In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.
By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to Maine students.
King’s initial efforts have been mirrored across the country. In 2024, the U.S. spent more than $30 billion putting laptops and tablets in schools. But more than a quarter-century and numerous evolving models of technology later, psychologists and learning experts see a different outcome than the one King intended. Rather than empowering the generation with access to more knowledge, the technology had the opposite effect.
I have a degree in computer engineering. I have been coding since the 80’s.
I learn better with pencil and paper. Most people do. Schools need to go back to that. Have computer labs but don’t do everything on computers all damn day.
I’m 23 and got a CS degree last year. When I was in highschool my CS teacher had us writing Java on paper with pencil. At the time I thought it was the stupidest thing but in hindsight there definitely are certain benefits to it. The best CS professor I had in college was also having us do certain things with pencil and paper and he strictly forbid it being done any other way.
Educational studies have backed this up. You learn more when writing than typing and by reading print media than digital. The digital tools should still exist but you also need to use the analog ones.
I get the writhing because of muscle memory but reading is reading…
Books are tactile and involve more of your perception.
That tracks, although I’d compare them with ereaders instead of screens.
We are more distractible when reading on digitsl devices though. Perhaps with the exception of dedicated ebook readers.
In addition to fhat I wonder if eInk and actual paper are more conducive to prolonged reading as well, less eye strain
Agreed! I also have CS degrees and got them before having computers in the classroom was the norm. We had all our exams on pen and paper, you would have to write out a lot of lines of code and make sure it was proper C in the flavor we learnt in that class. Most of our classes were all books, paper and overhead projectors. We did have classes with computers, but they were awful. Our class would be two hours and at about the one hour mark you needed to be sure you were compiling. The compilation could easily take more than 30 mins and if you fucked up or it simply crashed you’d be at the end of the class easily.
I have a masters in Embedded Systems design, so a lot of my studies focused on both the hardware and software. We needed to juggle bits and extract the absolute max out of our very limited hardware. We needed to know about how software could even work on the hardware and why it worked the way it worked. Why hardware shaped the software and vice versa. I feel with the billion abstraction layers these days people are missing a lot of fundamentals about software design.
I also remember half of our classes were various forms of maths. All of those the first year first class started with a variation of: “Forget everything you’ve learned about maths so far, this is something completely different”. And each and every time it was true as well, blew my mind. A lot of those maths I still use very often and I feel like modern programming classes don’t focus enough on those.
On the other hand, I’m an old fart and it feels very “Everything was better when I was young”. So don’t take my opinion too seriously, but it is genuinely how I feel about it.
A core moment of my life was when, late at night, doing homework for assembly class, I finally GOT that “The instruction is the data is the number”. I would be surprised if students today have an opportunity to get to that realization.
I’m just gonna toss this out there…
You old fucks1 are siding with someone non-ironically named “Cooney Horvath” who, btw, is trying to sell books on how best to teach. Hoodwinked I say. Absolutely hoodwinked. “Everyone knows you can’t learn math unless you have an abacus!” “They expect to be able to learn spelling and writing without a chalk board tablet? Preposterous!”
1 - Used as a term of endearment.
I know this is an exaggeration for emphasis… but people who learn the abacus method are faster and more accurate at basic addition.
That’s just not true. People don’t learn with pencil or computer better - a single tool does not shape the learning experience. Sure pencil has positive effects stimulating muscles while learning but it has a billion of negative effects too.
[citation needed]
It’s actual on people to cite that pencil is somehow better but somehow all research never yields any results. Hmm I wonder why. Maybe because learning efficiency doesn’t revolve around a single tool that is being used, weird I know.
[citation needed]
also: you made a claim that “People don’t learn with pencil or computer better”, and that claim needs backing up with facts.
no it’s the other way around dummy. The default state is neutrality and if you have a claim that something veers of it then you have to substantiate it.
there’s no such thing as a default assumption of “neutrality”. straight up not a thing that exists.
what does exist, and what you’re mosst likely mixing up here, is the mediocrity principle. that’s en entirely different concept and has nothing to do with “neutrality”, because no such concept exists in scientific contexts.
“neutral” is not a concept in nature, so it’s not a concept in research either.
there was for a long time a similar concept for U.S. broadcasters, where they were obligated to try and provide balanced reporting, but that also has nothing to do with research.
if you can provide a source for that “neutrality” claim, I’d be thrilled to learn something new! but for now that’s yet another [citation needed]
What are you even talking about. So you by default assume position that pencil learning is good and ask someone to disapprove it? Don’t you see flaw here? Smh
no, i don’t.
you claimed that haptic learning and digital learning are equal.
that’s the claim.
and you provided zero evidence for that claim.
claims are not true by default, just because they are “balanced” or “neutral”.
what matters is:
your claim that digital learning is at least equal to haptic learning is, by definition, the newer claim, so it needs evidence to back it up.
it must be the newer claim, because people have been learning through haptic media for literally millenia, but digital learning is a very recent development.
so claiming they are equal needs to be backed up by evidence.
or in other words: you pulled that claim out of thin air. bring the facts or get lost.