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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

#151

Post by saltcured »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #126
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…

My issue with that it's more that those are extremely poor analogies. The first 3 are simply plain wrong. GenAI's gonna GenAI I guess.

Maybe you need to ask it for 8th graders to get, "A Petri Net can be used for a recipe"?

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#152

Post by politician »

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…

Absolutely, the obvious best use-case for this technology -- from the ROI perspective -- is corporate HR training modules.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#153

Post by groby_b »

mattlutze wrote: post #59
Mtinie wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

And we've been doing a pretty crappy job educating people without written texts. The written word led to a tremendous acceleration of knowledge transmission. The printing press enabled that transmission at a larger, but unified, scale.

Anything we even remotely recognize as science has only ever been practiced by literate cultures.

Discarding technology for education because it's not a panacea is an absolute failure as educator.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#156

Post by apsurd »

SJMG wrote: post #137
apsurd wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not be wrong that tactics aren't sufficiently widespread, but that's the thing they're just tactics. Spaced-repetition is a good example. It's so objectively better than other forms of memorization, but it's just one tactic for learning. In this sense "teaching well requires a specific set of tools and tactics" is exactly how "a good teacher can teach anything" would make sense. The problem is it doesn't make…

Yeah there seems to be some confusion. I agreed with the comment I replied to in the sense that teaching well requires specific domain knowledge and some specific pedagogy. Where I disagree is the assertion that the "tactics", to use your term, have been perfused through the system and there's nothing left to gain here. He specifically says, "I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to…

Agree, it's unnecessarily limiting to say the well is entirely dried up re: improving status quo tools.

Charitable pov though, i'd say it's about leverage. Learning outcomes globally suffer steep steep cliffs and it's inevitably due to socioeconomic factors.

It's hard to argue that more chromebooks, spaced repetition, and catering to learning styles are the missing pieces johnny needs to get out of the hood.

as a person in tech i believed for a long time that if only we had better learning materials, people could orient and better self motivate around subjects. (learning needs to be hard. it's biology. brain takes notice and retains new and challenging stimuli. so "making learning easier" is a misnomer. the insight becomes how do we get people to self-motivate into hard things?)

I still think that's true, to your point, but all these takes are one of many many problems, and they aren't equal in leverage and i think that's where OP is coming from. there's outsized leverage in domain specific pedagogy.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#157

Post by squigz »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #118
squigz wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i.e. we've been educating people for 1,000s of years even without textbooks. By using the tools available at the time we did, certainly. That involves physical tools like writing, but also non-physical tools like better ways of conveying and disseminating information, better ways of testing the efficacy of various approaches, etc, etc. Education has to evolve, as it always has. While I'm not sure TFA is it, I do th…

FWIW, I find the classic texts of certain fields much more intelligible than the intellectually shoddy 56th iteration of some overpriced glossy Pearson textbook. Compare a typical chemistry textbook with something like Pauling's "General Chemistry" which you can get from Dover, modulo any dated information. You will walk away with a far more solid grasp of the basic principles. A lot of the failure of learning is a f…

I don't disagree with anything you're saying, really; education has been broken by things like too strong an emphasis on test scores, credentials, etc. This not only produces students who don't know how to learn properly, but those students then go on to become teachers who can't learn how to teach properly.

That said, teaching is hard. I don't fully blame teachers who cannot effectively convey subjects to 30 kids, especially these days. Even in an ideal situation, there's so much variance in how people learn best, that it would be hard to blame it on incompetence if a teacher cannot reach every one of their students.

Considering how hard it's going to be to fix the bigger problems with society* - obsession with credentials, lack of funding, better paying, less stressful jobs means less teachers, etc, etc - shouldn't we embrace tools that help kids learn things in a more accessible way to them? As I said, I don't think TFA is it, and we should obviously be aware of the issues, but surely people on HN of all places can see the value in tailoring subjects and lessons to a student's preferred method of learning?

* This is not to say we shouldn't also try to solve those problems

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#158

Post by non_aligned »

kccqzy wrote: post #133
raincole wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "a list can be used for a recipe" I don't even know what it means, tbh. I feel it's going to confuse the hell out of 7th graders.

How is that difficult to understand? A recipe is an ordered list of steps of what to do. So of course a list can be used for a recipe. I personally prefer a serious text without bringing in unrelated concepts like food, but this is still understandable.

I think it's just clunky, like "a pencil can be used for a recipe". My first take is "wait, are we cooking a pencil? or stirring with it?"

The first meaning of "use for a recipe" is "use as an ingredient."

But then, it's a pretty weird thing to explain to begin with, approximately every human on the planet knows what the word "list" means. So what does this pseudo-definition add?

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#159

Post by huflungdung »

joshvm wrote: post #56
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 ar…

[dead]

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#160

Post by ksenzee »

CodeMage wrote: post #136
joshvm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

"When do I ever need to use trig in real life" is an interesting question, because it points out certain flaws in the way our society approaches education. One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting. But there's another flaw that gets overlooked most of the time, which is that we're raising kids to believe that "why are you teaching me something that you're not 100% su…

If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back? I don’t blame them. I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us.
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