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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

#141

Post by cmcconomy »

tombert wrote: post #107
xhkkffbf wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 provide…

finding misinformation is a critical skill, but you need a basis to suss out bullshit. diving into the LLM plausibility deepend is not the best way for most people to distinguish the two.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#143

Post by bryanlarsen »

QuarterReptile wrote: post #128
qaq wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Textbooks do a better job than 90% of teachers, and that's not a dig at teachers. I spend more time, by far, figuring out how to keep student attention than thinking about the material itself. I'd be way more excited about getting 6 of my students to start reading and understanding textbooks than getting all 60 to pass. OTOH, my bosses would be pretty pissed...

IIRC studies show one-on-one attention is worth 2 standard deviations in test scores and a good teacher is worth 1 standard deviation. (Not coincidentally home schoolers have about one standard deviation of advantage).

Khanmigo doesn't have to be as good as a teacher to provide an advantage to the student.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#145

Post by RandomLensman »

tombert wrote: post #138
RandomLensman wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought it tough to really learn math without doing exercise to really understand how things work.

It is! In my case, that's why I usually try and figure out something to do in Isabelle. Trying to prove some kind of property based on something I learned from ChatGPT. I also will occasionally grab exercises from "real" textbooks once I know the keywords to search in Kagi.

Not sure self-selecting on exercises is really sufficient (at least for me I doubt it).

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#146

Post by IncreasePosts »

I'll admit I haven't read the book mentioned in the article. But I can't help but feel this is just dreaming about "AI" as a magical intelligence that we can perfectly instruct and trust, instead of having an actual plan for how current SotA AI could deliver that experience. I personally wouldn't trust any current LLM to train my child, without having to go over all of its content and see if it was actually trustworthy or not.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#147

Post by skrtskrt »

megaman821 wrote: post #134
diddypiddy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The average person has a higher standard of living and more wealth than ever before. Suicide rates are not at all-time highs, they were much higher during the World Wars and Great Depression. Drug abuse is down too, but newer drugs are more potent. Mental illness is a hard stat to compare over time since it is very sensitive to the collection mechanisms. The growth of carbon-free technologies has been exponential ove…

when you visit or live among people or parts of society that that essentially never "modernized" in any meaningful way, the only thing they really need is better healthcare.

the rest is a load of crap that is just solving problems created by industrialization and modernization

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#148

Post by beryilma »

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…

> Personalisation fails for a simple reason - people don't really want to learn.

Students/people who are interested in learning a particular subject are doing just fine learning it from already available material, be it books, videos, MOOCs, etc. They may or may not use AI, but AI won't make a huge difference for these type of people.

For people who are not interested in learning, AI won't do sh*t. Because the problem is not that they don't have a tutor available to them; the problem is that they don't have motivation to learn. I am not being judgemental here: it is perfectly understandable, for example, why a poor kid may not have motivation to learn.

A few years ago, MOOCs were touted as the next best thing to democratize education and make it available to underserved populations around the world. This did not happen. Some research shows that MOOCs are mostly used by an already-educated group of people who are interested in further learning. I think learning with the help of an AI tutor would be no different: its users will not be the intended ones.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#149

Post by megaman821 »

skrtskrt wrote: post #147
megaman821 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average person has a higher standard of living and more wealth than ever before. Suicide rates are not at all-time highs, they were much higher during the World Wars and Great Depression. Drug abuse is down too, but newer drugs are more potent. Mental illness is a hard stat to compare over time since it is very sensitive to the collection mechanisms. The growth of carbon-free technologies has been exponential ove…

when you visit or live among people or parts of society that that essentially never "modernized" in any meaningful way, the only thing they really need is better healthcare. the rest is a load of crap that is just solving problems created by industrialization and modernization

Are you talking about lost Amazon tribes? Most places I have visited people have seen real quality of life improvements by having clean water, refrigeration, sewage systems and access to the internet.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#150

Post by camdenreslink »

welshwelsh wrote: post #133
MajimasEyepatch wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While these are all valid concerns, they also apply to human teachers. Humans spew bullshit all the time. But that's OK. A teacher's knowledge doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than the student's. If ChatGPT explains Chinese history in a way that is 80% accurate, to a student whose understanding of Chinese history is 10% accurate, the student will walk away with a better understanding of Chinese…

This seems very incorrect to me. Human teachers make mistakes, or understand details of something incorrectly sometimes, but it doesn't come up in every lesson. It only happens occasionally, and sometimes a student will correct them/challenge them on it.

ChatGPT makes mistakes literally every time I use it (in a domain that I'm knowledgable in). How is that the same thing? Being given incorrect information is worse than not having the knowledge at all IMO.

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