Irony Alert
I just hope that the the Irony Alert Flag has been raised due to a purposeful and playful El Reg and not by a subEditor having had a mobile during his English lessons...
Restricting smart watch and mobile phone use can be a low-cost policy to reduce educational inequalities. This is the conclusion of a report by Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy working at the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance (pdf) and Louisiana State University. The survey looked at a number …
"As to whether parents should ban the mobile phone at home, Prof Beland told us: “I cannot answer this question with our data.”
Meanwhile, a Daily Mail columnist and wife of a senior UK politician has made the obvious connection that seems to have eluded these so-called scientists.,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/sarah-vine-says-allowing-under-16s-to-use-smartphones-is-just-as-toxic-as-underage-drinking-sex-and-illegal-drug-taking-10262894.html
It isn't just children, adults also go into a comatose state and become unresponsive to locally generated input. They lose the ability to abide by social conventions, ignoring those around them and communicating only with those who aren't in the room.
Is it "worse" than alcohol etc? It depends how you define it. Is alcohol worse than heroin? In absolute measures, it causes more damage overall.
"Smart"phones' bad effects are amplified because their prevalence undermines the social rejection of their downsides.
It isn't just children, adults also go into a comatose state and become unresponsive to locally generated input.
I have also reflected on bringing cattle prods to the synchronization meetings as people not currently "on air" are prodding the portable bullshit for "urgent mails" or repeatedly tapping the screen because there is some game on for which you have to respond in realtime to other players (something invented by the Google cancer, I hear). It's like something out of a comedy show.
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I'd like to see further study in this area. Is it becasue the smart kids manage the distraction better, or is it because the pace of the lesson is so slow because of their less able peers that they're bored?
When I was at school, the bright kid was the one staring out the window.
Chicken - egg, egg - chicken.
Managing multiple inputs, running the "school process" as a background thread which can preempt the "staring out of the window" and "reading a book under the desk" threads and managing distractions in general are 95%+ of getting high grades in school. It is also one of the reasons why girls tend to do significantly better academically up to a certain age.
They are simply better in juggling 10 things at the same time at that age. Based on non-scientific observations of my kids, the daughter can run 3-4 tasks at at the same time without botching them (f.e. doing homework while listening to music _AND_ watching pop-sci and pop-engineering shows on BBC iPlayer at the same time +/- a background thread playing Star Wars commander). Junior can handle at most one. Asking him to do two things in parallel is a recipe for disaster.
Allegedly they use versions of those "mosquito" devices as the notification tone because they can hear pitches that high whereas most adults can't.
Although I've also seen it said that kids can be spotted using their phones because most people don't tend to look down at their crotches and smile...
The misspellings and orthographical errors that are propagated on phones and social media are now so accepted they are becoming correct according to the dumbing down movement. The kids even see correct English as wrong.
And by "correct English" I mean the standard that is required by GCSE examiners, and some kids are losing out because of it.
Loosing out.....
Citation?
The standard of English found on the Internet suggests your rite. But theirs a well-attested phenomenon of contextual usage. It's most noticeable in speech: children use different accents, vocabulary and syntax depending on the social context. In writing too - even the bottom quartile know that the language they use for texting is unsuitable for essays.
Bear in mind that the widespread use of phones and computers probably means that all children use written communication far more than previous generations. Paradoxically, solecisms could be the price we pay for more widespread literacy.
@Kubla Cant
Citation? Is this an academic exercise? This, and the action to be taken to deal with it, was discussed at a school governor meeting I attended.
Not texting language, but normal language used incorrectly (according to exam standards) that children believe to be correct because to them it is prevalent.
And as for "solecism" I must thank you for being my Susie Dent on that one.
Just need an Arthur Dent now.
I womder hiow long these academics spent on this groundbreaking study to reach the conclusion that "being taught" and "doing work" in class result in better academic results than "playing videogames" and "doing Facebook"?
Certainly my best teachers were the ones who actually stood in front of the class teaching - especially the maths teacher who could spend 40 minutes of the lesson on hilarious stories and sarcastic putting the world to rights before a lucid explanation of some difficult new topic for the last 20 minutes, knowing he had gained the full undivided attention of the whole class : everyone in that class got a Grade A at O Level. The worst ones were the ones who just pointed us at a chapter in a textbook and then more or less left us to work through it before doing the written exercises at the end. Those were the most "spend time staring out of the window" type classes. I suspect that a lot of the latter still goes on rather than the former, and no amount of rebranding as free schools and academies is going to make the slightest bit of difference when the kids are having to plough through "Key Stage 4, Module 17B" in order to get the marks that get the school its' ranking in those risible "league tables".
"6.41% of a standard deviation"
I admit it is a while since my statistics education but that seems a strange way to specify a change. To make any sense we would need to know the standard deviation and confidence levels, and understand what those terms mean. Perhaps it is marginally better than the way mainstream media treat statistical results.
Can anyone enlighten me?
Can anyone enlighten me?
Well, basically, that means the difference is so miniscule as to be irrelevant. They are talking about an improvement in test scores by 3% or 4% (absolute) for the lowest scoring 25% of pupils even in the case where there may be a vast gap between the good and bad scoring pupils' results.
Let's say Johnny Aintgood scored 40% in a test whilst being allowed to use his smartphone for underage-drink-sex. Well, the same Johnny would have scored maybe 43%-44% with the ban.
... we learned "the three Rs". And we invented TehIntraWebTubes.
Today? Folks "in the channel" (whatever the fuck THAT means) have zero idea how it all works, and the teenagers are drastically being left behind when it comes to how technology works at a ones&zeros level.
Suggestion: Lose anything more complicated than log tables, sliderules, the dewey decimal system, dictionaries and encyclopedias until the kiddies are ~18 years old.
Why, exactly, does a 6 year old need a so-called "smart phone"?
Seriously. If you don't know how transistors work, you'll never really understand computers.
Seriously. If you don't know how transistors work, you'll never really understand computers.
Oh, come on.
I have been working with computers for over forty years. I have written in programming languages from assembler on minicomputers and microcomputers to Python and Perl.
I have written software for theatre lighting equipment and coin mechanisms - all of which needed a real understanding of the hardware behind the software I was writing.
I've written disc operating systems from the chip level upwards.
I have written software for bespoke hardware, working in tandem with the hardware engineer to create a working system - me debugging and patching the software, him debugging and cutting and soldering links to ICs on the board.
By any reasonable standards, I understand computers.
But I have no fucking idea how a transistor works. I just know it does.
"But I have no fucking idea how a transistor works."
If used as logic gates, it's not that hard to understand. They'd be either almost open or almost closed. Everything inbetween is an unholy mess. But for some strange reason this mess seems to be a preferred state for the analogue folks. Go figure.
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One of the first things you learn in computer science is that transistors have nothing to do with how a computer works. The fundamental two logic gates (not and or) can be implemented with valves, relays, bipolar and electrostatic transistors, and even fluid gates. D
I do know how a transistor works, but this has only been relevant to analogue design. Not many people do that.
"Schools are supposed to teach kids stuff."
Obviously. But are basic good manners one of them? Sure they can help with that, specially in the "interacting with lots of people" kind of situations, but good parents/family should probably be the ones doing most of that otherwise. The blaming of schools for the lack of simple human interaction skills sometimes goes too far, methinks.
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