The Home Access scheme is a well meaning Government-funded project to give computers to children from poorer families and so bridge the “digital divide”.
But, as The Register is reporting, new research from the US suggests such schemes may do more harm than good.
People often worry that such gaps will be enhanced as richer families acquire computers and internet connections and poorer households don’t, which has led to many initiatives by governments, charities etc designed to get digital technologies into the hands of even the poorest.
…a kid in a disadvantaged home given a computer and internet access will tend to be poorly supervised and use it mainly for gaming, social networking or other timewasting online/computer activities rather than buckling down and doing homework. Thus computered-up poor children actually become dumber than they would have been without the tech.
Perhaps the coalition government would do well to make sure there’s some decent evidence for our own Home Access scheme doing what it aims to.
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14 Comments
Snip, snip. I smell another candidate for the governmental scissors.
Rather like people in council houses using the bath to keep coal in?
I have obtained a copy of the actual research paper and the El Reg article has been sensationalised. The researcher’s conclusions are more modest and have a long list of caveats attached. This is an interesting research result, but is not by itself useful for formulating government policy.
The only part of the study that is directly interesting for political purposes (rather than academic ones) is this conclusion: the value of computer and internet access is directly related to the quality of parenting. Throwing cash or computers at the children of disinterested parents is unproductive; providing assistance to parents who are actively involved in their child’s education is effective. While marginally interesting, this conclusion will surprise nobody.
If I put that report on my potatoes, I’d have a bumper crop this year.
Is someone really trying to spin this load of cobblers?
Unbelievable.
Isn’t there a more fundamental question though. is there in fact any evidence that have a PC makes any difference at all to children education?
Computers are an excellent example of how money is wasted in schools. I lecture in Computer Science at university, and from this background I say – throw them out of schools, they are damaging our kids.
What exactly do schools use computers for in lessons anyway? When I was at school – the 90s – we had IT lessons where we learned to use pre-war versions of Word and some very basic databasing and Excel, but in the rest of the curriculum we used rectangular wood-based objects called
books.
How are computers actually used in classrooms now that merits (or doesn’t) the apparently massive cost of having so many? Certainly it’s good to teach children to use the various types of office software and to develop net skills (including proper online research and scepticticm – We have gone from “it must be true, I saw it on TV” to “it must be true, I saw a YouTube video/read it on Wikipedia”- but where is the scope for computers in, say a French or maths class?
Even if no responsible supervision is available then content management is an absolute pre-requisite.
Unless in a (well managed) school environment then that’s going to be very difficult to enforce.
As someone who’s had a recent experience of secondary education, I have to agree with Benjamin and Matthew. Computers are really of very limited use outside ICT. “We’re going to the computer suite” = this is going to be a doss lesson. The only big improvement that technology has brought to the classroom in the last ten years IMHO are projectors and interactive whiteboards, which took a good idea (OHPs and blackboards) and improved upon them. Sure, it’s good to look up the odd fact on the Internet, but it’s even better to actually pick up a book and look in the index.
Gaming, facebook and other timewasting? What do these people think computers in better off households are used for?
And the alternative to this view in the article is…?
Basically, that rich kids would still have computers and poor ones wouldn’t? My children go to a school in Longsight Manchester where computer access is very good. Both in school and when there Dad heads off out leafletting, they spend too much time on Stardol, Babydow and Y3, proving the point. BUt they all have a comparative knowledge of IT well in advance of mine plus, they spontaneously start doing powerpoint presentations, clearly marking out a future in middle management.
The rich kids aren’t doing homework either, but the key is often parenting anyway, not the tools provided. No child can bypass weak parenting unless you give them an opportunity to. (ie: a computer). Have faith
Is that St John’s Longsight? Didn’t have any computers when I was there in the 70s.
Hi Paul,
If – and I mean if – this research was accurate and applied to the UK, and the evidence showed the money invested in computers for poorer kids didn’t actually help their academic attainment, I would hope we’d be looking to find something else that did work, not just doing nothing. Not persuaded that we should base policy on faith!