein, for example, turned his lectures into a
| video series "The Mechanical Universe". But, frankly, I liked
| his in-person lectures using the blackboard and chalk better.
| groby_b wrote:
| > It worked for me. Have you tried it?
|
| I have. It doesn't work that way for me - but that hardly
| matters. More importantly, there's plenty of research
| around inner monologue and sensory replay also pointing out
| that this isn't true for most people.
|
| > I attended a university where that wasn't a problem.
|
| You were blessed :)
|
| > But, frankly, I liked his in-person lectures using the
| blackboard and chalk better.
|
| That's not something I'm arguing against :) I think they're
| a great teaching tool.
|
| My objection is that making a specious but unsupported, and
| often easily anecdotally invalidated point to support a
| case that's actually got a ton of solid evidence in support
| is detrimental to making that case.
|
| Physical note taking, and being actually present for a
| lecture are tremendously important. Laptops are hugely
| problematic for learning. And those points are important
| enough that we should make solid arguments in favor of
| them, not easily discredited ones. Because we also know
| that many students are very muched biased to discarding
| these points given half a chance.
|
| There's currently a related post on the home page: "Good
| ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public
| acceptance (2008)"
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's been 50 years, the voice has long since evaporated.
| I wish I had had the prescience to have recorded the
| lectures on cassettes.
|
| > You were blessed
|
| Indeed, but not totally. I took an economics course, and
| soon discovered that the prof was a Marxist. Since
| Marxism is a fantasy, I saw no more value in it than
| listening to a lecture on astrology.
|
| > many students are very muched biased to discarding
| these points given half a chance
|
| I have little interest in helping people that don't want
| to make an effort.
| Jbird2k wrote:
| I don't teach in a public school but we use tech to a very
| limited extent in my k-9 school grades 7-9 will be taking a
| computer skills course next year. We currently teach touch typing
| to grades 8 and 9. Everything else is pencil and paper. I think
| present day children are exposed to tech in non productive way ie
| mobile devices.
|
| The number of kids who don't know how to operate a mouse and
| keyboard is wild. Things like double clicking are quite difficult
| for some. It's quite interesting honestly.
| hintymad wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but it's pretty obvious that screens, such as
| iPads, are bad for kids' education. The homework on apps like
| i-Ready is mostly just crappy multiple-choice questions. I fail
| to see how that actually helps students. They should be
| challenged and kept in their discomfort zones. They need to
| experience problem-solving in all its forms and get feedback from
| teachers on _how_ they solve a problem. They need to practice
| writing and long-form analysis, and get detailed feedbacks from
| teachers - things i-Ready just can't provide. The funny thing is,
| so many Americans blame the system for inequality while embracing
| Jo Boalers ' nonsense. Yet they flock to screens like moths to a
| flame, not realizing that wealthy families will just pay for
| private tutors while the kids without those resources get left
| behind, when enforcing hgher education standards could be
| arguably the cheapest thing to do[1]. How's that working out for
| equality, let alone equity?
|
| [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.
| verteu wrote:
| What does the evidence say?
|
| AFAICT, meta-analyses tend to find a positive effect of tech in
| education:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...
|
| https://i.imgur.com/IYJLiA1.png
| tsoukase wrote:
| The luckiest were us that got into adulthood during the 90's.
| Traditional studying at school and full digital afterwards. The
| last generation. That's the cause of the reverse Flynn effect:
| diminishing IQ of 18-yo's after 1995.
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| I know it's brutal, but my kids were raised with iPads, PS3-5,
| computers, age inappropriate Minecraft and youtube, all kids of
| gadgets and turned out ok, already earning money (in tech of
| course) - one is in UX / product building, another more on the
| core math/theorem side. Protecting kids from tech is like raising
| your kids in a glass house, yes they are fine while inside but
| then what?
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| Your kids were raised on those before predatory people and
| unscrupulous corporations learned how to take advantage of them
| at scale.
|
| To protect against those, you have to make kids super-early
| adopters like yours, make them use tech that is ahead of the
| curve relative to the mass market, or go the other direction
| entirely and have them a couple of levels behind the curve so
| they are not targeted.
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| It's great that your kids had none of the issues reported.
|
| Others have had lives disrupted by addiction.
| amai wrote:
| Handwriting is important. But this could also be learned with
| digital pens. Unfortunately most schools don't have these and
| instead do just multiple choice on touchscreens.
|
| But have a look at https://dynamilis.com/ for s good app to
| improve hand writing.
| tomasGiden wrote:
| Guy here with kids in Swedish school. In general I support the
| direction of learning basic analogue skills and detoxing from the
| constant dopamine hits of the digital world.
|
| BUT one of my kids has Asperger's and it is extremely hard for
| him to muster up the energy to do something "boring". So gamified
| learning on an iPad works very well for him. Also doing math on
| an iPad where, instead of seeing full pages of equations to
| solve, he sees only one equation makes it much easier for him to
| get started.
|
| With these kids you learn to not focus on parenting/teaching
| principles and instead focus on the goals. I'll do whatever to
| get him to go to school and learn, no matter if I'll have to
| drive him the 700 m to school while he is watching YouTube or
| having him to math on an iPad.
|
| So as long as the push for more analogue tools is just a
| direction and not without individual exceptions I'm all for it.
|
| Sadly today's Swedish government seems more focused on being seen
| as hard on kids, crime, immigrants etc (basically everything
| except environmental protections) than actually following
| scientific principles.
| bmitc wrote:
| I hope to god this comes into vogue in the U.S.
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