Once again, a study proves the obvious: there's nothing you can give your child that will magically make them smarter. As a parent, you have to be involved.
On the other hand, the study keeps saying "only computer skills were improved" as if these were not worth having. My self-taught "computer skills" are the basis of my career. Practically everything the modern knowledge worker is required to do could fall under the category of "computer skills": word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, modelling, programming. These seem like worthwhile skills.
The presence of computers has allowed me to become smarter if only because it is an outlet for my curiosity.
Nobody encouraged me or teach myself computer programming do encourage me much to do learning activities on my own. The only aspect that my parents were concerned about is the grades in school.
I was hungry for the ability to make games and then make it possible for me to do so. Now, these days, I am interested in learning electronics and did acquired the means to do so.
However, this kind of curiosity and the drive to teach oneself some sort of skills is probably very rare.
I'd somewhat disagree, and say that a kid given books, versus a kid living in a house without books, has potentially a big advantage.
I remember two main books I used to read pre-10 years old, which were "Great Men of Science" and "Encyclopedia of Wildlife". The second book especially was huge and I'm sure I'd still learn something at every page, even today, 30 years later. Reading about dinosaurs, or mammals, or birds was always a great escape from a somewhat crappy at times childhood.
Kids have a huge amount of energy, but it seems that it's far too often directed towards collecting every single McDonalds Happy Meal toy, or getting further into the latest video game.
Kids love collecting stuff, including facts, and should at least be given the opportunity to read.
Locked in a house with an infinite variety of books, many kids would gravitate to the pulp fiction, learning nothing. If you're stipulating that they're left only with educational or good books, then that's the result of at least some form of parental selection or guidance. Or it's the result of them already being curious to learn and gravitating towards the "good" books, just as some kids will use the internet for Wikipedia and others for flash games.
What's scary is that people have spent decades putting momentum behind the idea that technology is an educational force, and now we have to wonder how far in the opposite direction that might have been wrong.
If it's not wrong, we can at least see now that computers are like cars and take people where they're going faster, whether they're going straight ahead or into the gutter.
Directions of hope:
1) Maybe the spread of these technologies is in fact spreading skills that will enrich lives and economies. If so, can we identify what those are and stop wasting time with other things? (I don't get the impression at all that modeling and programming are propagating as fast as games and websurfing)
2) Maybe this is indeed the end of faithfully hoping technology will have a net educational benefit. If so, what is the next thing to try?
I think you're conflating giving technology to teachers and giving technology to students.
It seems nutty to me to imagine that just giving students computers is going to provide an educational benefit, although apparently some people would disagree. But providing schools with better technology for guided instruction (e.g. computer labs, ancillary instructional material available online, homework management software) sounds totally sensible.
One of the smartest things my parents did was never put a TV or computer in my bedroom. That kept me from being up all hours of the night leaving me exhausted for school the next day.
I don't think I'd be the person I am today without a computer growing up. I used GEOS to type my papers on a Commodore 64 in elementary school. I was "online" with Quantum Link (precursor to AOL) and BBSes when I was 6. Since then every new technology has basically seemed like a twist on the same concepts from the 80s.
And one of the smartest things my parents did was to put a computer in my bedroom. They thought it was a big mistake at the time, because it kept me up at all hours of the night and left me exhausted for school the next day. But I've made far more money and derived more life satisfaction from those computer skills than from anything I learned in school.
I personally wonder how the advance of usability has hurt the educational aspects of a computer. We had a computer when I was a kid, and sure, all I wanted to do was play video games. The problem is, at that time, this required a lot of work. I spent hours trying to figure out how to free up enough memory so the damn things would run. Before that it was messing with an Apple IIe
Computers were a real chore then, and I'm young enough that I was spared much of the difficulties. My little brother, only six years younger, never had any difficulties in doing what he wanted to do. Put the CD in and it automatically fires up. He's never had to do anything about interrupts or whatever to get sound to work, or anything like that, but his computer skills have never been beyond your typical user.
I've often though if I were to have children I'd give them a computer, but I'd intentionally leave it crippled so that some pain is needed to actually use it.
I can say with complete certainty that access to computers caused my grades to be much lower. All of high-school was just an annoying blur that got in the way of coding and building stuff.
The advantages of which would not be reflected in this study. They quite clearly state that the children who received computers had increased computer skills, how could one claim that is not of educational benefit?
How disappointing to read in the Texas study that "there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork."
When devising ways to beat school policing software, students showed an exemplary capacity for self-directed learning.
Makes you wonder if, had the schools spent less effort attempting to block the kids from non-educational activities, the kids might have directed that self-directed learning impulse toward the education.
"Makes you wonder if, had the schools spent less effort attempting to block the kids from non-educational activities, the kids might have directed that self-directed learning impulse toward the education."
Somehow, I don't think so. Why were kids trying to get around the blocks? To go to Myspace, Facebook, play Farmville, play World of Warcraft, and listen to/download music. If they had no blocks, the kids would do one or all of the above with ease.
Having no rules won't suddenly change a kid's mind about education. It will just introduce chaos.
I would argue that this is the intended effect. Playing games is the first thing that I did with my computer. This encouraged me to find out how to build my own games. Thats when I learnt BASIC and then went on to C and I am fudging around with Scala, Ruby and Clojure now. I learnt about architecture and beauty from games. I learned about image sprites and how beautifully they were used in Prince of Persia (Jordan Mechner's original) to create stunning worlds.
My scores dropped as well. But I do not think that academic scores are a measure of a person's intelligence. They are a measure of a person's commitment on how doggedly he would pursue a goal. I would argue that letting children play games explore ways of cheating and bending the rules of the system helps them become far better individuals than what today's education system can probably bring out. I guess most adults have gone sour to a point where they are jealous of kids having fun. :-) I remember in my friends place where my friend and his father would have fights about who would play the next game on the computer. You parents have to try it out once. I am sure your will have a better bond with your kid.
So my advice to parents is to ignore this article and be happy that your kid is playing games. Just ensure that the grades do not drop that low that it endangers his/her career altogether. Otherwise it is fine he/she would grow out of it. Or probably not and he/she might create the next world of goo for all you know. Either ways I do not see it as a bad thing.
BTW, I write from the perspective of India. My comments need to be considered with loads of salt.
I've never understood idea that computers will help education. Great education has been happening for thousands of years; obviously computers are unnecessary for good education. Personally, I feel like the three R's is a much more effective educational idea than the computers in the classroom idea. You will ultimately have to teach the R's, it's never been clear to me how computers would help teach them.
Kids have more time than money, and most are bored. If they were stuck with a Linux machine, I'm sure they'd go to pretty extensive lengths to get things to work under WINE, and learn something in the process. I attribute my lack of fear from a computer to the countless hours I had as a child just trying to get some stupid game to run and after more pain and time than an adult would be willing to spend, succeeding.
On the other hand, the study keeps saying "only computer skills were improved" as if these were not worth having. My self-taught "computer skills" are the basis of my career. Practically everything the modern knowledge worker is required to do could fall under the category of "computer skills": word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, modelling, programming. These seem like worthwhile skills.