Technology

As a Computer Scientist, I increasingly believe this tech might actually be poison for the human mind, and I'm not sure what to do about it.

I want to believe we can make it actually useful. But I don't know if that's possible or not.

I suppose what’s needed is to look at data from other countries and see if the data is similar. They’ve found a correlation but, as anybody remotely versed in science should know, correlation does not imply causation

I've been hearing about this. And the software isn't great, I hear stories of kids taking tests online and software glitches keep them from completing the tests. I love computers, but you know what always works? Pencil and paper.

• Correlation

• Causation

Hey, Computer, what's been happening to

• Average Class size
• Average teacher years of experience
• Average annual hours in school

Had it been?

• Up
• Down
• Down

But sure, also, they've replaced a stack of 5 lb textbooks nobody reads with a tablet computer nobody uses.

"The kids are so smart they figured out this computer stuff I could never" - 75 yo Deborah, School District Superintendent

No Deborah, the kids had a mandatory computer literacy class which helped them understand the fundamentals of computing.

Key word "had"

You know, it wasn't always like this

Not very long ago, just before your time
Right before the towers fell, circa '99
This was catalogs, travel blogs, a chatroom or two
We set our sights and spent our nights waiting
For you, you, insatiable you
Mommy let you use her iPad, you were barely two
And it did all the things we designed it to do
Now, look at you, oh, ha, look at you
You, you, unstoppable, watchable
Your time is now, your inside's out, honey, how you grew
And if we stick together, who knows what we'll do?
It was always the plan
to put the world in your hand

~ Bo Burnham

Welcome to the Internet

Kind of hard to take the article seriously when it ends with:

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We should be investing in teachers not technology.

I'm sure the systemic defunding and dismantling of the public education system across the United States at the hands of Republican lawmakers over the same timeframe has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Don't forget that Google made big bucks on that deal.

Public money gets funneled to the tech bros and the population gets dumber. It's a conservative win-win.

I meana, sure. There's a cognitive decline when they get gunned down in their classrooms, or even just the perpetual stress of having to live with that threat on a daily basis.

The problem isn't the technology, but the implementation.

The USA should have had a national digital textbook initiative, where free textbooks are developed and digitally distributed to all schools of every educational level. Each textbook can have modules and problem generators, designed to make it easy for teachers to assemble a custom curriculum for their class, to assign problems, and to quickly have generic quizzes graded.

The biggest problem with such a program would be things like essays, culture, and history, since many bad actors would want to press their beliefs onto students. Still, things like dates, locations, and people involved with events can be standardized. Maybe teachers can rate educational modules, to help keep bad material from being adopted by most teachers?

I studied things without technology. I take notes on pen and paper, and i hate having to do online tests too. I like my printed documents and physical books. Many students will say the same, and i also tend to dislike the trend to digitise every and each aspect of learning. The truth out there is that analog classrooms work better than this chromebook hellhole, but many of you are not ready to hear that. Technology is also the problem.

So who benefits from $30bn in spending on Laptops and Tablets? Oh Apple and Microsoft. Not students. Surprise surprise.

As with many of these articles there is a big caveat - Gen Z in the USA. It does not follow that this research applies across the world. It'd be interesting to see how other rich countries outcomes are different with their differing approaches to this. For example here in the UK I don't believe there has been a wholesale move to laptops/tablets for every student in schools. Technology is certainly used but it's not solely about students using laptops and tablets. Its things like smart wide boards, and the use of digital content to engage attention and so forth. Spending billions on laptops for all would be a scandal when school buildings need renewing for example.

I would hazard to suggest that the US education system is being corrupted in a similar way to other parts of the US state, with big expensive projects decided at state level by the Republicans and Democrats thanks to lobbying, benefiting big companies but not citizens. This is instead of money going to areas of proven benefit such as more teachers, school infrastructure renewal, or funding of homework clubs, after school activities, breakfast clubs or free school meals. Things proven to make a difference across the world but things that don't benefit big US corporations.

And lets be honest, if you wanted to give every student a laptop you wouldn't be going to Apple or Microsoft. You'd save money and go for generic hardware and a license free operating system like Linux. But that would be an anathema to both the Democrats and the Republicans, who have signed off huge spending on overpriced tech.

Also the underfunding of teachers and overall mismanagement in persuit of profits.

It’s so sad that we love shitting in younger generations and we love making things harder for them. This isn’t a new concept btw. Americas been doing that for generations

The problem isn’t keyboards it’s the policies and reasoning.

I completely blame ChromeOS.

Even on AD snafu'd windows, the first thing we all did was figure out how to bypass any block and do what we wanted to.

Kids are growing up not knowing there are things you can do aside from accessing the internet and loading crappy webpages.

Probubbly cuz you gave the tools and didn't begin the process of using it for schools, dumbasses.

Capable of what though? We have all the evidence we need that our parents and their parents are brain damaged. Maybe that kind of cognitive capability is bad and there's a goldilocks zone to go back to.

Correlation =/= causation. Somehow other countries did it right? So maybe it's just US thing

Meanwhile we’re integrating AI into classrooms. Surely nothing bad will come from that.

I suspect that if Gen Z designed their own cognitive tests, their tests would determine that we older generations were less cognitively capable than them.

The reality is that every generation adapts in different ways to fit their own cognitive circumstances, and one generation’s metric is at best an imperfect match for another—“cognitive capacity” can’t be objectively measured.