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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

#111

Post by ben_w »

tombert wrote: post #102
ben_w wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 calcul…

> Doesn't that sort of prove my point?

Only if you missed mine about how it is no longer cheating to use one.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#112

Post by wrs »

Myrmornis wrote: post #104
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…

“Fall down” doesn’t mean they’re always wrong. It means they’re right just often enough to make you believe them when they’re making stuff up, which is a terrible characteristic for a teacher.

At this point, ChatGPT is good enough that I can tell what authoritative source I should go look at for the answer, which is great, but I’m not going to believe any statements it makes without checking. I think people suffer a bit of Gell-Mann amnesia when dealing with ChatGPT.

I actually do get a lot of value from ChatGPT as a self-motivated learner with a specific goal in mind, but that’s not the scenario we’re talking about.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#113

Post by [deleted] »

ben_w wrote: post #59
tombert wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I've found ChatGPT (and its clones) have been immensely useful as a learning tool for me. Having it summarize stuff in different ways and being able to immediately ask clarifying questions has been sort of a game-changing learning tool, at least for me. 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 th…

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#114

Post by qaq »

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…

[flagged]

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#115

Post by Jtsummers »

tripdout wrote: post #103
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.

But Khanmigo isn't, it's $4/month.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#116

Post by RandomLensman »

tombert wrote: post #22
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.

I dunno, I've found ChatGPT (and its clones) have been immensely useful as a learning tool for me. Having it summarize stuff in different ways and being able to immediately ask clarifying questions has been sort of a game-changing learning tool, at least for me. 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 th…

Does ChatGPT give you good exercises in set theory to work through as well on that or is that back to other material?

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#118

Post by MajimasEyepatch »

Myrmornis wrote: post #104
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…

I can ask ChatGPT to write code and assess myself whether it's correct or not. (It's frequently not, but it can still be useful for certain tasks.) I can ask it to explain something about the industry I work in or adjacent fields and have a pretty good sense of whether it's leading me in the right direction. But if I asked it to teach me about, say, Chinese history, I would have very little ability to assess whether it's telling me the truth or sprinkling little falsehoods into things. I would only be able to catch the most blatant mistakes; the rest would require more detailed independent research.

Now imagine you're a kid who's still learning reading comprehension and hasn't yet developed a functional BS detector. You're not going to have much of an ability to separate truth from fiction, but you're likely going to trust this thing that sounds authoritative.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#119

Post by tombert »

ben_w wrote: post #111
tombert wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 calcul…

> Doesn't that sort of prove my point? Only if you missed mine about how it is no longer cheating to use one.

I see, so you're claiming that if AI can be utilized to solve the problem, and it's determined to be useful, then it should be allowed to be on a test as a result, in the same way that a graphing calculator is no longer considered cheating?

I think the disagreement I have is that I think part of the reason calculators are allowed on calculus tests is because they're actually not that useful for a lot of what they teach you in calculus. I had a graphing calculator in my math and physics classes in high school, but most of my work was still done with a pen and paper. The calculator was of course useful for the arithmetic stuff, and it could be useful to sanity-check your work (e.g. to see if the roots you calculated were correct), but I still had to do most of the actual calculus by hand.

Even when I got a calculator with a CAS built in (HP 50G), I would still have to do most of the algebra by hand, and honestly if my teachers had known that my calculator had a CAS I suspect they wouldn't have allowed me to use it to begin with.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#120

Post by raisedbyninjas »

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…

Maybe no school board buys and puts it into every class. Parents will still buy it and it can supplement learning gaps when doing homework. $20/month is a rounding error compared to pre-school, clothes, extra-curricular activies, private school, private tutors, etc.
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