The darndest thing
So, a nice side benefit of having purchased typing software for our older daughter is that our younger daughter is learning to type too. (She uses the Disney title, which by age 9 our older daughter wouldn’t be caught dead playing.)
There was a wonderful moment when she our youngest first started playing and was learning the first four keys on the home row: j f k d.
Rafiki the Baboon (yes, it is a Disney game) was leading her through a typing exercise: fff jjj ddd kkk… and on and on it went.
My daughter started saying each letter as she typed:
“f” f “f” f “f” “f” f and so on.
She kept that up for three lines of type. Then she just started typing without saying anything for another line.
When it happened, I thought: “Ah! She started out saying each letter to help herself know what to do; then once she learned the task, she didn’t need to tell herself what to do anymore.”
This is, of course, the phenomenon of internalization which was first described by Lev Vygotsky, and which I wrote about in How Computer Games Help Children Learn as one of the of the fundamental ways kids learn through games.
At that moment, though, the scientist in me replied: “But how do you know she’s stopped saying the letters because she has mastered them?”
And then at the start of the next line of letter may daughter said really more to herself and to the computer than to me: “Oh, enough already! Can’t I do something more challenging!” Then she happily went on typing when she realized that the row had more complicated combinations of letters to type.
Kids really do say the darndest things…
If prestigious law schools can evolve…
A recent article (free registration required) in the New York Times describes how the country’s most prestigious law schools are taking a close look at their programs… and deciding they are not adequately serving their students.
The Dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan, suspects that “what has been taught and how it has been taught may be ‘embarrassingly disconnected from what anybody does.”
It turns out that K-12 public schools are not alone when they teach to the test.
Teaching FOR the test
We recently purchased got some “learn to type” software for our older daughter. We got two programs, actually, and both are about what you’d expect: drill and practice with a fancy front end. (One is a Disney title, the other a generic.) The good news is that our daughter is interested in playing, and in fact, if you are going to learn a basic skill like typing, drill and practice is the way to go.
We got the program because, like me, my daughter has poor penmanship, to the point where her difficultly in the physical act of writing is in danger of getting in the way of the the more important intellectual aspects of writing.
Her teacher was very receptive to the idea of handing in assignments done on the computer–and said that our daughter could use the computers in the classroom (there are two incredibly old PCs) to write if she wanted. But she also said that our daughter should still learn to write clearly.
Now I don’t object to that idea at all. Kids need to be able to write clearly so they can read their own ideas, organize their thoughts, and generally work with what Merlin Donald has so aptly described as “external working memory.”
But the teacher’s reason for learning to write clearly was a little different–and a little more troubling.
Waiting for innovation
Following up on the last two posts, I was recently at an OECD meeting on computer games and education, Seminario video juegos y educaci0n, sponsored by the Chilean Minestry of Education.
I was talking, as usual, about the importance of education for innovation and the role that epistemic games might play in that process–in other words, the themes of How Computer Games Help Children Learn.
A question that came up is one that I’ve been hearing more and more these days: Are there countries that are already thinking in new ways about their education system?
The unspoken part of that question is more interesting, though. In effect, the real question is: Couldn’t we let someone else figure out a better way to prepare kids for the digital age, so we can just copy them?
I don’t have any data on this point (yet)–and I would love to hear from anyone who does. But if you take seriously the data on the falling prominence of traditional leaders in advanced degrees, it suggests that playing catch-up in innovation isn’t really the way to go….
Higher Education
One more measure of innovation–and the changing pattern of innovation worldwide. This time from the Economist in a recent article, which describes the OECD’s new approach to measuring the comparative quality of universities internationally. What caught my eye was this graph:
What is shows is trends in cross-boarder higher education–that is, the number of students who travel to another country for college and graduate school. This is a rough measure of preparation for innovation, in the sense that it corresponds to the net inflow or outflow from a country of intellectual capital.
And… surprise, surprise… the US market share is down. So is Britain’s and so is Germany’s. The gains come from other OECD countries (France, Australia, Japan, Russia, Canada, and the most dramatic gain from New Zealand).
Now overall, of course, everyone benefits when training for creative thinking is more widely available. But it is one more way in which countries–like the US–that enjoy a historical advantage in knowledge work need to recognize that they need to think about education in innovative ways, or risk falling and then being left behind.
