You can do active learning on laptops, but the default is probably passive learning. You can do passive learning on paper, but it's maybe a little easier to do active learning on paper.

I don't know that I believe that laptops are inherently inferior to pencil-and-paper for learning. I definitely do believe that laptops are way worse than paper if they're connected to the internet, or if they have distracting programs installed on them, or if the kids are never taught how to type, or if they're broken or slow in some way, or if they cost too much to distribute or maintain, or even if they just allow the kid to hide the fact that they're just staring at the screen instead of working. So, in practice, I'd say it's almost certain that laptops are worse for learning.

Studies confirm traditional methods -- reading and writing on paper -- remain superior to screen-based approaches.

Every year it seems two or more studies come out showing writing something down is superior to typing for retention of the information. From 2024 I found [1]three [npr.org] [2]such [popsci.com] [3]articles [scientificamerican.com].

Oxford Learning had [4]this article [oxfordlearning.com] from 2022 indicating handwriting is better than typing.

Back in 2017 [5]the same thing [psychologytoday.com] was reported.

And a decade ago, [6]this study [jowr.org] showed a higher word recall when you wrote something down rather than typing it out.

Not sure what the issue is.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529661/handwriting-cursive-typing-schools-learning-brain

[2] https://www.popsci.com/diy/typing-vs-writing-by-hand-memory/

[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-hand-is-better-for-memory-and-learning/

[4] https://www.oxfordlearning.com/writing-vs-typing-debate/

[5] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/memory-catcher/201710/is-it-better-write-hand-or-computer

[6] https://www.jowr.org/index.php/jowr/article/view/662

The reason that standards are falling at schools is not really due to technology but because education has become a sideline for what schools are used for. Today schools are there to provide daycare and social support, the education of kids is a secondary to that.

We saw this very clearly in the pandemic where schools e.g. in the UK were opened specifically to provide daycare to frontline workers. Things like streaming kids to allow teaching to be better tailored to differing student abilities is frowned on as "elitist" for academic subjects but yet it is fine for sports teams who select the best players instead of using a random draw. Overuse of technology might not help but the real problem is that we no longer treat schools as establishments where education is the primary goal.

Schools started handing out laptops like candy but failed to adjust their curriculums to actually take advantage of the laptops. They mostly just converted pen and paper to digital and left it as is. That was always going to lead to failure. It's not even hard to do it right, but people who are making the decisions to get the laptops in the first place, don't know jack shit, and most schools don't have even halfway decent IT staff.

I have spent the last 12 years in front of a laptop. before that, it was a desktop.

Most of the ideas about how tech would improve learning were hype-filled, speculative baloney. It's a testament to how hard it is to resist this kind of bs that schools are as deep into "educational" technology as they are now.

Another negative effect that Bloomberg didn't name but that I see with my daughter and the children of my friends and family- platform fragmentation. Most classes I took 30+ years ago were based on a textbook. Whether the textbook was good, bad, or indifferent, it was coherent. You read a chapter, did some exercises and then moved to another unit. If your teacher assigned some extra source material, s/he would photocopy them and give them you. Those were generally supplemental to the textbook, so if you didn't understand that extra material you knew you could go back to the textbook and try to figure it out. And a parent trying to help could read back through the textbook and refresh their memory enough to try to be helpful or could at least help coordinate with the teacher to figure out where the student was getting lost.

Now that textbooks are relics, teachers pick instructional material and exercises from a dizzying array of platforms. Some of these are licensed by school systems, so students have to go through some sort of SSO thing to get to them. Others are third party that require account creation, and still others are free stuff on the internet. It is very difficult for students to keep track of all of this even when the teacher is disciplined about posting/linking all the material in the primary course management system. For parents it is essentially impossible to follow what is going on.

And on top of that students are very good at figuring out how to use their computer for non-class uses, regardless of the filters on them. My daughter often emails me or my wife multiple times in a day. This is not good for her or us - she needs to just be in school and not communicating with her parents all the time.

I could not agree more with Bloomberg's idea of getting computers out of classrooms, except for very specific uses.

> "...With about 90% of schools now providing these devices, test scores hover near historic lows -- only 28% of eighth graders proficient in math and 30% in reading..."

bold mine...

An immigrant I hired a few years ago, who had to learn English from scratch, was surprised that his workmates, who'd spoken the language since "age zero", could not write a two paragraph composition of what may have taken place the night before!

And I agreed with him, sadly...and for those that attempted at a report, it was full of slang, grammatical errors and would hardly qualify for the least grade in my opinion.

We're going down folks...

The answer is to buy them iPads, right? /s

The Google executive who questioned why children should learn equations when they could Google answers might now ask why they should write essays when chatbots can do it for them.

One should always be careful when a smiling salesperson wants to sell you dependency on their product, but this is even worse than that.

I've heard multiple times that knowing how to write well is obsolete, the robots can just do it for you. If I were one of those shitty, insecure people who try to cut down others ability to co

I agree that working things out on paper is a major part of learning that laptops may have supplanted. Let's bring it back!

Nevertheless, I see a use for laptops because they offer access to other resources, including videos, animations, and interactive simulations of experimental setups.

While we're on the subject, let's not allow laptops to replace all lab experience with videos, animations, and simulations. You still need to handle test-tubes, measure objects rolling down inclined planes, and so on. Laptop

That 's because parents and teachers spend too much time on devices.

It's called reinforced example.

All the rest is just side effect.

> Bloomberg notes technology's classroom push came from technologists and government officials who envisioned tailored curricula. Computer manufacturers, despite good intentions, had financial interests and profited substantially. The Google executive who questioned why children should learn equations when they could Google answers might now ask why they should write essays when chatbots can do it for them.

Yes, technologists do say exactly this. i think it's a fundamental disconnect between what school should be for, and what we've turned it into in this country.

School should teach us the whys, the hows, the what fors. There's a reason they used to have us do manually written "show your work" equations for even advanced math. Because that "show your work" work meant you were actually training your brain. Do something manually enough times, and it starts to become a part of your brain's natural processes. It w

Are you testing fish on how well they can climb trees?

Kids today are fucking geniuses even compared to when I was a kid. If you think otherwise, you're asking them the wrong questions. The problem is, testing methodologies are lagging behind by literal decades. This was something I recognized while I was a kid a few decades back learning tech on my own, but its even worse now.

Just one point of reference: I literally learned how to use an abacus in school only a couple years apart from learning IPv6 on my ow

Think AI is becoming ubiquitous, the impact will be things reformatted for your personal taste and perhaps economic, geographic or political class. The quirks in writing a short message will be removed from everyone and the world will appear all AI generated. The Matrix was on to something, but the reason why humanity descends to this level, we are lazy. Or The distinctiveness often found in individual expressions within brief messages may increasingly be eradicated, resulting in a world that appears

The problem with computerized learning is that most of it is stupid. They are just finding ways to do the same old shit but on a computer. The potential benefit of the computer is new learning experiences, not warming over the same old bullshit. Now you get the same old bullshit plus you have to manage the computers, it's senseless.

We should be gamifying learning to make it engaging. Learn stuff in context, then solve puzzles or otherwise achieve goals with what you've learned. That's something that the com

I know multiple teachers that have left education for good. There are multiple reasons:

The first one is that everyone thinks they know better on how to teach kids than they do. The districts, the principals, the parents. Do you like people coming in and telling you how to do your job? Neither do they. It gets political. What ends up happening is the teachers are forced to teach the same curriculum and adhere to the same standards.

They are measured by ridiculous testing standards. Imagine coding if your boss

A couple of issues ago, "American Annals" published an evaluation and comments on research dealing with delayed cognitive development in children who were essentially left to smartphones to be their babysitters. Their language and reasoning capabilities were noticeably hampered by the lack of human interaction.

They seemed to be developing their own form of AI and it isn't pretty.

... is more like it. Laptops are the teacher's equivalent of using a TV as a babysitter.

If schools is supposed to train kids for the adult world of work and life, this is in fact how adults do work. They gather in conference rooms with their laptops, typing things that may or may not have anything to do with the subject of the meeting thy are attending. So you could argue it's good practice for the kids.