Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
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Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
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Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#2Looking forward to my copy of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" a la Diamond Age
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#3How much of this is cutesy animations and how much is really valuable?
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#4Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#5Shameless plug but I made a similar tool called asXiv[1] which allows you to "ask" arXiv.org papers questions.
It also recommends questions on initial load that can help understand or explore the paper, here's a demo[2] from the popular Attention Is All You Need paper.
The code is all opensource[3], it uses the google 2.5 flash lite model to keep costs down (it's completely free atm), but that can be changed via env var if you run it locally.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#6Doesn’t work on mobile when you click into one of the examples. It says it is best for wide layouts
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#7Google Veo 3 could also do a lot to spark interest by making 3D environments of Rome or Medieval Europe
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#8I feel like this is thinking too small. I don’t want a better textbook. I want them to be basing this off of the experience of going to the most effective private tutors.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#9All the people at the forefront of AI really loved and thrived in highly academic settings from kindergarden to PhDs, their own lived experience doesn't match up with this product at all. Why are they making it?
EdTech has the worst returns of any industry in venture capital. Why?
There are no teachers who say that technology has generally improved experiences in classrooms, even if some specific technology-driven experiences like Khan Academy and Scratch are universally liked. Why?
When you look at Scratch, which I know a lot about, one thing they never do is allege that it improves test scores. They never, ever evaluate it quantitatively like that. And yet it is beloved.
Khan Academy: it is falling into the same trap as e.g. the Snoo. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's about, who pays? Who is the customer? Khan Academy did a study that showed a thing. Kids are not choosing to watch educational YouTube videos because of a study. It is cozy learning.
But why does Khan Academy need studies for a test score thing? Why does Google? This is the problem with Ed Tech: the only model is to sell to districts, and when you sell to districts, you are doing Enterprise Sales. You can sometimes give them a thing that does something, but you are always giving them exactly what they ask for. Do you see the difference?
It doesn't matter if it's technology or if it is X or Y or Z: if the district asks for something that makes sense, great, and if it asks for something that doesn't make sense, or doesn't readily have the expertise to know what does and doesn't make sense, like with technology, tough cookie. Google will make something that doesn't make sense, if it feels that districts will adopt it.
We can go and try the merits of Learn Your Way, thankfully they provide a demo. All I'll say is, people have been saying, "more reading" is the answer, and there is a lot of fucking reading in this experience, but maybe the problem isn't that there isn't enough text to read. The problem is that kids do not want to read, so...
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#10I'm a former physics teacher, and while I'm impressed by the technology, I think this is a low efficacy innovation.
The real challenge in teaching Newton's laws of motion to teenagers is that they struggle to deal with the idea that friction isn't always there. When students enter the classroom, they arrive with an understanding of motion that they've intuited from watching things move all their lives, and that understanding is the theory of impetus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_impetus
An AI system that can interrogate individual students' understanding of the ideas presented and pose questions that challenge the theory of impetus would be really useful, because 'unteaching' impetus theory to thirty students at once is extremely difficult. However, what Google has presented here, with slides and multiple guess quizzes, is just a variation on the 'chalk and talk' theme.
The final straw that made me leave teaching was the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject. Discussions about 'the best pedagogy' never make any consideration of what is being taught; there's an implicit assumption that every idea and subject should be taught the same way. School systems have improved markedly since they were introduced in the nineteenth century, but I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement, and we need to start engaging with the detail of what's being taught to further improve.