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Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
171–180 of 244 posts
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
When learning from a source like a textbook, docs, or being instructed by a person, I do not expect the source of truth to lie to me, and verify everything they tell me.
Did we all just collectively forgot basic literacy? You as the reader when you're reading anything are supposed to verify claims the author is making. You never expect anything to be sources of truth. That's why every textbooks either cites the sources or proves their work. Very rarely do you have any textbook that's just a list of facts out of thin air. I don't think I've seen a single textbook, even bad ones, do th…
> And it is the job of the reader to follow those citations, and to verify the claims.
How do you verify the claims? Replicate every piece of research cited?
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#173What was this AI that did infographics?
I already used it to learn like this 6-12 months ago.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#174Earlier 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…
I asked my math teacher for applications and she just mumbled something, embarrassed. Took me until a while later to realize that most of my teachers had never stepped foot outside a school in their entire life.
Later at university I complained about the lack of applications in the textbook, and my classmates became very upset. One of them responded, "we are mathematicians, we do not concern ourselves with applications."
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#175No 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.
I don't follow your logic from 'When I tried it, AI hallucinated some citations' to 'AI is fundamentally incapable of explaining a textbook'. Those seem like rather different tasks to me. Plenty of humans are perfectly capable of paraphrasing and summarizing a textbook but struggle with standardizing citations.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
When learning from a source like a textbook, docs, or being instructed by a person, I do not expect the source of truth to lie to me, and verify everything they tell me.
Did we all just collectively forgot basic literacy? You as the reader when you're reading anything are supposed to verify claims the author is making. You never expect anything to be sources of truth. That's why every textbooks either cites the sources or proves their work. Very rarely do you have any textbook that's just a list of facts out of thin air. I don't think I've seen a single textbook, even bad ones, do th…
You have a very funny definition of "basic literacy". This is (an example of) the definition most of the English-speaking world uses: https://americanenglishdoctor.com/l-2-basic-literacy/
> Know how to find information in the old technology called “books"
> Can think critically about statements made in such different contexts as advertising, entertainment, news reporting, and books written in an earlier century.
So, before indulging this any further, do you mind citing your source for the definition of "basic literacy" that includes the claim "never expect anything to be sources of truth"?
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#177Earlier 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 read it fine, but it would have been clearer as:
- a list can be used for the steps of a recipe
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
> One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting. I think the truth is a lot simpler. Most kids won’t use trig in real life.
That was pretty much my point. Most kids won't use trig in real life, so making trig more interesting is only half of what we need to do. The other half is making kids more interested in learning.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#179This is a comparison between a new and interactive medium (+ slides, mind-maps, etc) and a static PDF book as a control. How do we know that a non-AI based interactive book wouldn't give similar (modest) increases in performance without any of the personalization AI enables?
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
I don't see any part of my comment where I blamed the kids. I explicitly said that it's a flaw in the way our society approaches education.