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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

#111

Post by janalsncm »

aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #105
janalsncm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Going by the atrocious salary expectation for teaching (which i firmly place as one of, if not the most, fundamentally important jobs in modern society) i think we've already established where we land on this. And note how i didn't mention a country; i think this is a widespread issue beyond country borders currently.

My only other frame of reference is China where being a teacher is a very respectable and competitive job with good wages. (Software engineering is way less prestigious interestingly.) They even have a national holiday for teachers. So it would be essentially unthinkable for a tech company to drop a demo that threatens teachers.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#112

Post by lo_zamoyski »

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 can help, but in recent history, there's a track record of bogus pedagogy that insists on incorporating technology without any sound justification. Some of this was motivated by corporations trying to sell shit (like computers), some by silly or clueless teachers and administrators. Some of it is informed by dubious pedagogical methodologies like gamification.

For the most part, it's a matter of clear presentation, student engagement, and effort. A well-written textbook (many suck) and a good teacher (same) and a properly disposed student (which presupposes things like certain virtues; parents are responsible for teaching and supporting these for the most part). Technology won't get around the basic human reality, and sometimes, there's nothing to fix. Some people aren't interested.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#113

Post by squigz »

lacy_tinpot wrote: post #110
squigz wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can't discern what good answers look like to the questions you're asking, you're not asking the right kind of questions. Whaaaaat? How does this work? If you're trying to learn a new topic, how are you supposed to recognize a good (and truthful) answer, whether it's from an LLM or instructor?

I would argue you're doing it right now. By being skeptical of the answers, testing the answers, corroborating with other sources, etc. This isn't new. This is literally how we've been exploring this knowledge game for thousands of years.

I would argue this isn't a fair comparison. There's a big difference between a fairly open-ended discussion about a topic both parties are at least somewhat familiar with, and someone trying to learn a new subject.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#114

Post by amsilprotag »

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 have used the quiz-making learning tool within gemini. It is very good for things that would exist in a typical K-12 textbook. The first 30 or 40 multiple choice questions on a subject are usually pretty good and useful. But then it will tend to repeat multiple choice answers, give strictly wrong answers, repeat questions, or offer multiple valid answers. The answer explanations are what you'd expect with little human QA. Still a useful tool for people who sanity-check the given answers, but it might do more harm than good if people don't follow up on their confusion.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#115

Post by all2 »

cjs_ac wrote: post #66
SJMG wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. Where have you taught? I taught in Australia and the United Kingdom, where many of these things were mandated by the promulgation of spiral curricula by the relevant government departments. I'm aware in the US that, for example, algebra is taught as…

I'd be curious to see how this is laid out in plan view. Are there any resources you can recommend on this topic?

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#116

Post by lacy_tinpot »

squigz wrote: post #113
lacy_tinpot wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue you're doing it right now. By being skeptical of the answers, testing the answers, corroborating with other sources, etc. This isn't new. This is literally how we've been exploring this knowledge game for thousands of years.

I would argue this isn't a fair comparison. There's a big difference between a fairly open-ended discussion about a topic both parties are at least somewhat familiar with, and someone trying to learn a new subject.

All knowledge is open ended...

I bet when you're learning a new subject you do the same exact thing.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#117

Post by all2 »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #81
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…

Hush! Don't bring teaching experience into these discussions, you will trigger the EduTech people who have been promising a teaching revolution for 15 years already.

The 'teaching revolution' reaches much farther back than the last 15 years. It goes all the way back to the introduction of radio and television. It never did play out well.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#118

Post by lo_zamoyski »

squigz wrote: post #97
mattlutze wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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 failure of teaching. Incompetent teachers throw disconnected information at you instead of trying to explain or lead you to an understanding of what something is about. I attribute part of this to a loss of solid philosophical coursework where you are taught to think from first principles, taught within a larger integral context, and taught to reason clearly. It used to be the case that everyone with a college degree had at least some basic philosophy under their belts (compare a Heisenberg to a Feynman to a Krauss; the progression is clear). And don't forget the success of the trivium and quadrivium or some variation of them that was often presupposed and prepared students for intellectual work.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#119

Post by squigz »

lacy_tinpot wrote: post #116
squigz wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue this isn't a fair comparison. There's a big difference between a fairly open-ended discussion about a topic both parties are at least somewhat familiar with, and someone trying to learn a new subject.

All knowledge is open ended... I bet when you're learning a new subject you do the same exact thing.

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.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#120

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

lacy_tinpot wrote: post #108
aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Asking the right kind of questions is a genuine skill. A skill we cannot rely kids to have, and which i think takes years of training and learning for even adults to really acquire. (to be clear, i'm not thinking about AI prompting. I 'm thinking about assumption breaking and understanding prodding questions the learner asks themselves and seeks answers for, to build and refine their mental models of something they…

That's absolutely not true. Kids get trained how to ask questions very quickly from a very young age. Good responses to those questions fundamentally shape the entire developmental journey for kids and extends to their academic abilities in school. Because questions are fundamentally about knowledge differentials, which will always exist for individual human beings. We can't at any point know everything. Know how to…

A great answer can compensate for a bad question.

A great question can compensate for a simple answer.

Kids can ask questions, but they rely on an experienced teacher to effectively answer.

Teaching someone effectively through answering questions, require the teacher through the students questions to build a model of the students model. To answer not only the question directly, but also the question that should have been asked instead.

A good end-of-chapter quiz doesn't check that a reader read the next. It asks questions whos answer rule out possible (or common) incorrect mental models the reader may have built.

A learner skilled in asking truly excellent questions, makes questions for which even a bad or simple answer rule out and refine their assumptions.

And that is a skill i doubt is ever truly mastered.

Its like the X Y. A great teacher answers X instead of Y. A great learner asks about X in the firstplace.

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