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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

#51

Post by SJMG »

cjs_ac wrote: post #10

I'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…

> the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject.

Tell me this wasn't foreign languages? :face_palm:

Okay, I was totally with you until this,

> 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

I think if you walk into the bottom 80% of classrooms you would not see, interleaving, spaced repetition, recall-over-reread, or topic shuffling to avoid interference.

There's a load of understanding we've gained in pedagogy and human learning that has not affected how we structure formal education yet.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#52

Post by TimorousBestie »

exe34 wrote: post #40
lagniappe wrote: post #2

Looking 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.

> imagine Tom Riddle's diary helping you with mathematics.

Your tone suggests that this wouldn’t be horrifying so I wonder what you meant by this.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#54

Post by picardo »

I'm excited by this multi-media approach. I've been avid self-learner for years, and I've often found the textbook format too dry, and forbidding, but ever since I started using NotebookLM, I'm diving into textbooks more and more. There is genuine value in creating a new format that meets learners where they are at.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#55

Post by BoorishBears »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #49
0xWTF wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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 What they are doing internally after launching something like this is patting themselves on the back, updating their resumes, and promptly forgetting it exists.

*leaving, raising a round because they worked on this, promptly not doing anything without Google's distribution behind them

(see NotebookLM)

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#56

Post by joshvm »

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…

I'm sure computer science has improved in high school over the last (gulp) 20 years, but when I did variations of IT and programming lessons before university, it was bad. This was peak "you must Microsoft Office"-era. I've been involved in outreach for almost as long at this point. A lot of kids ask sensible questions like 'when do I ever need to use trig in real life?', because the examples in lessons and exams are so divorced from reality that it feels pointless.

I do think there is pedagogical value in showing where these concepts can be used practically and the advantage of LLMs is that you can transform the examples to what you're actually interested in. For example the Red Blob Games series on A* pathfinding are really good at showing how Dijkstra and graph traversal algorithms work, for a use-case (video games) that is appealing to a lot of nerdy people.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#57

Post by sky2224 »

cjs_ac wrote: post #10

I'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…

Yeah, as a student, I have to agree.

The issue with learning things isn't that it hasn't been tailored to be interesting or relatable to me, it's just that it's a lot of content and it's hard. The solution is figuring out how to set up a type of spoon feed algorithm that checks that I'm understanding little bite size pieces along the way in addition to giving layman's terms for things that don't necessitate the formal description (e.g., deciphering math language).

ChatGPT Study mode has actually been quite good at this when you prompt it correctly and are studying a subject that it's well trained on.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#58

Post by teaearlgraycold »

cjs_ac wrote: post #10

I'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…

I'm not a teacher, but I think a simple change to "objects in motion stay in motion" could help with teaching it. Instead, tell students that any change in motion always has a cause, then ask them for the cause in different scenarios. Why does the ball stop rolling across the room? Why does the rocket launch into space? Why does the falling feather stop as it hits the ground? Then, ask what happens if there is no cause for change. Now you are left with the original law. That object will stay in motion.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#59

Post by mattlutze »

Mtinie wrote: post #38
apwell23 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.).

Technology is a tool to expand the possible ways to educate, but isn't necessary for education to happen.

i.e. we've been educating people for 1,000s of years even without textbooks.

Education itself isn't primarily a technology problem. Treating it as such is an administrative failure, as is pursuing a technological solution in many scenarios that are first social in nature.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#60

Post by truelson »

This is one of the areas where LLMs are really useful. At their core they aren’t “thinking” so much as transforming and reorienting data.

What’s been most valuable for me is the way they create a kind of imperfect but effective Socratic dialogue with whatever I’m reading. I was the kid who always had my hand up in class, not to show off, but because I hated leaving something unexplained. Good teachers could make a text come alive by answering those questions.

LLMs give me some of that back outside the classroom. Even when I ask them to speculate, the process forces me to interrogate the material and refine my own model of it. That’s changed how I read, learn, and even how I experience novels.

So innovation on this “Socratic interface” and other interfaces is pointed in the right direction.

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