Ask HN: Is EdTech Just Hype?

1 points by tdekken 3 years ago | 4 comments

Before the 1870s, customers were expected to haggle over the price of retail goods. This interaction was not only bad for customers (e.g., image waiting in line while all the customers ahead of you haggled over their prices), but also necessitated multi-year apprenticeships during which store clerks learned the art of haggling and the intricacies of the business (e.g., how much goods cost to make, how much competitors sold them for, etc.) This seemingly minute detail impeded the development of larger stores and, correspondingly, economies of scale.

In 1874, a simple yet radical technology, the price tag, revolutionized the retail industry. A fixed price for goods was better for most customers and better for most businesses. Importantly, it didn’t eliminate the role of the store clerk nor the incentive inherent in better serving customers (e.g., knowledge of materials, styles, etc.) Instead, it dramatically lowered the barrier to entry by eliminating extraneous complexity.

Analogous to store clerks of yore, expert teaching is simply too complex. It requires, at minimum, a single person to deeply understand:

1. at least one subject deeply,

2. how to present that subject in bite-sized lessons,

3. how to customize those lessons a priori based on an expected audience,

4. how to identify and overcome academic, social, and emotional challenges during a lesson,

5. how to connect those lessons into a logical progression,

6. how to customize that progression based on the outcomes of previous lessons, and

7. how to motivate learners to exert effort over the long haul.

This is a tall task even for professional teachers and an almost insurmountable barrier for the countless parents, relatives, and volunteers that want to ensure children everywhere succeed.

My question for this group: Is today’s educational technology a breakthrough like the humble price tag or does it miss the mark? Why or why not?

sirspacey 3 years ago |

Framing education as lessons presumes that lessons are how people learn

Project based learning pioneers, Maria Montessori, and other education innovators like Tom Wagner @ Harvard have discovered that learning is a human experience

Dr. Feynman has a wonderful illustration of this in his book “Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman” on how he transformed Brazil’s physics education curriculum. Instead of drilling mathematical models of curves, they build ramps, invented their own questions, learned how to measure outputs, and derived their own formulas under Dr. Feynman’s guidance.

From birth, we are naturally curious and learn.

The fundamental problems to solve in education are:

1. Poverty - children without healthy, stable environments with proper nutrition & sleep are significantly handicapped in their ability to learn

Psychological safety matters

2. Reframing learning as something a person does vs. a scaffolded theoretical learning journey they are supposed go on

3. Building lessons as experiences that the student then creates out of - using the creative arts like writing, film, products, etc. - similar to what you’ll see Olin College of Engineering do

There is no way to bring this approach to education into the education system as it is today, because the education system is not designed as an institution of learning but certification.

Instead, we must build new institutions. It takes about 60 to 100 years for new institutions to take root because their students & families go on to be successful then donate back to the school in dollars, time, and political influence.

There are people who understand how to do all the things you describe, but that is not the decision tree for today’s education content producers. The work of Dr. Katherine von Duyke might be something you consider as you explore.

Instructional Design courses may be worth investigating. Just be highly skeptical that measuring performance is measuring learning. Retention is an easy indicator as to whether students have internalized a new concept or simply passed a test.

tdekken 3 years ago | |

Thanks so much for your response @sirspacey!

> Framing education as lessons presumes that lessons are how people learn

To clarify, are you thinking of a lecture instead of a lesson? A lecture is "a speech read or delivered before an audience or class, especially for instruction or to set forth some subject" whereas a lesson is "a section into which a course of study is divided".

A lesson is a generic term agnostic to instructional style (e.g., explicit, discovery, project-based, etc.) Similar to how everything in software engineering is a "task" :).

sirspacey 3 years ago | | |

Appreciate the follow up!

I do mean lesson. In this case I’m critiquing the idea that learning is a set of tasks.

Of course, we can apply lesson generically to any form of instruction, but I do think it’s meaningful to consider things like learning by hanging out, learning by imitation & experimentation, without a preconceived idea of what is being taught or in what order.

As an example, I’m a huge fan of unit-based studies, which explicitly enable a more free roaming, multi-disciplinary approach to learning with the topic as a jumping off point. The curiosity of the student drives the teacher’s response.

Lessons are of course useful. My observation is that we see lessons as the learning path, but I’ve seen students learn multiple things simultaneously without a designed path.

Another example here is instruction where students invent their own lessons. The tasks are subservient to the student’s learning journey instead of the arbiters of it.

tdekken 3 years ago |

FWIW, this framing is the start of an essay I am writing about why the untold number of apps that purport to teach children to read fall far short and what can be done about it.