Terralthra wrote:People who bitch about having devices that can access reference libraries measurable in petabytes are so stupid I don't understand how you think brains work. Human memory is bad. There are huge limits on what humans can remember, and they aren't even clear or bright borders: your memory doesn't clearly report to you "I don't remember this fact," it gives you the wrong fact.
Offloading that onto something that is capable of perfect recall lets you spend your neurons on thinking and remembering your own experience and perceiving things in the world, and that's a huge win.
Smartphones are bad because they are distractions to concentrated focused learning, not because they provide easy access to vast libraries of information.
Yes; the obstacle is the distraction power. Students are given a shiny toy at thirteen, one which the teacher cannot easily confiscate because it cost hundreds of dollars and the parents don't want it lost.
They start being obsessed with the shiny toy... the access it allows to their social network... and they
never think again.
So you end up with alleged college students whose brains have still not matured beyond whatever level they were at when they were thirteen, simply because they never did any thinking hard enough to put their brain to the test beyond that time.
Which is even worse when the child was behind grade level
then, because then you have mental ten year olds wandering around in eighteen year old bodies, with eighteen year old belligerence and hormones.
Jub wrote:This has been my experience, we could let kids take devices into a test to look things up and make the tests about demonstrating knowledge rather than memorizing things. Sure it means not reusing tests any more and ensuring that there are multiple tests handed out per classroom so students don't cheat, but there aren't many situations these days where one can't juts look something up. Even cheating by asking another student for answers is kind of like the networking I do at my job when I ask the tier 2 support guys for help with a problem I don't have the info/know how to solve.
Except then you do not have an accurate measure of
what that individual person knows, which means you cannot certify that they know what they are expected to know.
The fact that you have a good friend willing to tell you how to do your math and write your essays doesn't mean
you should get a diploma. It doesn't mean
you should be accepted to college. It doesn't mean
you should get hired.
All the knowledge is in your friend's head, so all the credentials should go to them, not you. And who in their right mind would hire someone for money to do a job when every time they hit a problem of more than trivial difficulty, they have to call a friend? At that point it makes more sense to just hire the friend and have done with it.
The biggest issue with schools and phone is that the schools and teaching methods are archaic, outdated, and unlikely to change any time soon. It's one of the largest reasons that I won't become a teacher in spite of my love of passing on knowledge.
Actually, schools all over the US (I can't speak for other nations) are scrambling to adopt modern technology. The problem isn't resistance to the technology. The problem is figuring out
how the hell to get useful results from the technology. Especially when special software is called for.
Don't speak so confidently about practices in a profession of which you are ignorant.
Joun_Lord wrote:There is nothing wrong with augmenting ones own knowledge with the reams of knowledge available at a touch.
It starts to become a problem when all a persons knowledge is online and they think they are smarter for it. Its the problem of calculators magnified, where people think they don't need to know math because they can just get a calculator to do it for them. Now kids seem to think they don't need to know anything because Google will tell them.
Then let these kids fail for once, learn their lesson and try again next year. Letting people fail for shit like this is one of the things that educators seem to have forgotten how to do.
Educators remember. Believe me, we do.
The bureaucratic administrations that run the school districts forgot.
In my district, I can give the kid an F all I want in first year algebra. They
still wind up in geometry and second year algebra courses next year. It's a matter of county policy.
Why is that so? I couldn't tell you.
But it's sure as heck not the educators making this systematic mistake.
Jub wrote:Darmalus wrote:Jub wrote:Then let these kids fail for once, learn their lesson and try again next year. Letting people fail for shit like this is one of the things that educators seem to have forgotten how to do.
The current system punishes educators harder for failed students than the students themselves. Simon Jester can no doubt go into the details of the mental calculus used to determine if it's worth it to fail a student or fudge the grades and shovel them along.
That's the system being broken, not cellphones being an issue. A system that can't adapt to the times is a system that has already failed, and the US education system is broken, misguided, and politicized all to hell and going nowhere fast in terms of productive reform.
The cell phones are an issue because they make an existing problem worse. The children were already undisciplined and insulated from the consequences of failure, and now they have
a new way to fail, one that is if anything more seductive and appealing than the ones before.
The broken-ness of the system comes, quite simply, from the American taxpayer's insistence that 100% of their children receive a high school diploma, and that anything less indicates failure on the
school's part, when in reality the failure is usually on the part of the parent or the student.
Imagine a school that is basically required,
by policy from above, to keep every kid who doesn't try to blow up the school or murder someone with an axe. Regardless of whether those kids are wandering the halls instead of attending actual classes. Regardless of how many classes they fail because they never actually try to do anything. Regardless of how constantly they behave in grossly disrespectful and disruptive ways, regardless of how blatantly they spit upon the people trying to provide them with a free all-expenses-paid education.
Welcome to my world.
The only reason American schools are even keeping performance
on par with what it was in the 1960s and 1970s is because, even as they took away our ability to protect students from the chronic troublemakers and delinquents among their ranks,
educators did a great deal of research into how to teach more effectively.
There have been major breakthroughs in theory of education in the past few decades, and computers enable a lot of very interesting teaching techniques, which a lot of educators are very actively trying to use,
directly contrary to Jub's claims.
The main obstacles to accomplishing this are the very bad disciplinary environment, and the massive waves of standardized testing that drain off so much of the time and energy we need in order to innovate. Basically, we can't afford to come up with technological solutions to our problems because we're too busy coming up with technological solutions to how to administer tests.
