Sounded like a topic that fits in here...


== Forwarded Message Follows =========================================

 * Originally By: Alan Zisman
 * Originally To: ROBERT FOWLER
 * Originally Re: Undelete.
 * Original Date: 01 Jul 05  19:39:05
 * Original Area: WIN95 help
 * Forwarded by : Blue Wave/DOS v2.30

-=> ROBERT FOWLER wrote to ALAN ZISMAN <=-
 -=> ALAN ZISMAN wrote to ROBERT FOWLER <=-

 RF>  Seems like Alan mentioned sometime back that he was building a museum
 RF>  of functional relics at his school.  Maybe he could use them. :-)

 AZ>  While I would like to build a 'museum of functional relics' at my
 AZ> school, space and time considerations have ruled that out... pretty
 AZ> much every available space in my lab has a workstation for student use
 AZ> on it... (Some might consider our 266 MHz base-platform 'functional
 AZ> relics', but until I can upgrade them they are state-of-the-art for
 AZ> us).

 RF>  As a regarded publisher in your field, perhaps you could get some sort
 RF>  of research grant for a study comparing the educational outcomes of
 RF>  older vs. newer platforms, etc.?

 The research into the educational use of computers is almost all poorly
designed; it's awfully hard to really get a handle on these sorts of things, at
least in part because it's almost impossible to get comparable groups to
compare and to have meaningful control groups.

 Among the variables that rarely get dealt with properly:
-- social backgrounds of the students and their families
-- computer access (and history of access) outside of school
-- teacher familiarity and use of technology

 This past spring, an Ohio study was reported in the press (it made the front
page of our local daily) with a headline "Computers may hurt kids'
grades"... I
haven't seen the actual study, and can only comment on what was reported in the
paper. It suggested that (in this middle school in a middle and upper class
neighbourhood where the grade 7 and 9 kids all had access to laptops with
wireless Internet access), kids who spent less than 3 hrs per day using
computers saw an average 0.124 grade point gain in their marks; kids who spent
more than 3 hrs per day using computers had an average drop of 0.078.

The study was quoted as saying "When you spend too much time on computers, the
benefit of using technology seems to be cancelled out or even outweighed by the
detriment that using technology could bring".

There's a problem as I see it in this sort of report. When, as a teacher, I
look at the time kids spend on ANY sort of school work-- using technology or
not-- I see a relatively complex pattern... there are kids who spend little
time on it, and do poorly. There are a bunch of kids in the middle, for whom
there's a more or less direct connection between spending time on an activity
and doing it better. But there's also a bunch of kids who struggle with the
work-- spend a HUGE amount of time on it, and do badly, because they just
aren't getting it. (Sometimes, working individually with those kids, backing up
and finding what they're missing, explaining the instructions differently, etc,
can make a big difference-- but sometimes not).

So are the kids who are spending more than 3 hours a day working with computers
getting lower grades because they're the same kids who would be spending too
much time struggling with work that they just aren't getting?

As well, in a 5 hour school day, I'm uneasy with ANY kids spending 3 hours or
more staring at a screen. Frankly, it makes me uncomfortable. Those kids should
be spending more time reading books, writing on paper (as well as in a word
processor), doing music, art, drama, PE, and learning a foreign language.

Parents and schools have spent HUGE amounts of money bringing computers (and
Internet access, etc) into schools... there clearly needs to research into how
(and whether!) technology can be best used in education.

But it needs to be well-designed research-- and that's very rare, at least in
part because it's really hard to do well.

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