Are Computers in Classrooms Bad for Learning

Sideshow Vox writes "Evidently a number of experts in the education field see more harm than good in exposing young children to computers in the classroom. The article raises some good points about the darker side of the current fashion of computers in every classroom." I don't know when I would have found the time to write Slashdot during college if we didn't have computers in the classroom ;)

Forget that...

Testimonial time:

If it wasn't for that Apple ][ I saw in 3rd grade, I might never have gotten my C64 or my PC's, or learned to program, or majored in computer science...

I have no idea what I'd be doing if I hadn't become a programmer. Math? Bleh.

So tell me: what could possibly be bad about introducing computers to kids? If they don't like them, they don't have to use them, but I have a feeling they will all have to know what they are, and most of them will have to know how to use one...

The only possible cool slogan I could think up for such uneducated luddites would be "Fight the Future!"
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

Schools need more than computers

Some idle thoughts...

1. Last time I checked some of the schools in our public school system needed better roofs and asbestos removal, and, whatever-deity-makes-you-happy help us, up to date text books. Spending money on computers isn't, or at least shouldn't be, a priority for some school districts.

2. What are schools going to do when the computers break? Hire a bunch of network admins and techs? Maybe in wealthy districts, but those kids probably already have computers at home, so the "digital divide" will morph into "rich kids have working computers and poor kids have broken computers" Great. That's a real improvement.

3. How many teachers will realistically use the machines for more than busy work? It will take a person with the energy to learn a new skill while working a full time job that often includes running the drama club, the chess team, or the yearbook on top of classroom work.

Our public education system is in many ways a nightmare. Teachers are underpaid, as a profession it doesn't rank up there even with VB Developer in the eyes of many people and thus doesn't always draw the cream of the crop, classrooms are overcrowded, in outdated buildings. Success is increasingly measured in test scores...

Wait -- I've got it -- schools can use the computers to more efficiently drill students for standardized exams! Because it's much more important for a person to do well on achievement tests than anything else...right...

Keep the machines, ditch the clueless educators.

Well, I'm sure my experience with computers in the classroom is a similar one to many others here.. If it weren't for my librarian (Brenda Sand, Prairie Elementary School, circa 1979-1984) wheeling a giant old black & white Magnavox TV into the room hooked up to an Apple II, and teaching us the bare essentials of BASIC programming when I was like 6 or 7, then I probably would never have had anything in life I could really latch onto and enjoy for as long as i've enjoyed computers.

I used to stay after school and play around with the Apple II's until the damn janitors kicked me out at 5:30. I was lucky, tho, I only lived two houses away from the school, and I knew how to cross the street without getting killed. :)

Having 3 measly underpowered personal computers hooked up to black & white TVs gave me a truse sense of awe among other things..along with it, a sense of responsibility, creativity, logic, respect, and imagination, and power. I was the youngest kid in the neighborhood growing up, and having that sort of thing to pour my time and energy into was unbelievably important to me, in retrospect.

Taking computers out of schools is like saying "Screw books! We have television!".. not the smartest strategy when it comes to education. Schools should be places where truckloads of information are available in a wide array of forms. Im pretty sure I was the only kid in school who understood what BLOAD meant, but it didn't matter. I learned 10x more with computers in schools as I was growing up as I would have learned without them.

A good thing -- Because with that knowledge, at the age of 26 I can pretty much choose where I live and choose what I do with my life. Many people with educations less comprehensive than mine don't have that luxury.

Information isn't evil. However, the teachers--the people who control access to that information are largely ignorant when it comes to computers. When you have that sort of situation, where the access to information is controlled by people ignorant about the technology involved (as many teacher's will readilly admit to being) THAT is the problem. The people in charge, not the computers. Computers are just tools, like chalkboards, overhead projectors or books. If you dont know how to use them, the information they hold never sees the light of day.

My $0.02,

Bowie J. Poag

Re:Forget that...

Thank you! I've been trying to get the point across for years that GUIs inhibit learning.

First a small rant.

I learned most of what I did because things were hard, intellectually. Now all anyone ever says is, "You'd make a lot of money if you could make ____ easier." Finally, someone said that about the install process for linux... I was mad. If I didn't install linux when there were no GUIs to help you... I'd be useless to my employers right now. I learned more in 50 hours (without sleep) than the entirety of school has taught me about computers.

It's apalling when EUs (end-users) who think they own the world complain about how difficult _____ is, and how every tech they know should go about fixing it.

What if we did eliminate every challenge in computer operation? If there's no challenge, there's no point.

Now, for the point.

In my opinion, computers shouldn't be marked unfit for the classroom, rather, I believe that most teachers should be marked unfit to teach a classroom full of computers. The assumption that computers inherently have a good or bad effect on learning is naive. If you put a capable teacher behind them, on the otherhand, you'll have more realistic results.


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script-fu: hash bang slash bin bash

Re:Computers don't work in the classroom

I agree with you on this. It's become common practice where I live to divert book money (both library book and text book) to buy either new computers or new software. Sometimes I think this is a really bad decision. Books are cool for lots of reasons. In the case of library books they don't ever need to be upgraded. The computer or software that is purchased instead may only have a life of a few years, and may not get fully used during that few years because of training issues.

I know of one particular junior high school that spend over $30,000 on routers, switches, etc. because they were going to do their own internet connectivity. It never got installed because no one knew how, and they wouldn't sub it out because they wouldn't admit their ignorance. Then the local phone company hooked them up with DSL at a discounted rate a couple of years later. As far as I know, all of that equipment is still rotting in a closet.

I believe that limited exposure to computers in the schools is a necessary thing. But I also believe that staying on the bleeding edge of technology at the cost of other budget items is a bad idea.

Stop paying so much attention to it!

The problem here is that teachers pay way to much attention to the computer. Way, way too much attention. If they had the kids in front of the TV as much as they do the computer, parents would be screaming and shouting. But nobody realizes that the computer is educationally equivalent to the TV, and should be treated as such. Stop paying so much attention to it, and get on with the education! Stop making big splashes about the computer in education, and just do what needs to be done.

Jeez.

Computers don't work in the classroom

Here are a few reasons why I'm still skeptical about computers in the classroom:

• Education is not just about transferring information, and isn't improved by transferring it more efficiently
• Kids will always know more than the teachers. This will inevitably lead to huge conflicts. The teacher in charge of computing is often the one who wasn't any good at anything else.
• Computers aren't programmable. Not anymore. They used to come with BASIC interpreters. Now you just get Windows on the home PC, or a Mac. Kids can't learn as they play.
• A lot of the so-called educational software is a joke, rewarding little kids with visual stimuli too easily, leading them to fire at the programmes at random. Some studies have found that a lot of the educational software for very young kids discourages rational thought and promotes trial and error.
• Multiuser systems in schools tend to be run on an utterly fascist basis, due to admin cluelessness and underfundedness.

That really was an unordered list.

Hrmmm

I think that the emphasis on having computers in the classroom is a bit too high. I think that people go out of their ways to find ways to put computers in every classroom. If there isn't really a reason for the computer, I don't see a reason to put it there. That's the case in most high schools. Some colleges dump ethernet jacks into every classroom. Sometimes this is useful, sometimes it isn't.

One interesting thought. I'm a computer science major. Most of my lectures are taught in rooms without computers (at least, not ones that we are really using). They get the concepts along fine without them as well. True, that means that I have to spend a few hours a week in a computer lab to get my assignments done, but what use would the computers be? If I'm in a math class learning Big-O notation, I could see a computer demo helping with the concepts (graphs and such), but if I'm a computer science major, and don't find it NECESSARY, I can hardly see how it is even applicable in most high school classrooms. I can see computers helping out a LOT, I can see how my classes are MUCH improved by their use, but when people are just saying, "Yeah, and we need a computer because computers are cool." It's kind of pointless.

Also, teachers should concentrate on actually teaching their students what they need to know. If computers are helping this, cool. Don't just have them sit and chat on ICQ during your lecture though, it's not productive. The only thing that that might help is the students who need a little distraction during your lecture. They might as well be reading a newspaper and ignoring you completely.

Anyways, just a few thoughts, use them if you can, but don't force it if it's useless.

Too extreme

I'm going to guess and say that Dr. Healey hasn't much of an idea as to what a computer actually is.

Which is understandable, and very common. As a geek, I (and likely most of you) run into this sort of thing all the time. Most people don't understand what the internet is; they understand what a web browser is. And it's darned hard to explain to somebody, "no, I can't show you Linux." I can show you Windowmaker, and I can show you a Bash prompt, but you have to understand what Linux itself is.

A computer is, in a sense, the universal machine. It can become a calculator, or a watch, or an artist's canvas... hypothetically even a brain. Now to say that a windows machine doesn't belong in the classroom, that's plausible. You can make a case, too, that kids don't need to be researching their Julius Caesar report on the web. But to say that computers stifle learning and creativity, and that young children should not be allowed on them for any reason at all? Oh, please! Even if you can't find any better use for them, you can't tell me filling a scan-tron sheet is more educational than clicking radio boxes.

Of course, then there's the other extreme: computers are the greatest educational tool since the guidance counselor (most of whom are real tools...). Any kid with the unhappy fate of going to school without one is doomed to misery, probably as a useless minor bureaucrat in a public school.

People were getting damned good educations before computers. Often better ones, in fact. Hell, in the late 19th century, 1 Englishman in 5 was a Dickens reader... enjoying grammar that would snap the poor minds of most folks today. And a kid with a good grounding in symbolic logic, even if he's never seen a computer, is going to be better suited for IT work than one who spent 13 years pointing and clicking his way though most schools' pseudo-educational crap.

Computers aren't necessary to a good education, but they're probably useful in providing one. How they may be useful doesn't seem to be well-understood by our teachers just yet, and they (the computers, not the teachers) doubless do much more harm than good when misused.

My somewhat off-topic opinion? In the US we've not even been able to settle on a curriculum that works, much less an approach to computers. A centrally orchestrated, one-size-fits-all approach develops as poor an educational system as an operating system. Separate school and state, let schools create their own computing policies, and watch the effective ideas propagate through the system. There's no sense in trying to figure out the best educational use of computers a priori. I think I might do a better job of it than Dr. Healey, but surely nowhere near as well as would a healthy system of creative competition.

Bridge the "computer gap"?

for years, we've been told that the "computer gap" or "technology gap" between underpriveleged students and white, middle-class students is going to leave the poor out of the lucrative technology jobs.
the solution is to get modern computers into schools, and to allocate massive federal funds to implement the solution.

right?

some questions for the slashdot audience:

1) which would you teach programming to a middle school student with:
a) an apple II with logo and BASIC.
b) a pentium III running Microsoft Visual Studio.

2) how many of you had computer classes in school that consisted of playing "oregon trail"?

3) do you think that computers in classrooms are being used to teach computer skills, or as glorified slide projectors?

4) how much does it cost to get large coporations to donate their old XT's and apples to your school? (hint: they're dying to use this as a tax writeoff).

5) do you need a pentium III to teach assembly to a child? will an XT do? might an old XT or an apple be better?

when i was 14 i designed a robot that would sweep a photocell across my room, detect intruders, and alert me via a modem. when i was 16 i used the same system to control an optical fiber-measuring test gear for a science fair. it was an apple II. i haven't seem a more accessible computer since.

-food for thought, and my 2c.

"The Internet," Roszak recently told The Dallas Morning News, "offers electronic graffiti. The idea that they should be swimming in a sea of information is idiotic. The essence of thinking is mastering ideas."

well i'm all for keeping 10-year-old third graders off of slashdot. we've got too many 30-year-old third graders already.

Computers teach kids the wrong lessons.

When I was in kindergarten, I had already learned the basics of reading before my classmates. So my teacher, in her infinite wisdom, sent me up one day a week to practice reading with the 3rd graders in the school's computer lab. The procedure was simple: I was given a color-coded disk (different colors meant different levels) which contained a story to read and then some comprehension questions. That way, students could read on their own and get instant feedback on their progress.

The program worked well, even given the basic hardware specs (Apple II's or XT's). There was no problem with me understanding the material -- even illustrations and hyperlinked definitions of "hard words" were available. However, the comprehension questions were a different story. Students who gave a wrong answer to the multiple-choice questions were prompted with a reassuring "Try Again!" and a chance to choose from the remaining options. Although the total score went down as a result of second-guessing and the usage of "hints" (eliminating incorrect answer choices a la "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire"'s 50-50) the teachers rarely paid attention and merely were on hand to dispense disks.

What does this teach children? If you're asked a question, choose any answer. If you're not correct, don't worry -- the computer will guide you in the right direction. The computer does all the processing, while the students exist to push buttons. Anything requiring cognition and thought, or (gasp!) an answer in some form other than multiple choice, is neglected completely. Of course, the lack of human interaction and group thinking also come into play.

Bottom line: computers are certainly very useful in education, but they should not replace teaching methods that involve more than just pushing buttons and getting responses.

Parents and teachers take note...

Big surprise.. NOT! Sitting a kid in front of the WWW isnt going to teach them anything any more than sitting them in front of daytime TV. As the article said, education is about teaching children to handle ideas and think creatively and coherently for themselves, not about feeding them data in the hope that they can someday connect it all into a body of knowledge. My kids access to the net is the same as access to the TV - restricted, monitored and controlled by mom & dad. If it has neither educational value nor acceptable standards of entertainment quality it doesnt get watched, whether its a TV program, a computer game or a www site.

Why is it such a shock to discover that pouring nothing but data into kids minds doesnt teach them to think about it?
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking

Re:Computers don't work in the classroom

So this doesn't mean that computers don't belong in the classroom, just that they're mismanaged. I agree that computers are handled horribly in schools, that 75% of the admins are morons, and that they're use is usually abused; but I if used properly, I think that they can augment the learning process. Learning games probably aren't a good idea, since the computers in classrooms are designed to give information, not teach, but if they are used for informational purposes (perhaps a history or science lesson) they may be useful. Also, as you said, computers used to come with BASIC interpreters, and they should again. If basic algorithms are taught along with mathematics, that would be useful as well. I don't think we need to automatically say that computers are evil in classrooms, we simply need to rethink the way that they are handled.

More of the same old cant.

I've been involved off and on in education for some years as a volunteer and as part of non governmental organizations concerned with education. The contrarian blowhards have been beating the anti computer drum for years (for example the Waldorf school people, or Fritjoff Capra of Tao of Physics fame).

Now, I'm a contrarian myself, but I have two problems with the way these people think. The first is the straw man argument. They like to hold up a particularly feckless attempt to use computers in education as a model for the whole, rather than searching for the best (e.g. Seymour Papert's Logo work). The second problem is one of false dichotomy -- you really should be doing X (for example lab work) rather than computers -- as if "doing computers" should be a subject matter that displaces something else.

For example, take Cliff Stoll's observation in the article [the instant gratification involved in downloading information off the Internet - to which 94 per cent of America's public schools are now connected] "discourages study, reflection, and observation". Note the heavy paraphrasing from the article, to be fair to Mr. Stoll.

Sure, downloading somebody's unsubstantiated opinion is not going to do anything for a student's intellectual ability. But look at how bad biology texts are -- we are perilously close to that situation with textbooks today. Perhaps they would be better off downloading an essay on evolution by an eminent biologist [brembs.net]. Like the open-sourcers say -- use the source. Go back to the Federalist papers and see what the founders actually thought. Read Milton on free speech, Jefferson on the problem of slavery, Einstein's letters to Roosevelt on the atomic bomb, or find out how a dictator thinks by reading Mein Kampf. You can get it all on the Internet.

I'm not an expert in educational systems, but I see two great possibilities for using computers, both of which are hobbled by fatal flaws in our educational values.

(1) The Internet. Criticizing the Internet for having educationally valueless content is silly -- the same can be said for your local library. However, sending children off to do assignments on the Internet without training in critical reading and thinking is folly. Unfortunately, kids are trained in the mechanics of reading more than the philosophy and art of reading -- questioning the provenance of an idea, going to original sources, detecting rhetoric and logical fallacy.

(2) The computer as a creative tool. The fact is, all kinds of creative activities such as art, music or computer programming are given short shrift. How can the computer be used as a creative tool if the student doesn't have outlets for creativity?

Modern Society In General Discourages Reflection

Modern society in general discourages study, reflection, and observation.

As James Glieck points out in Faster, we used to wait weeks between lettered discussions and conversations -- even in professional fields. With the advent of typewriters and the enhancement of the postal service, this was reduced to days. Still, days of contemplation and reflection are good. You have time to think about things before you comment on them or reply to them, while waiting for a response.

In this instantaneous age, you have seconds, minutes or hours. I fire an email off to a customer, student or friend and can often receive an immediate response. Not much thought there. Or, if there is a lot of thought, certainly not much pause for reflection and contemplation before hitting the send button. We would consider minutes to be sufficient time for thinking these days.

Political polls are the same. What used to be a matter of days and weeks to form opinions now is, literally, seconds. Ten seconds after a politician says something, it is regurgitated on the news in sound-bites and immediately, opinions which have not been codified and split-second polls are returned and broadcast. Shazam -- you now have material to form your ill-understood opinion on.

Let's not just blame this on computers and the internet -- or short attention spans of children. Processing of information has grown greater than exponentially. If we're going to blame anything, blame TV Dinners, 22-minute news-casts, 10 second commercial jingles and minute-rice.
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seumas.com

The real problem:My opinion

Is that teachers aren't properly educated as to what's going on in the world of computers.

These teachers go to school for 4-5 years learning what? How to teach! The teachers themselves can barely understand what's going on with the computers.

I do tech work at a school district in a Pittsburgh suburb, and if what I've seen is typical, then it's completely understandable that kids aren't learning anything more than button pushing in school.

I've had teachers fill out work request forms for their computers and when I go to take a look, the problem is that THE KEYBOARD IS UNPLUGGED! Or the power cord is not plugged in! Or the monitor isn't plugged into the computer.

The teachers who have no clue come in many different varieties, the ones which I detest most are
1. The 'pretty girls'. They have this "I'm just a girl, tee hee" attitude and don't care how ignorant they are.
2. The almost retired. They have the "I'm outta here in 5 more years so screw this learning new stuff crap." attitude.
3. The administrators. "I make $100,000 per year so I don't need to understand a fucking thing."

The people in charge of the school can barely turn the computers on and use them, how in the world do you expect them to be able to teach kids how?

LK

Re:Forget that...

what could possibly be bad about introducing computers to kids?

It serves no purpose and doesn't teach children anything?

Don't get me wrong, if your going to attempt to teach children something about computers, then, by all means, but a computer in each class room, and install Logo, or BASIC, or something.

But, don't do what was done to me. In the school district I grew up in, every grade (small schools too) had it's own computer room, which consisted of about 40 computers. So, once a week, we would join up with another class, and go to the computer room to learn.

This consisted mainly of three actives, in order of use:

1. Playing learning games. Absolutely useless. You learned how to play stupid games that were supposed to teach you grammar and math. Almost always the edutainment games seemed to be below our learning level. I can never once remembering a game that reinforced some just taught lesson. It seems to me that this was just done to give the teachers a break from teaching us.
2. Writing essays and such. Mildly useful, but still pointless. Perhaps if they had instructed us on how to use a word processor, it would have been good, but instead most students would hand write their essay, and edit it using pen and paper techniques. Then, in one shot, type it into the computer, and this was the preferred way, since it kept the children out of the teacher's hair (they often knew very little about how to actually use the word processing program)
3. Actual instruction on computers. I had one class (the only one ever offered to me) on programming. It was in Pascal, and this was only in high school. They should have done this more often.

Perhaps it's just a bad experience, and I had lazy teachers, but I don't think it's that abnormal. Computers were just used as gaming devices, in a bizarre attempt to ease parents concerns that we would be ready for the coming technology age.

All of my knowledge of programming (I took the final for the Pascal class the second week and didn't have to take the class) came from my self-teaching, by reading books and the like. So as a result, I tend to think I would have been better off (merely because my teachers would have been forced to teach me more) if our schools didn't have computers. And that coming from someone who makes his living as a "Software Engineer".

Damn Right

Damn Right. In my middle/high school we had a computer network. Guess what? It was only used to play pirated network games, experiment with virii, BIOS passwords, and other nasty stuff, and just generally give the poor underpaid admin way to many headaches. The computer is only needed in the classroom as far as it can be a supplement. Just like a pull-down map. It can be a learning aid. But people shouldn't pretend that it is the teacher and subject itself.

Re:Computers don't work in the classroom

Another thing to add to that list is that computers are comparatively expensive to buy and maintain. Yeah, some of the stuff sounds great in theory, but when my wife's school (in a good area, BTW) runs short on funds for buying pencils, for god sakes, you have to wonder why they are spending multiple thousands per classroom for something that most teachers don't know how to use.

They just don't want the saccharine.

I read through this article, and I have to agree with these educators: Bringing the cutesy video-game world of Windows and the MTV-esqe Internet (not the meaty content that experienced surfers go for, but the eye candy kids will gravitate to naturally) would be little better than having kids watch cartoons all day in class.

I got a computer of my own for my eighth birthday. Prior to that, I had used other people's computers to program, both at school and at friends' houses. I learned quite a lot on that machine, because it was a machine that did little on its own. It was raw clay, and I got to learn how to sculpt. How could you deny that that's valuable to a child?

Sure, there were game cartridges, and yes, I played them. (Moon Patrol anyone?) But kids have N64 or Dreamcast or PS2 or whatever nowadays, and so don't need the computer for that. Most of the value I derived from my computer was learning how to make it do things. It was like a box of Legos, only the building blocks were program statements and the structures I built were on a TV screen.

Today's computers aren't like that. Rather, they're like TV. Force feed eye candy. They exist for "wow" and "fluff." I personally had started falling into that trap in the PC world. I got pulled out of that trap when I went to college and learned Unix. Now, whenever I go to use a PC running Windows, I feel like I'm watching MTV or something. It's all so uselessly flashy and relatively devoid of content compared to its volume.

It's really sad.

I intend to keep my Apple ][e's, Commodore 64's, TI-99/4A's, and so on, to give my kids machines to learn on. When they're old enough, I'll give them logins on my Linux network and start teaching them C or some other structured language, before BASIC's brain-rot sets in too heavily -- you're ok if you catch them by puberty.

Sitting a kid in front of a web browser does not teach computing. Showing a kid how to make the computer do things it's not already trained to do (ie. program) opens the door for true creative exploration.

No comments about posture though... (as I slouch heavily into my chair).

--Joe
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