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Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

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Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#91

Post by itronitron »

chii wrote: post #9
croes wrote: post #5

>Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to keep up in math. But now, you have an AI tutor like the one Sal describes by your side. Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to solve the equations in math. But now you have an AI that solves it for you. I bet that there will be more students of the later type than the former.

> But now you have an AI that solves it for you. and then the AI explains how it was solved, step by step. You can repeatedly ask it to clarify, and it has endless patience and won't get bored or sick of you. Eventually, you understand how the equation is solved. No human teacher would be able to achieve this.

There are already multiple websites that will solve math problems that the user submits and then walk through the individual steps one by one. I'm pretty sure the solutions are based on mathematics and not a trained AI.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#92

Post by theptip »

croes wrote: post #5

>Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to keep up in math. But now, you have an AI tutor like the one Sal describes by your side. Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to solve the equations in math. But now you have an AI that solves it for you. I bet that there will be more students of the later type than the former.

There is an important point here; the curriculum needs to change, a lot.

There is little point in writing essays any more. We’ll need to find other ways of testing knowledge acquisition.

But also, we’ll need other menus of skills/knowledge to acquire. It seems to me that rote memorization of facts is even less useful than it was 5 years ago. However being able to synthesize facts and ideas, this is where the human edge will be concentrated.

With AI to do the grunt work, maybe we can have our kids actually building meaningful things much earlier than they would otherwise be capable of.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#93

Post by anon7725 »

koolba wrote: post #17
chii wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But now you have an AI that solves it for you. and then the AI explains how it was solved, step by step. You can repeatedly ask it to clarify, and it has endless patience and won't get bored or sick of you. Eventually, you understand how the equation is solved. No human teacher would be able to achieve this.

> No human teacher would be able to achieve this. This immediately reminds me of the scene in Terminator 2 where Sarah Connor is reflecting on how the terminator, reprogrammed to aid John Connor, is the best father figure he’s ever had. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tksN5Jaan9E “ It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him. Never shout at him or get drunk and hit him or say he was too busy to spend time w…

Plus it has detailed files.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#94

Post by jobs_throwaway »

wisty wrote: post #37

> But drawing on his experience creating Khanmigo, an AI-powered tutor, Sal makes a compelling case that AI-powered technologies will be different. That’s because we finally have a way to give every student the kind of personalized learning, support, and guidance that’s historically been out of reach for most kids in most classrooms. As Sal puts it, “Getting every student a dedicated on-call human tutor is cost prohi…

> If you want to learn something, and have the motivation, then reading the textbook is easily good enough

Anecdotally, I found it dramatically easier to learn math through Khan academy than from textbooks. For one, I have terrible handwriting which makes the pen and paper part messy and hard to read, and for two, Khan's lessons were broken down into much smaller, more digestible steps.

I took discrete math at Uni and had to learn it from the same Rosen textbook that many on this thread probably did themselves. If I had the same thing in an online version analogous to Khan Academy, I think I would've had a much better time. Now obviously, some of the harder problems and proofs in that book are much harder to grade automatically the way Khan does for grade school math, but that seems like something LLMs are trending towards being able to do

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#95

Post by neuralnetes-COO »

Pulcinella wrote: post #88
babl-yc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may be "no money in EdTech" but that doesn't mean there can't be impactful products for it. Students don't want to pay for Google but every student still uses it. Some students will want to waste time if given access to more tools like AI agents, but the motivated ones will use it to their advantage. Even if it's wrong sometimes, it's right a lot, perfect for rubber ducking, and almost always gives answers that…

As for "GPT-4" fabricating things, I remember in school how I wrote essays and was given A's despite citing NYT and Wikipedia. Fabrications exist all over the place. If anything, hallucinations might give more examples as to how to be skeptical of any source and look for direct sources as much as possible. "Actually it's good that AI sucks because it will teach people to be more skeptical" is not a very compelling ar…

This is the purpose of LLMOps. To provide guardrails for precise output to prevent hallucination.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#96

Post by xhkkffbf »

tombert wrote: post #72
nicklecompte wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredibly depressing to read this comment when I have tested GPT-4 extensively on simple finite group theory, and it could not reliably distinguish associativity from commutativity, either in prose or in computations, even for very small groups where I gave the multiplication table. The only simple abstract algebra problems it could solve were cliches it almost certainly memorized. I would never use an LLM for learn…

First, just because there's issues with some misinformation with ChatGPT right now doesn't imply that it will always be there. Second, I know what fuck I'm doing, and I'm sorry to "depress" you, but having a high level summary of something in terms of a cartoon is generally reasonably accurate, and generally any information I learn is also mechanically checked with Isabelle. I agree that it shouldn't be the be-all-en…

Another way to look at it is to recognize that all teachers have limitations. Humans often convey misinformation too.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#97

Post by selykg »

Pulcinella wrote: post #70

Background: I taught high school science for half a decade and now I am in tech. This will never take off. One, there is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. What little money there is goes to the obvious stuff like student records databases. Anything that requires an ongoing subscription fee is dead in the water. The only reason those stupid smartboards took off is because…

As an IT and data analytics manager in ed tech, I agree, there is no money in ed tech. I make a customer support rep salary. It's ridiculous.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#98

Post by dmvdoug »

red_admiral wrote: post #44
croes wrote: post #5

>Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to keep up in math. But now, you have an AI tutor like the one Sal describes by your side. Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to solve the equations in math. But now you have an AI that solves it for you. I bet that there will be more students of the later type than the former.

We've had phone apps that you can point at an equation in a textbook and it solves it for you, for several years now: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fastmath-take-photo-solve/id14... I don't think we need Generative AI for 7th grade. College, perhaps, but how much advanced math is there in 7th grade these days?

Came here to point this out, as a history teacher who is often told by students they use phone apps for math.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#99

Post by ben_w »

miki123211 wrote: post #80
ben_w wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think they should allow use of AI during tests because yeah, it'd just do all the work for them and they wouldn't learn anything, but I absolutely think there's value in being able to use it as a 24/7 instant tutor, particularly since ChatGPT can be coerced into explaining things in basically any style that you'd like. For any test where there's an AI good enough to cheat with and cheap enough students can…

I used to agree with this point, but I actually changed my stance. Once you hit a problem that an AI cannot solve, it's good to be at least aware of what's going on in the field. You don't necessarily have to remember every formula and every fact off the top of your head, but having an intuition on what facts and formulas there are and where they can be used is immensely helpful. Imagine you're writing a program in a…

Hmm.

That sounds like a different thing than I'm saying, and I agree with what I think you're saying.

So, if an AI can answer "what's a fast sort function" with "quicksort, here's some pseudocode: …", that's a related but different question to "write quicksort in [this brand new language you've never encountered before]".

Is like how AI won't take our jobs, but it will take over for each individual task that our jobs are made from.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#100

Post by nbzso »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #54
nbzso wrote: post #6

If you have some form of financial independence in your life, some form of the grid backup, you know what is all this about. Did you think the richest of the elite will give their kids this form of education? Seriously? My kids learn in a classical way. No aid, no electronic devices, no "modern" bullshit. Critical thinking is a must in a world of corporations greed and digital dystopia. The school mandatory program i…

I agree the endgame is turning all education (and other areas of society) into McDonald's type crap because it's cheapest to offer. But it's weird to make this about Microsoft when AI is being shoved down our throats from all directions. Like you said, it's a "world of" greed.

Greed is contagious. But looking at Closed AI and seeing Azure all over it is not easy to ignore. Looking at hostile takeover of FOSS at GitHub to train commercial product Copilot is another thing. We all knew the strategy when they bought it, and we all complied with the move. They have power because we refuse to challenge the lack of intervention from authorities. It is all a big scam.
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