Some vaguely consistent threads around education in my morning procrastination break.

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Some vaguely consistent threads around education in my morning procrastination break.

Some vaguely consistent threads around education in my morning procrastination break.
Charles Arthur points out that school IT education is built around pointless lowly tasks in Microsoft software
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/aug/17/becta-schools-computers-technology-creative?CMP=twt_iph
Meanwhile Colin Blakemore talks about the waste of learning old irrelevant cognitive workarounds that were only ever relevant to contemporaneous gaps in technology
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/15/internet-brain-neuroscience-debate
It's no criticism of teachers, since I think a lot of these things are down to culture and institutional inertia, but a lot of science and tech education seems a bit fossilised to me. First my personal interest: I could do, I have to say, with just a little bit less physical sciences, and a little bit more evidence based medicine, since that is the science of whether something works, and the science behind what makes you live or die (and since the most common science stories in the media are medical stories, about whether something works or kills you, it seems to me that the people have spoken and given us a pretty clear hint as to how we can make science "relevant" and "accessible").
But leaving that aside, I suspect the bigger issue is that we're living through a technological revolution, which creates changes in what can be cognitively outsourced and what's worth learning, and where some people can press ahead by leaving out the pointless stuff.

On the one hand, there are daydreams: this stuff about local people setting up education academies is all very well, but what I’d like to see is a visionary nerd school, like a geeky version of Summerhill but set up by, I don’t know, Tim O’Reilly, Suw Charman, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Schneier, Petra Boynton, Vaughan Bell and others. But the inevitable reality is that a lot of individuals will be way ahead on this, educating themselves and cracking on, before institutions can have a hope of catching up.

This might have implications for our hopes of living in a meritocracy, or at least it might in certain fields, and in certain countries. And then again it might not. But aren’t you glad to be alive? Normally living through “interesting times” somewhere means war and misery. For now, these changes really are just interesting.
Now here is some music by some old people.

dr ben goldacre
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- 17 August 2010
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almost 2 years ago hapsci responded:

agreed, technology has moved on and what is taught is schools is outdated. Technology could move away from being a 'subject' on its own - unless in I.T. you were taught how to write computer programmes etc. Technology could be integrated into different lessons, for example in science you could learn how to interpret results using different systems, in maths you could learn statistics and how to manipulate data using different programmes. Equally with art/drama the creative use of computers could be exploited (could they do lessons on production?) I think the way technology is used in science could also do with a bit of a revamp, I have done some blogging here -http://sciencehastheanswer.blogspot.com

almost 2 years ago electroweb responded:

The thing about IT lessons is true: churning out people who can use Office but don't understand folder systems or networking or IP addresses.
IT lessons should include how file systems work, how networking and IP works, how programming works (not how to program, just what the concepts are), how to search Google or whatever and find what you're looking for, how web pages work and how to use them.
I've been in lessons where kids are told what search terms to use and which link to click. Surely saying "search for radioactivity" is enough as they should be able to find the information from that?!
I've also seen kids on a webpage, unable to find the section of the site they needed as they hadn't seen nor understood the sidebar menu. They literally asked me how to find uses, where there was a link right in front of them they said "Uses".

almost 2 years ago electroweb responded:

Oh, and most kids copy and paste the Google Images thumbnail into a pixellated piece of shit rather then clicking it to bring in the full size one...
Copy and Paste should be banned in the classroom, because it prevents thought.

almost 2 years ago Paddy responded:

There is a natural lag in technology and science in regards to what is on the syllabi in schools (which is a positive in many areas of education) but increasingly with technology and IT these changes are being generated by younger people. The rise of social networking is an excellent example. This leaves the writers of syllabi in the unenviable position of lagging behind the students. The access to information should be embraced by teachers (I am a physics teacher myself) and utilised by teaching research methods in terms of researching information from the internet. To often I have had pupils copy and paste wikipedia pages with no critical analysis, and so the critical analysis skills should be developed to help pupils decide what is good information and what is bad information. Probably why I like Bad Science as it has helped me develop critical analysis skills in regards to medical sciences, but also more generally as well.

almost 2 years ago hapsci responded:

actually I just remembered an excellent example of kids knowing far more than the teachers, we used to abuse IT lessons using a very old version of MSN - that worked through windows on a network - you could send a message to the computer (rather than than a person/username). We all used to complete the I.T. 'worksheets' we were given in about 30 seconds, then spend the rest of the lesson sending inappropriate messages to each other via this system. The teachers had no idea what it was or how we were doing it. Hehehe.

almost 2 years ago electroweb responded:

I'm training to be a physics teacher... as part of my utopian dream before reality catches up, I have three lessons in mind:
1. Why Wikipedia is bad. Including the Wanky Balls Festival and Ronnie Hazlehurst - Pop Composer.
2. How to search. I can use Google like a bitch. Other people phone me up to get me to search for stuff for them coz it's quicker. So, a lesson on using the right terms, narrowing it down and identifying how useful a link might be before clicking on it.
3. Critical analysis: identifying why a source might be biased or wrong, including Red Wine Causes Cancer and Seeds Contain All The Energy Needed For A Tree.

almost 2 years ago Andy responded:

"we're living through a technological revolution, which creates changes in what can be cognitively outsourced and what's worth learning"
This reminds me of our main complaint at secondary school; in maths lessons people would constantly ask "why are we learning this, we have calculators". The teacher never had an answer better than "just because".
I suppose nowadays the argument could be "why are we learning anything, when we can just google it?"

almost 2 years ago Ian responded:

I've been teaching in universities for some years now and have seen a curious inverted-U level of IT skills over time. 12 years ago, many students had little IT skill (some had never touched a computer when they got to me). Then followed a phase where most were quite IT literate and capable of showing initiative in using a computer. But in the past 4 years or so, computer skills have reduced again - many students know nothing about computers other than how to fly MS Windows. But perhaps it's not surprising: today's students' first experiences of using computers would have been with Windows 95 - a computing paradigm unchanged to this day, and which requires no real insight into how the computer works.
More generally, it would be nice if the govt were to look into the practices of software companies like MS and Adobe. These companies work very hard to ensure that people leaving school or university only know how to use their products.

almost 2 years ago Richard Hare responded:

When I studied O-level computer studies, we spent a year learning about punched cards and paper tape before being told halfway through the course that those topics had been dropped from the syllabus.

almost 2 years ago electroweb responded:

That's why Gove is wrong about learning the kings and queens. Yes, you can Google it.
What you can't Google is the understanding of the changes in society as a result of the reigns of the different kings and queens. I can't actually say much more on that as I don't know the answer myself (though I wish I did).
And your teacher was an idiot: yes, you can use a calculator. But then, if you can do it in your head it's quicker not to use one. My mum was great at this and could beat anyone with a calculator at general arithmetic.
Secondary to that, if you can't do maths in your head then you can't understand the more complex operations you might need to do later in life. 10% discount on a car? Adding VAT to a price? Calculus in your engineering finals?

almost 2 years ago machupiku (Twitter) responded:

I can't see it improving. The primary I work in has had 25% of our IT money taken back by the new government to pay for the free schools. Before it was taken away we could only afford rubbish cheap pcs and now we won't even be able to afford them. Our local authority also has ultimate control over what we run, and they insist on using dull software. They also set a curriculum that is impossible to teach due to THEIR restrictions. E.g. They tell us to get the kids to take photos and video, to use/ manipulate, but block the USB ports for kids log-ons, so they can't download the images themselves!

almost 2 years ago ciphergoth (Twitter) responded:

Sinclair made the ZX80 and the ZX81. Zilog made the Z80 processor inside them both.

almost 2 years ago Bobweb2 (Twitter) responded:

Of course you can find an answer using Google. That just leaves the questions of whether the answer you find is true or whether it's the best answer for the context you are working in...

almost 2 years ago Skepcheck responded:

More evidence based medicine at the expense of the physical sciences? Really? There is already a massive bias towards things "human" in the science curriculum in the UK. This is part of the problem and I would say one of the reasons physics and chemistry are suffering as subjects at university. It could even be part of the reason that the media have such a bias towards medical stories.
Students do not need more encouragment to study things medical, they find all the encouragment they need when they figure out how much the average medic is paid compared to the average research scientist.
Science by its very nature science is all about evidence and making predictions (or whether something "works") - once these principles are understood they can be applied to almost any situation, of which there are millions that could be used to make science more "accessible", even more bias in the curriculum would be a bad thing indeed.

almost 2 years ago Tom Geraghty responded:

I studied sciences at school, for GCSE, then at A Level (mathematics, and biology), and then at University (plant sciences), and at no point through that 10 year period, was I ever taught about the philosophy of science, and the history of how people acquired knowledge.
Children should be taught very early on, in a very simple format, the difference between knowledge based on evidence through scientific studies, "knowledge" from authority, "knowledge" from myth or hearsay, and suchlike.

almost 2 years ago Mario Creatura responded:

Wrote a blog post that involves some of your discussion:
http://mariocreatura.blogspot.com/2010/08/route-of-he-problem-primary-educati...
May be of interest though it is more about the link between Primary school education and the flaws in entering Higher Education.

almost 2 years ago Chris Satterley responded:

Good post, Ben, but I completely disagree with your assertion that we need less physical science - we need more. Chemistry and Physics have suffered far more than biology and human sciences in terms of 'dumbing down' because they've been eviscerated by having the maths taken out.
Innumeracy is at the heart of many things I see you decry in evidence-based medicine as well as elsewhere. We need more maths and we need it earlier in education. Then we can build the solid foundations of both biological and physical science education. At the moment, brighter children effectively tread water at primary school and learn pointlessly laborious methods of calculation as algebra is 'a secondary school subject'.
Surely we can agree that a set of young people who can understand computation, statistics and the manipulation of equations in much more depth are going to be much better prepared to undertake a career in evidence-based medicine, physics or even just be a more clued up member of the public.

over 1 year ago Alix responded:

*comes in late*
I'm fascinated by this. We all assume that tech and science knowledge outstrips teaching because so much new stuff is being discovered, so it's impossible for education to keep up year by year. My other half was taught how to program a BBC computer by a friend when they were both 9 (he's a Drupal developer now. Thanks, friend!) The teachers knew bugger-all, and apparently still don't.
But I'm sure it's not just the whole whizzy rate-of-discovery thing. The same knowledge gap exists between current thinking and education on pretty much every subject. I can certainly vouch for it in history, and I suspect postgraduate philosophers, economists and the like could say the same thing. Part of it is about complexity of material, of course, but actually most of it is because education systems are by their nature ossified and ossifying creatures. They exist to seek out the longest-standing and most widely accepted authorities, freeze the knowledge at a certain point and instil it in a perfect state in the young. Like formula milk or something. The medieval history they teach kids in schools is literally fifty years behind the academia. I'd suggest the pace of change in STEM subjects just makes an existing and much more general problem worse.
So I guess then it becomes a question of, do we want systemised and state provided education at all, if this is what it defaults to? The best you can hope for is that the ossified "education" is provided in a way that gives people the critical tools to challenge it. But that isn't always the case, and certain recurrent fads in education (targets, Gove's reductive history lessons etc) make it even less likely.
And on that note, @Tom Geraghty:
"Children should be taught very early on, in a very simple format, the difference between knowledge based on evidence through scientific studies, "knowledge" from authority, "knowledge" from myth or hearsay, and suchlike."
I think the word you're looking for here is "humanities" ;)
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