[phyllistine]

This is largely just anti tech puritanism. I cant comment on the psych and neurological arguments, but the following line of reasoning

  > A pre-Covid survey exploring how US students aged 8-18 utilize digital technologies both inside and outside of school provides the answer (values below are per week) ...If we extrapolate and consider a typical U.S. academic school year of 36 weeks, these numbers suggest that students spend 198 hours annually using digital devices for learning purposes, and 2,028 hours annually using those same exact tools to jump around between scatter-shot media content.

is incredibly silly, given that it is counting time on device outside of class (things that students are allowed to do) against effectiveness of in class usage.

It's like arguing that a student who likes reading Harry Potter, or Comic Books 2 hours a night is forming habits against the idea of using books for learning. Students who play games or watch movies are not alcoholics using beer for buoyancy studies.

Not only this, it groups listening to music on a computer as an independent recreation activity, and not something that students will do concurrently with homework or other tasks outside of class, double dipping on recreation hours. As if listening to music isn't a boon for learning, which it easily can be.

[pessimizer]

No, it's saying that if you use the same device to entertain yourself and to do homework, and you use it for entertainment 10x as often as you use it for homework, you'll get distracted then you're doing homework.

> It's like arguing that a student who likes reading Harry Potter, or Comic Books 2 hours a night is forming habits against the idea of using books for learning.

Books are separate objects, they are not a platform. It's saying that if you put a child's homework as a two page insert into a great comic book, the rest of the comic book will distract from the annoying, difficult insert.

The opposing theory is that the proximity of homework to comics will somehow make the homework fun. Homework is going to be hard and annoying no matter what you do, if it's not hard you're not learning anything from it.

[phyllistine]

The Harry Potter and comic book argument also works for paper newspapers, the same object contains good, informative articles, opinion pieces etc, but also the comics page.

I am arguing that thinking that the same object cannot be used in two contexts is incredibly reductive and essentialist. They are stacking the books (by double counting time listening to music etc) to prove the idea that they are insistent on, that computers (which the article generalizes from desktops to chromebooks to iPads to smart watches) are essentially bad for learning, when this is not necessarily the case.

Students will continue to learn using computers, just as I will, because they are ridiculously effective for doing so.

[luzojeda]

IMO the correct analogy would be a physical object where you could switch back and forth between Harry Potter and books used for learning. If that were the case I'd agree with you. But here we are talking about two separate distinct physical objects, the Harry Potter book and, for example, a biology book.

When a person is reading the latter they can't easily switch to HP, but I can do that while learning anything in my computer. It's as easy as doing ctrl + T + red + enter and I get to the infinite entertainment that is Reddit thanks to the browser autocomplete, for example.

[phyllistine]

Switching to nonsense with physical books is as easy as having two books in your bag/desk, or reading a physical newspaper with a comics section. Treating the ability to switch context quickly as essentially bad for learning is reductive, especially when the ability to add more context (searching unknown words, useful videos, articles etc) can obviously be incredibly useful.

Stopping the ability to do ctrl+T+reddit.com also prevents the huge amount of info the rest of the informative internet can provide.

The article also includes smart watches as computers, and personally as a Apple Watch user, the amount that this device can distract is incredibly low, and obvious to viewers like a teacher.