<i>The prospect of children surfing the Web and clicking through their lessons while teachers, or non-teacher chaperones, pace the room is an emerging reality, especially in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi, where personalized “ed tech” is offered as a balm for budget austerity. “There’s been hyperbolic claims about the ability of these new technologies to radically transform schools,” Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education at Brown University, told me.</i><p>This is personalized learning at its worst. Startups are marketing themselves to districts as a means of achieving the same outcomes with fewer teachers. That's harmful to society and will result in lower quality education for the poor.<p>Technology is a powerful tool for education but it is no substitute for teacher-student interaction. It's best used for administrative duties such as segmenting students into groups, aggregating data for reports, facilitating collaboration by making longitudinal student information more accessible and digestible to teachers. It's a useful replacement for textbook and handout based homework, and enables students to consume and information from a variety of sources. It's not a substitute for interacting with teachers.<p>Also, there needs to be more regulation to protect student information. FERPA (the law that's supposed to protect student data) makes student data less secure. Under that law, health records that pertain to the student's education (such as the diagnosis of learning disabilities) are no longer protected by HIPAA. FERPA has no such security requirements.
I'm 100% for using data to help personalize learning but I strongly believe using a computer for even half of the learning leads to large negative results in social skills & physical health.<p>Instead of using the tech start up mentality, I think a lot more benefit could be done by helping teachers build relationships with there students & having open dialogue on what they like & what they don't. I get that this means throwing more money at lower teacher/student ratios which is hard to do but I think it would have a greater impact than tech. I say this as someone whose life & thoughts towards learning did a 180 once they were introduced to the internet & computers in the 90s.<p>Yes, computers can change the lesson plan & personalize per student faster & better than a teacher. But at what cost?<p>While multiple techniques exists, are there that many that a teacher can't try multiple out on there students and record how they respond? I feel if we had reasonable classroom sizes of 10:1 this would be fairly easy to do.<p>I also feel we could cut down the amount of info we jam into students heads & focus on learning the more important concepts. I believe Bill Gates & many others have started preaching this as well.<p>You don't need to learn everything but there are some core skills that we don't spend enough time on that will benefit us much longer.
<i>>Personalized learning, though premised on differentiating one student from another, has seemed to work best when it attends, first and foremost, to the needs of teachers as a group. If tech is, indeed, merely a tool of personalized learning, then what does that make the teacher?</i><p>It makes the teacher more of a facilitator/coach/mentor and also a proctor for administering tests.<p>This is a long article and headline of <i>"personalized learning"</i> and how it was described in the article was unfamiliar to me. That jargon of "personalized learning" seems to translate to "laptop-based learning". The laptop/Chromebook is the <i>primary</i> transmission of material. The teacher becomes a <i>secondary</i> role -- help answer extra questions/etc.<p>The author of the article is biased with the premise that the teachers that are physically there in the classroom are the best transmitters of the material. This is <i>theoretically</i> possible but reality is that you often get an ok or under-average teacher. The result is a bad teacher that confuses and frustrates the students instead of teaching them. With laptop-led learning, you could assemble the best instructors (or multiple alternative virtual teachers) instead of being restricted to the random quality of the local teacher where you happen to pay your taxes.<p>As a personal example... None of my math teachers from 1st grade to high school were as good as Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown)[0]. (I think many HN'rs might have a similar life schooling comparison.) I would have been better off with high-quality math lessons from a laptop and then consulting with the in-classroom teacher acting as a coach to supplement the videos. The alternative of watching teachers bored with their jobs did not help me learn math.<p>That said, I can see where some kids won't respond to laptops and need a live instructor to transmit information. This is where we can <i>personalize</i> the curriculum. Some kids use more laptop videos; others utlilize the live teacher.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/videos" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/vid...</a>
I'll give you the other side. Think of this from a developing country perspective - we don't have enough teachers. But we have a billion people. We need to educate them.<p>We can't train teachers fast enough. Not to mention the 20 different languages that India has.<p>We need this to work.
> If every child had a computer or iPad, she could log into a customized cyber classroom and learn at her own pace.<p>Who determines what her own pace should be, and how do they do that?<p>One of the biggest problems I've had when learning things on my own has been pacing. Suppose learning the subject requires first learning A, then B, then C, and so on, each part building upon the previous parts.<p>I'll tend to end up spending too much time on some parts. I might, say, get stuck on B because I'm not confident I'm good enough at B to move on, even though my B is actually sufficient to support C.<p>Other parts I don't spend enough time on. Let's say I find D uninteresting, but am really looking forward to E. I'll tend to rush through D, just getting a superficial understanding, and move on to E without adequate preparation.
I think that the main problem of a customized and changing over time curriculum is that it's hard to maintain connections to information in long term memory over time. Ever since I started using a spaced repetition/interleaving program, I find that I can start learning something, then walk away for as long as I like, and be able to come back to the subject not just fresh, but with the previous information far more entrenched than before.<p>This allows me to jump around my interests rapidly within the limited time that I have for learning difficult subjects, and means that the time that I do spend on particularly difficult subjects that require deep understanding isn't wasted.<p>I think that meta-learning is a key subject that any learner should start with, then messiness isn't a problem anymore. If I had learned it 20 years ago, I probably wouldn't have lost all of that wonderful college expertise.
It's hard to believe there is no hard data as far as test scores. I would expect more of that in an article like this.<p>I assume there are studies that show significant improvement in test scores as well as some studies that show no improvement or even regression.<p>I think how well it works depends on how well the students are supervised, the actual content of the programs, the parameters such as required learning rate, how well the particular software works or not, how closely the software tracks or does not track with the standardized tests, etc.<p>For things like algebra I had to use pencil. How do computer instructions handle work like equations and math?
I am patiently waiting (in fear?) for the day when we have "educational ad exchanges". The Gates Foundation and CZI put up a $500M slush fund for "rockstar" teachers to bid on impressions, while publishers lobby to abolish CIPA, COPPA and FERPA in the name of a "quality" education for all.
Not a good example of personalized learning.
This is more of a hyper-virtualized school system. I'd say ot's obviously bad for children to be so immersed in technology and not get the necessary personal interaction people need to thrive.<p>Personalized learning is perhaps best observed in a homeschool-like environment.
Personalized learning would work super well if the US has a standard national criculum. Then a student could take the same module online if it wasn’t clicking at school and learn the same concept from a different instructor and perspective. Otherwise it’s super difficult to match concepts up
In the utterly amateur teaching I have done the key thing, which someone will never get from a computer, has always, always, always been convincing the student that they are smart and that they can learn this stuff or indeed anything. Next most important is generic how to learn stuff, which for the people I have taught usually starts with relaxation exercises and other techniques to overcome their fight or flight reactions to get to a place of relaxed enjoyment.<p>I don't know how that replicates to other, better, more experienced teachers observations of it. If it is as important as I think, I don't know how you get that from a computer.<p>Learning and study abilities are tortured and murdered by the constant re-enforcement of "you can't, you're not smart enough, them over there, they are better."<p>Maybe I'm over emphasising a point that is less important than I think but also maybe <i>not</i>. It's a point that needs an airing here either way. Interested in your thoughts, especially if you have experience.
Lower teacher pupil ratios and more personal attention to learning. Machines have a role but denying the role of the pedagogue feels wrong. And corporatism. Why is education hold hostage by big data outcomes? Ethics potholes.
individualized learning is also part of montessori, and, it has been championed by the OLPC project as one of the possible outcomes of giving a computer to every child. so this is not new. most of all, montessori is doing it without computers.
The education industry is not doing its job? Who knew?! Me! Because I went through it and had my life ruined by it. I say this as a 30 year old man. I went to public school where the following happened:<p>- I was not only intellectually neglected, I was intellectually poisoned. The result was worse than if I had just been left by myself as far as education and intellectual development. They don’t just not do their job, they sabotage kids<p>- I was subjected to bullying that has had mental health ramifications that persist even now. Everyone knew and nobody did anything. The teachers don’t do anything and the admins don’t do anything. They watch knowingly as kids under their care are viscously bullied, doing nothing.<p>Teachers are stupid. There is no other way to put it. Public education is a free daycare service. The kids who succeed in public school succeed in spite of the teachers and their circumstances, not because of them. It is not an exaggeration to say that subjecting a child to public education is abusive. Look at the average Americans understanding of maths and geography — they are basically retarded compared to other western nations. But nobody cares and nobody does anything. Saying that any alternative is too expensive is bullshit. Utter bullshit. Take grandma, who is starved for human interaction, and move her in. She watches over the child while he does assignments given to him by you and while he is tutored by starving PhD candidates and undergraduates who are actually smart and passionate. They will do it for peanuts. I know I would have when I was a starving student. Socialize the child by engaging in social activities such as soccer leagues and other things. Sleepovers, whatever. I just invented a method of education that is guaranteed to give you better results than a public school and probably costs a similar amount when you account for all the therapy you’d have to pay for from the bullying and whatever.