Tangent inspired by this: why hasn't there been a serious effort to redesign the edtech stack around an e-reader type device (think Remarkable, Onyx Boox etc) as the central per student content delivery and note taking mechanism? Seems like it would preserve a lot of the positive affordances of the laptop centric stack (no heavy textbooks, instant update ability) while mitigating a lot of the downsides (video distractions, typing gives inferior retention compared to handwriting). What is the big barrier here I am missing?
Yeah that's really interesting. I need to think about it more, but my first guess is that it has something to do with how those readers emerged on the market -- as a loss leader for adult readers -- and in this sense it might have just missed the Ed tech wave
I think that's basically right, and I probably like NCLB more than most education policy commentators. Maybe I just like the audaciousness of it, but it was also always doomed to fail, I think, given (1) it assumed every student should learn at the same pace, and (2) the incentives structure was going to make it untenable with various constituencies
Testing for testing for testing. This is at the heart of it all. In fairness to teachers though, it’s foisted on them from the higher-ups. Thanks for the great deep dive into the foundational ed-tech rot, Thomas!
No Child Left Behind was a fundamentally good idea with a fatal design flaw: The standardized tests and the accountability devices were based around a simple proficient / not proficient standard. Tests that captured most of the range of proficiency and incentives that considered impact across the entire skill distribution would have been much more effective, and far more difficult to game by "teaching to the test".
Tangent inspired by this: why hasn't there been a serious effort to redesign the edtech stack around an e-reader type device (think Remarkable, Onyx Boox etc) as the central per student content delivery and note taking mechanism? Seems like it would preserve a lot of the positive affordances of the laptop centric stack (no heavy textbooks, instant update ability) while mitigating a lot of the downsides (video distractions, typing gives inferior retention compared to handwriting). What is the big barrier here I am missing?
Coming back to this, here are some more barriers that might have been decisive:
- e-readers are designed for single-user, offline use, and that's the opposite of what digital testing / multi-student accounts required
- textbooks aren't read like normal books
- the procurement/economic model was a mismatch with curriculum publishers
Yeah that's really interesting. I need to think about it more, but my first guess is that it has something to do with how those readers emerged on the market -- as a loss leader for adult readers -- and in this sense it might have just missed the Ed tech wave
Thanks so much for this informative history. What do you think of the argument that NCLB did increase learning at the margin, but that key constituencies disliked it for their own reasons: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-strange-death-of-education-reform-3f5 ?
I think that's basically right, and I probably like NCLB more than most education policy commentators. Maybe I just like the audaciousness of it, but it was also always doomed to fail, I think, given (1) it assumed every student should learn at the same pace, and (2) the incentives structure was going to make it untenable with various constituencies
My goodness, I forgot all about miniclip games! I remember playing on that site in so many ict classes.
Testing for testing for testing. This is at the heart of it all. In fairness to teachers though, it’s foisted on them from the higher-ups. Thanks for the great deep dive into the foundational ed-tech rot, Thomas!
No Child Left Behind was a fundamentally good idea with a fatal design flaw: The standardized tests and the accountability devices were based around a simple proficient / not proficient standard. Tests that captured most of the range of proficiency and incentives that considered impact across the entire skill distribution would have been much more effective, and far more difficult to game by "teaching to the test".