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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

#101

Post by anon7725 »

mminer237 wrote: post #31
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.

That requires a young student who is really self-motivated to keep asking it to clarify things. Plenty of teachers, parents, and tutors are willing to keep trying new ways of explaining things to kids until they understand it. The kid giving up is way more common than the adult without someone pushing him to keep trying or coming back to it regularly. Obviously, not every child has someone in his life that cares enou…

I guess the difference is that there is a social dynamic at play between a student and an instructor. The student may tire of some aspect of the relationship before they tire of learning the material.

For example, unless the instructor has some kind of Jedi master level self control they may begin to show frustration at being asked the same question repeatedly or with minor variations.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#102

Post by tombert »

ben_w wrote: post #86
tombert wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no, I absolutely and fundamentally disagree with that. We didn't just stop teaching children how to read the second that text-to-speech stuff came about, and we didn't stop teaching basic arithmetic the second that calculators were invented, and we didn't stop teaching algebra the second that Wolfram Alpha was released. There is value in learning the fundamentals of things. If you never actually learn algebra,…

> We didn't just stop teaching children how to read the second that text-to-speech stuff came about TTS from visual input isn't good enough to be an example of that yet. It's good, but not that good. > we didn't stop teaching basic arithmetic the second that calculators were invented and we didn't stop teaching algebra the second that Wolfram Alpha was released. And yet, my A-level exams 22 years ago required me to h…

> TTS from visual input isn't good enough to be an example of that yet. It's good, but not that good.

Even if TTS were absolutely perfect, then I'd still maintain my point.

> And yet, my A-level exams 22 years ago required me to have a graphic calculator.

Doesn't that sort of prove my point? Calculators existed and were obviously useful, but they didn't just stop teaching you algebra, despite knowing you had a calculator.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#103

Post by tripdout »

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…

Yet Khan Academy is free.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#104

Post by Myrmornis »

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…

> Sure it can generally put words in grammatically correct order and is passible for writing no one is going to read anyway (like marketing emails). But the moment it requires actual domain knowledge all these AI models completely fall down because, again, they don't actually understand anything, they just are really good at guessing what word comes next.

Many of us are frequently using it to obtain answers requiring domain knowledge; the evidence that this works is that the answers it gives are often found to be correct, and yet things we did not know. So your description is simply contradicting the experience of many people. Perhaps you're using it in a different domain, or not writing clear prompts, but it's well worth experiencing what people are talking about.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#105

Post by diddypiddy »

doctoboggan wrote: post #83
7thpower wrote: post #19

I am a high school dropout and who learned math using Khan Academy after never having completed more than pre-algebra in middle school. Sal Khan’s work changed my life and allowed me to build a foundation in not only math, but also finance and economics, that allowed me to feel confident enough to go to college. I did not have a support system or people in my life who could teach me these things, but I had the intern…

Impressive! You should give yourself more credit as it takes more than just internet and patience to teach yourself enough to get into college. I am also excited for society. However I am worried as well. While an AI tutor who is able to understand the child's current knowledge and gear the lessons toward what will make the most sense will be very powerful, it could also be used for brainwashing, propaganda, misinfor…

We live in a world where wealth is increasingly being concentrated at the top, social mobility for the average person is trending downwards, suicide rates in the US are at all-time highs, drug abuse rising, general deaths of despair rising, mental illness rising, climate and ecological catastrophes mounting by unchecked greed and all of this AI crap is mostly in the hands of the powerful who will use it to solidify the trends of the things I've mentioned above. Which begs the question, what kind of society is this to be excited about? Great if you live in a bubble unaffected by the above, but for the rest of us, the society sucks.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#106

Post by ben_w »

llm_trw wrote: post #67
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…

Fountain pens are easier to use than most ball point pens. If you need to think deeply about a problem there are few better things than a binder of a3 paper and a fountain pen to think. That said the uselessness of education is the point. It's a signal that you're willing to do pointless work for future rewards. We may as well replace it with counting beans and it would be just as effective.

As a southpaw, the last thing I want to do is touch a fountain pen.

Well, unless I have another go at learning Arabic…

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#107

Post by tombert »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #96
tombert wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, and I actually think that there can be some value in students being challenged to find some misinformation.

I maintain that one of the very best teachers I ever had was my 9th grade biology teacher, purely because she understood absolutely nothing about biology and appeared to just be making shit up. You could argue that in a vacuum this might be benign, but part of the issue is that she would use tests provided by the textbook, written by competent biologists. As a result of this, I had to learn to ignore most of what my teacher said, and sometimes argue back with her, and I feel like ironically I learned biology better than most people in that class; if nothing else I did get an A on all the "real" tests from the textbooks.

I think that arguing is actually a really underrated tool in education. Looking for and correcting bullshit is something that extraordinarily enlightening, at least for me, and I think AIs even in their current state can be useful for that.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#108

Post by tehalex »

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…

There's some money but there's really two markets: small medium (eg a lot of work for a relatively small sale) and mega districts (and those generally just goes to the big established players because of connections)

Most school wifi isn't that bad anymore - the bigger problem for us is web filters that break things in interesting ways.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#109

Post by bertil »

This is a lot of words for not saying that students keep sending essays entirely written by ChatGPT and never proof-read by their “author.” Never having to do homework is affecting students dramatically, according to many teachers.

What Gates and Kahn describe is interesting, but it’s a little bit like talking about color theory and how the fact that a baseball bat is purple affected you after you just got whacked in the head with it.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#110

Post by seidleroni »

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…

I understand the skepticism around AI in ed tech, and I think people have the right to be skeptical of this being portrayed as a "cure all". Saying that it is of no value because nobody will pay for it and the kids wont learn from it because they're hungry does not capture the whole picture. I was never a great student because I had trouble focusing in class, but if I had this to guide me through my homework, I believe I would have been a much better student. Looking at math homework and having no idea how to even start and no resources to help is very different than looking at the problem and working with AI to help you understand how to attack the problem. Sure, you can't turn every single kid into a math wiz, but I think there is a real possibility that this will help almost every kid become better at math than they would have. Assuming this is low cost, I think many parents would be very willing to pay for it.
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