Well, if shoehorning interests in works for youth pastors...
Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
31–40 of 244 posts
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#32I 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.
In that case the problem isn’t what technology we do or do not introduce. A society that values literacy isn’t going to be duped by a demo and a blog post. However a society which does not value understanding, expertise, or teachers will take every opportunity to shortcut them.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#33No one who understands ai can rely on it to help us learn. I provided one with 100 citations I wanted to standardize and it deleted 10 and made up 10 to replace them. Can’t imagine this being used to replace a textbook or even explain a textbook.
> explain a textbook I've had very good luck using LLMs to do this. I paste the part of the book that I don't understand and ask questions about it.
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Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#34I 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.
> I want them to be basing this off of the experience of going to the most effective private tutors.
Good goal, but they've got to start somewhere.
Delivering an education experience even 80% as effective as the best private tutors would be a huge achievement.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#35I'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 under…
My general experience with things like this from Google is to assume that this is at least one big step behind what they're doing now internally. Taking a position on how useful one finds this today effectively insulates from thinking more seriously about what could be done. If taken from a perspective of "what hints are laying around in this blog post or scientific articles about what's possible?" it's probably more effective use of time if you're going to invest time in reading it.
As an example, as you're reading it, try posing a few relevant counterfactuals.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> explain a textbook I've had very good luck using LLMs to do this. I paste the part of the book that I don't understand and ask questions about it.
But the problem is, you don't understand the passage, so therefore how will you vet the answers? Seems like hallucinations would be very very damaging in this use-case
I was in the middle of typing the same question. This is the part that worries me about Generative AI; far too many people seem to have forgotten that its prone to confabulation and telling the user what they want to hear.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#37Shameless 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…
Seems legit, I'll have to try later. Just curious, why didn't you make this a commercial SaaS?
maybe because every LLM provider has an "attach file" feature so you can attach a paper and then ask questions about it?
what's the value add of the wrapper that this person wrote at all?
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#38I 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.
It’s both. Technology is a component (I’d we wouldn’t have books, recorded videos, multimedia aids, etc.).
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#39I’m not sure this approach is the right one, but the problem resonates with me.
I vividly remember hitting some blocker (7th grade chem, 4th grade reading, 2nd grade dinosaurs), where I had a question that the teacher dismissed.
My mind was stuck (blocked) as it couldn’t get past the question I had, and in a public school setting, it wasn’t worth the time for the teacher to dive down the tangent (or they simply weren’t prepared).
My hope for LLMs in education, is that they can supplement traditional curriculums such that students can go “off the rails” while still being nudged back to the desired outcome.
- How do we know electrons “spin”?
- Why does that word behave differently than others (in English)?
- How big is a sauropod compared to a blue whale?
I’ve found that on my own journey through education, it’s these sparks of interest that drive towards deeper understanding, rather than surface level rote memorization.
TFA says: “What if students had the power to shape their own learning journey?”
In the context of nonfiction/textbooks, this is already possible!
I didn’t read “How to read a book”[0] until high school, but it opened the world for me on another silly blocker I had, which is that material should be consumed start to finish.
Hopefully with “AI” more students will learn that there are many paths towards understanding the world, and not just the curriculum in front of them.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#40Looking forward to my copy of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" a la Diamond Age
I was thinking about that when I bought my pinenote - imagine Tom Riddle's diary helping you with mathematics. Sadly I lost interest in the Linux side of the pinenote as it took a while to get to a working state and now I've got other things going on.