We need to use computers smarter

Do you remember how moody computers used to be? It was crashing for no reason, and we had to hit the “save” button every five minutes for fear it would wipe out our work?
I finally got through this old frustration while visiting a high school in London, where I was helping teach a class on fake news. All children were provided with laptop computers to solve an online quiz. But most of the devices could not connect to the internet. Half an hour later, a teacher borrowed a set of laptops from the math department that looked newer, but they didn’t connect to the network either. She watched in displeasure as the children, who were bright and inquisitive at first, began to feel bored and uninterested. One of the staff members shrugged his shoulders, “It’s always like that.”
For decades, parents and teachers have been told they need to invest in computers to prepare children for the modern world. In the United Kingdom, a significant increase in technology spending began under Tony Blair’s government, and by 2019, there were 3.3 million computers in primary and secondary schools. During the pandemic, the government promised to provide another 1.8 million laptop computers to needy children so they could study from home.
But research is conflicting on whether computers improve education. The One Laptop Per Child program, launched in 2005, has distributed low-cost laptops filled with educational software and books to millions of children in developing countries. But in 2012, the first large-scale study of the effects of the program found no evidence of improved math or language skills in recipients, even though they appeared to score higher on cognitive tests. Children used computers mainly for writing, playing games and music.
There are studies that show positive effects, including teaching students at different speeds according to their abilities. But while Blair’s bragging about the technology appears to have improved scores in English and science, its impact on math test scores has been “very close to zero”.
Of course, there is a lot of research, which proves what every parent knows: YouTube and games tend to be more fun than homework. “Evidence suggests that children do not learn more through interaction with laptops than they do from textbooks,” the Brookings Institution noted in 2020.
We may be treating technology the wrong way. In schools, children learn a new topic or skill in class and then simply reinforce the knowledge by doing computer training, for example.
British researcher Conrad Wolfram argues that it is wrong for teachers to focus their efforts on making sure that children are able to do arithmetic by hand, and to show their work on paper. He says that’s what we should be using computers for.
In the real world, he points out, math never looks the way it does in textbooks. Focusing on a long math is not just boring, it’s unimportant in an environment where we need math to understand everything from stock markets and climate change to the way fake news spreads.
We should teach children how to ask the right questions and how to translate them into mathematical terms that a computer can understand. After the computer has finished the calculation, the students then need to know how to check and interpret the results. That’s what kids care about anyway. In the fake news class, most students had a more sophisticated understanding of how to interpret the Internet than I did, and they distinguished disinformation, false and false information easily “that is intentionally created to cause harm.”
Education may not be the only area where we need to rethink how we use computers. Many companies would benefit from taking a serious look at whether computers actually improve our work. It’s been almost four decades since the economist Robert Solow quipped, “You can see the computer age everywhere, except in the productivity statistics.”
In this golden age of technology, office employees are entering the system mainly to surf the internet, create documents, send email, or schedule endless meetings. Then they have to answer emails, attend meetings, and read the documents they sent each other.
Is there a better way? Can’t we automate more of our work so we can focus on areas where people add value? It seems to me that if we continue to use our computers for normal tasks, without taking the time to seriously question their suitability for our lives, there may come a time when the roles will be reversed and it will be me who is moody, frustrated, angry and not my old laptop.

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