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Computers are a drag on learning?
Dec. 9th, 2004 01:31 amAn article in the Christian Science Monitor (man, I hated it when their radio news show went off the air!) reports that too much working with computers can be bad for young people.
They surveyed "...175,000 15-year-old students in 31 countries..." and found that "...performance in math and reading had suffered significantly among students who have more than one computer at home."
This is something that I've given a lot of thought to over the years. I first started working with computers in grade school back in 1974. I currently work in a college computer lab. And one thing that I see in a lot of people of all ages is a weakening of critical thinking. Cliff Stoll, who, as an astronomy grad student, discovered the infiltration of an East German group of hackers funded by the KGB (he wrote a book about it called The Cuckoo's Egg and they made a Nova/PBS special about it), has written two books on the internet and computers in education called Silicon Snake Oil (1996) and High-Tech Heretic (2000) where he criticizes the overuse of computers in early education. I tend to agree with him overall and I think a lot of these "computers in the classroom" programs are not much more than pork barrel projects to give computer companies a lot of money.
An example. Mr. Stoll has a friend who is an elementary school teacher. Every year said teacher divides his class into two parts and assigns them a research paper, both groups do it on the same subject. One group uses only the library, one uses only the internet. The library group has consistently outperformed the internet group.
There has been a phrase used to describe the world wide web: it is an information resource infinitely wide, but only a millimeter deep.
Not too long ago a friend was finishing up a teaching degree, I tried to get them to read the books (they’re not that big of a read, they’re basically collections of essays) but they think that computers are absolutely essential to education and never found the time.
This now becomes a specific rant on PowerPoint. What is a presentation? In this blogger's ever so humble opinion, it is a person in front of a group who is trying to convey information. Back in the early days of computers, we had software that helped us generate slides. Later we had printers that allowed us to directly make transparencies for overhead projectors. In those days a presentation would consist of a presenter talking to the audience and using occasional slides and graphs to reinforce points.
Then along comes PowerPoint. The number of presentations explodes as people discover the niftiness of dissolves, wipes, fades, animation, sound, etc., all of which can be projected in front of the audience. So what has happened? Usually the presenter spends all his time making an incredibly nifty-looking PowerPoint package, and then when the presentation is given, they stand there and read the slides to you.
This is THE BORINGEST way to convey information! So many people have poor personal animation, they just stand there and read the slides to you, usually with zero inflection in their voice. Or they choose horrible font colors that don’t stand out from the background, and suddenly you’re glad that they are reading their slides to you because YOU CAN’T READ THE BLOODY THINGS!
If they’re not going to convey any information not found in the slides, just print the damn things out and let me take them home and read them.
In the astronomy class that I finish next week, every lab group had to prepare a presentation to give to the class. It could be on anything involving astronomy as long as the teacher approved it. I suggested to my two partners that we drive up to Lowell Observatory with digital cameras, photograph it up one side and down the other, and work out some presentations from there. One guy opened with talking about the observatory as a whole, the second about Percival Lowell and Mars, I followed up with the discovery of Pluto.
We worked out butts off. We read books, we researched online, and we built good PowerPoint presentations. The slides consisted mainly of photographs, drawings, and talking points. We NEVER simply read the slide, we had notes in front of us that we followed. And we rehearsed our speeches as we had only 15 minutes as a group to serve up our shtick and we had to have it reasonably divided between us three. And we pulled it off with aplomb. When I finished the last slide on Pluto, we got the strongest applause of any other presentation by the class. I think we got a 93 overall (out of 100) for what we did.
Zero slide transition effects. Zero animation. Zero sound from PowerPoint. One font. Three different background colors for the three different parts (red for Mars, dark blue for Pluto, I think green for the observatory), white text on top of it that was easily read. WE the presenters did the work, PowerPoint reinforced what we were talking about.
THAT is a presentation.
Then I go to work/school and I see the presentations that people are putting together for classes and it drives me nuts. I have ranted with some co-workers and with a couple of students, and once I explain my position, they agree with me. They’re probably just being polite to get the hell away from the lunatic, but at least they’re seeming to agree with me.
Final point. PowerPoint got so bad in its abuse that parts of the US Army, if not the whole organization, FORBADE the use of PowerPoint in presentations! They found that an enormous amount of time was being wasted by people tweaking presentations to get them to look “just right” and get all the transition effects perfect. Without PowerPoint, meeting times went down, productivity went up.
So if you ever see me give a presentation using PowerPoint that uses transitions and special effects and sound and animation and crap and I’m not grimacing in pain every time the slide changes, just shoot me: obviously I’ll be too far gone to care.
End of rant. Thank you for your time. If you are amazingly bored and have any interest in learning more about the discovery of Pluto, I'm considering posting my presentation and notes online. The presentation is also available on VHS and DVD, soon to be a major motion picture. Coming soon to a theatre near you, get in line now!
They surveyed "...175,000 15-year-old students in 31 countries..." and found that "...performance in math and reading had suffered significantly among students who have more than one computer at home."
This is something that I've given a lot of thought to over the years. I first started working with computers in grade school back in 1974. I currently work in a college computer lab. And one thing that I see in a lot of people of all ages is a weakening of critical thinking. Cliff Stoll, who, as an astronomy grad student, discovered the infiltration of an East German group of hackers funded by the KGB (he wrote a book about it called The Cuckoo's Egg and they made a Nova/PBS special about it), has written two books on the internet and computers in education called Silicon Snake Oil (1996) and High-Tech Heretic (2000) where he criticizes the overuse of computers in early education. I tend to agree with him overall and I think a lot of these "computers in the classroom" programs are not much more than pork barrel projects to give computer companies a lot of money.
An example. Mr. Stoll has a friend who is an elementary school teacher. Every year said teacher divides his class into two parts and assigns them a research paper, both groups do it on the same subject. One group uses only the library, one uses only the internet. The library group has consistently outperformed the internet group.
There has been a phrase used to describe the world wide web: it is an information resource infinitely wide, but only a millimeter deep.
Not too long ago a friend was finishing up a teaching degree, I tried to get them to read the books (they’re not that big of a read, they’re basically collections of essays) but they think that computers are absolutely essential to education and never found the time.
This now becomes a specific rant on PowerPoint. What is a presentation? In this blogger's ever so humble opinion, it is a person in front of a group who is trying to convey information. Back in the early days of computers, we had software that helped us generate slides. Later we had printers that allowed us to directly make transparencies for overhead projectors. In those days a presentation would consist of a presenter talking to the audience and using occasional slides and graphs to reinforce points.
Then along comes PowerPoint. The number of presentations explodes as people discover the niftiness of dissolves, wipes, fades, animation, sound, etc., all of which can be projected in front of the audience. So what has happened? Usually the presenter spends all his time making an incredibly nifty-looking PowerPoint package, and then when the presentation is given, they stand there and read the slides to you.
This is THE BORINGEST way to convey information! So many people have poor personal animation, they just stand there and read the slides to you, usually with zero inflection in their voice. Or they choose horrible font colors that don’t stand out from the background, and suddenly you’re glad that they are reading their slides to you because YOU CAN’T READ THE BLOODY THINGS!
If they’re not going to convey any information not found in the slides, just print the damn things out and let me take them home and read them.
In the astronomy class that I finish next week, every lab group had to prepare a presentation to give to the class. It could be on anything involving astronomy as long as the teacher approved it. I suggested to my two partners that we drive up to Lowell Observatory with digital cameras, photograph it up one side and down the other, and work out some presentations from there. One guy opened with talking about the observatory as a whole, the second about Percival Lowell and Mars, I followed up with the discovery of Pluto.
We worked out butts off. We read books, we researched online, and we built good PowerPoint presentations. The slides consisted mainly of photographs, drawings, and talking points. We NEVER simply read the slide, we had notes in front of us that we followed. And we rehearsed our speeches as we had only 15 minutes as a group to serve up our shtick and we had to have it reasonably divided between us three. And we pulled it off with aplomb. When I finished the last slide on Pluto, we got the strongest applause of any other presentation by the class. I think we got a 93 overall (out of 100) for what we did.
Zero slide transition effects. Zero animation. Zero sound from PowerPoint. One font. Three different background colors for the three different parts (red for Mars, dark blue for Pluto, I think green for the observatory), white text on top of it that was easily read. WE the presenters did the work, PowerPoint reinforced what we were talking about.
THAT is a presentation.
Then I go to work/school and I see the presentations that people are putting together for classes and it drives me nuts. I have ranted with some co-workers and with a couple of students, and once I explain my position, they agree with me. They’re probably just being polite to get the hell away from the lunatic, but at least they’re seeming to agree with me.
Final point. PowerPoint got so bad in its abuse that parts of the US Army, if not the whole organization, FORBADE the use of PowerPoint in presentations! They found that an enormous amount of time was being wasted by people tweaking presentations to get them to look “just right” and get all the transition effects perfect. Without PowerPoint, meeting times went down, productivity went up.
So if you ever see me give a presentation using PowerPoint that uses transitions and special effects and sound and animation and crap and I’m not grimacing in pain every time the slide changes, just shoot me: obviously I’ll be too far gone to care.
End of rant. Thank you for your time. If you are amazingly bored and have any interest in learning more about the discovery of Pluto, I'm considering posting my presentation and notes online. The presentation is also available on VHS and DVD, soon to be a major motion picture. Coming soon to a theatre near you, get in line now!
