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Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

research.google

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Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#11

Post by spwa4 »

I wish instead Google would instead find a good way to have exercise books, with:

1) well-thought out exercises (covering all cases, whether in math or Spanish)

2) CORRECT solutions (just saying because even ChatGPT gets it wrong even for high school math)

3) that you can enter them using pen (if need be on an iPad)

Just a way to make zillions of exercises if I want to. And for my kids, the problem is these days teachers won't (AND mostly can't, they just don't know their subject) help them make a lot of exercises.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#12

Post by devmor »

Animats wrote: post #3

How much of this is cutesy animations and how much is really valuable?

This feels at first glance like another instance of an AI tool doing something humans already enjoy doing, rather than replacing work we'd like to avoid.

The teachers and professor I've known have always loved adapting their lessons to suit the interests of their students - I think that's a core educational instruction skill.

I'm open to hearing disagreements, but reading through the usages and evaluations does not leave me thinking of a tool that would provide any benefit greater than just giving teachers more resources would.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#13

Post by ares623 »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #9

All 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 ex…

You know what really motivates studying though? The promise of being completely useless when you finish studying since everything will be done by AI! What a motivator!

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#14

Post by Imnimo »

I looked at the example for computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in food. Explanations include:

"a list can be used for a recipe"

"a set can be used to list all the unique ingredients you need to buy for a week's meals"

"a map can be used for a cookbook"

"a priority queue can be used to manage orders in a busy restaurant kitchen"

"a food-pairing graph can show which ingredients taste good together"

Maybe I'm over-estimating the taste of 7th graders, but I feel like I would get sick of this really quickly.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#15

Post by yorwba »

Figure 10 of the technical report https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/ai_augmented_textb... has a third n=30 group labeled "LCG" that is mentioned nowhere else. It scores 100% on "I felt like today's educational tool helped me gain a good understanding of the content." so I wonder what's up with that.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#17

Post by apwell23 »

Imnimo wrote: post #14

I looked at the example for computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in food. Explanations include: "a list can be used for a recipe" "a set can be used to list all the unique ingredients you need to buy for a week's meals" "a map can be used for a cookbook" "a priority queue can be used to manage orders in a busy restaurant kitchen" "a food-pairing graph can show which ingredients taste good together" May…

yea this is stupid . agreed.

I don't know when these dorks will understand that education isn't a technical problem. Its a social and emotional problem.

existing material is clear enough to learn from.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#18

Post by clusterhacks »

Isn't this just showing the effects of actively engaging the learner by placing a topic in contexts familiar/favored by learner versus just reading about a topic?

Like, if you had made the text pdf readers do some manual thinking by working on trying to place the topic into the same type of familiar/favored context, wouldn't that have been the better comparison?

I think using GenAI for learning is cool and exciting (especially for autodidacts) but I'm not excited by this particular study structure.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#20

Post by mossTechnician »

I wonder how this will contribute to our current declining literacy rates in a social climate that's already rife with anti-intellectualism and isolation. Even if this worked well, it appears to be to be a step backwards.

Call me pessimistic, but this technology looks more poised to replace teachers in schools than supplement them.

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