151–160 of 171 posts
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Make sure you know the definition before you start using it casually as he has! > Noun. grundle (plural grundles) (US, slang) The area between anus and scrotum in a male or between anus and vulva in a woman. [0] [0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grundle
Intersting. In NZ and Australia, "grundies" is slang for (usually male) underwear.
Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm today is highly relevant to this [1]: 1/ If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing. 2/ Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials. 3/ Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. @ycombinator made $…
> The best books are on the Internet. I'm neutral on many of these points, except this one. This is simply not true. The Internet can be incredibly shallow on a very wide range of topics. I mean maybe if you have access to University Library systems etc...but I don't think that's the "Internet" you mean. I hope this will get better, although the impetus to make the Internet deeper seems to have slacked off recently.
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> The best books are on the Internet. I'm neutral on many of these points, except this one. This is simply not true. The Internet can be incredibly shallow on a very wide range of topics. I mean maybe if you have access to University Library systems etc...but I don't think that's the "Internet" you mean. I hope this will get better, although the impetus to make the Internet deeper seems to have slacked off recently.
I mean, it's not exactly the most kosher thing to do (though you can usually get actual oficially released ebooks for the newer stuff), but you can usually get PDF versions of whatever textbook you want on the internet. I know about a guy with a serious hoarding syndrome, who has hundreds of gigabytes of the stuff stashed somewhere.
Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm today is highly relevant to this [1]: 1/ If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing. 2/ Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials. 3/ Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. @ycombinator made $…
Respectfully, I disagree with a lot of the points here. School isn't just about credentialing or dishing out information. You learn a lot about interacting with others, getting a social life, developing relationships with different people, discovering more about yourself and the list goes on. Even a bad experience is still an experience. I'm in the digital learning field and can get doe-eyed about the potential of te…
This. Very important, and this process is made much more effective if parents or teachers or other adults are with the young on that journey to coach them. Not easy to do online as you need to see the young people in their everyday interactions.
"But the Internet will never replace teachers."
I'm not sure. The point isn't to replace teachers, is it? You can get to great teachers, mentors and peers through other means, schools aren't the only source of teachers for the young.
You can follow thinkers, business people etc. online, and reach out to them or their communities, and that effectively can act as a teacher.
You can actually meat with people who become your teachers/mentors because you engaged in online activities.
None of these require an institution, and specifically, poorly run schools will actually promote groupthink and monoculture. It's good balance to get some experience and 'education' outside the regular system for diversity.
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Respectfully, I disagree with a lot of the points here. School isn't just about credentialing or dishing out information. You learn a lot about interacting with others, getting a social life, developing relationships with different people, discovering more about yourself and the list goes on. Even a bad experience is still an experience. I'm in the digital learning field and can get doe-eyed about the potential of te…
"You learn a lot about interacting with others, getting a social life, developing relationships with different people, discovering more about yourself and the list goes on." This. Very important, and this process is made much more effective if parents or teachers or other adults are with the young on that journey to coach them. Not easy to do online as you need to see the young people in their everyday interactions.…
Yeah schools aren't perfect either, but it's very hard to replicate the teacher role online. Peers yes, but I'll eat my hat if anyone can come up with a digital platform that allows students and teachers (totally strangers) to connect and build relationships that last for years.
You might accidentally bump into a mentor, but that's extreeeemely rare. It's a nice dream though, hope it happens to me one day. But in all my time as an active participant in online courses (small sample, I know) the most personal interaction I got was someone reaching out via private messaging. This is totally within expectation though, many of us still unconsciously regard the Internet space as not really real.
I've been slowly working on an idea in this area for a while and and would love to be able to work on it full-time, part of its a software problem and that's the only part I've been working on thus far. I'm not doing this for monetary reasons at all, and don't really see how VC would ever be the right solution and lawmakers probably wouldn't allow it to happen either. But anyway I'll put the gist of the idea up here.…
You have to imagine a school full of children like a room full of hackers that will work harder to break your system than they will to follow it. On this forum people say "all you need is a library card" to learn Computer Science, but you also need to read those library books. How does your system deal with students that just refuse to do anything?
How is this dealt with in normal schools? From what I remember, students that didn't do anything just got passed on to the next year (maybe having to go to summer school which just meant showing up and you get passed on to the next grade).
Obviously, software can only help minimally here (by giving teachers better insights sooner into which students aren't doing their assignments, etc). I think overall, you really have to lower student/teacher ratios a lot. This helps significantly with misbehaving or problem kids in my experience and creates a more personal connection to the teacher.
If you have any ideas yourself on ways to solve this problem I'd really like to hear them.
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Do those folks really count as traditional credentials? Google founders suspended their Ph.D. programs. Bezos has a BS. Gates dropped out. Zuckerberg dropped out.
> Gates dropped out. > Zuckerberg dropped out. Both of them managed to get into Harvard, which is an academic achievement in itself though.
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There's a lot of buzzwords like classroom flipping floating around in education. Part of the issue is the subject matter experts (teachers and instructors) are not up to speed on the capabilities of technology, some even fear being replaced, when the real goal is having the same teachers reach more students more effectively. Education budgets rarely increase.
I see a gap for educating teachers about the potential of edtech :) Many will welcome the opportunity to focus class time on quality interaction.
No they won't. Some may value that opportunity, but I wouldn't say "many". I've seen the word "scale" tossed around in the comments. I'll add two more: economics and politics. Until we as a voting people elect leaders who value education, we will continue to see stagnant or falling education budgets.
EdTech will remove some teaching jobs. As a principal, if I can rely on the Internet educators to do a significant portion of the instruction, I don't necessarily need the best teachers in every classroom. In some class rooms I can simply use the bachelors-bearing teacher rather than the masters-bearing teacher. Some teachers recognize this, which is why they are anti-tech. They see how technology helped their community members in manufacturing and other industries, and want to avoid it.
Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm today is highly relevant to this [1]: 1/ If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing. 2/ Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials. 3/ Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. @ycombinator made $…
He is absolutely right and you can already see the tides shifting with the meteoric rise of "coding boot camps" and similar alternative educational models.
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I see a gap for educating teachers about the potential of edtech :) Many will welcome the opportunity to focus class time on quality interaction.
> Many will welcome the opportunity to focus class time on quality interaction. No they won't. Some may value that opportunity, but I wouldn't say "many". I've seen the word "scale" tossed around in the comments. I'll add two more: economics and politics. Until we as a voting people elect leaders who value education, we will continue to see stagnant or falling education budgets. EdTech will remove some teaching jobs.…
And that is exactly why educators need education about edtech.
Edtech exists in many forms. The YC list will give you a snapshot of that. Most of it are actually supportive rather than replacing the teaching role itself. You cannot compare to other industries like manufacturing because they are vastly different.
IMO it's a bit unhealthy for educators to be technophobic. The current students are from the tech generation, and most likely appreciate if their teachers could show more digital fluency. And yes, there are so many good and bad edtech tools out there, but the point is they can be pick-n-mixed to make their jobs easier.
> In some class rooms I can simply use the bachelors-bearing teacher rather than the masters-bearing teacher.
All the good teachers I know are not defined by their qualification, rather the passion, idealism and talent that they give. I had a high school physics teacher with a doctorate and he was not too great at explaining concepts. I also have a maths teacher friend with 3rd class honours in her degree, but is currently one of the most popular teachers in her school.
Other than Montessori's, most teachers are actually not that adverse to tech. But I think a basic digital training is needed. At the very least, learn how to find resources and pull them together. Learn how to use basic software, like rudimentary game-makers. Learn how flipped classrooms work, to design better homeworks and classroom sessions. Learn how peer-learning works, to encourage sharing ideas and working as teams.
There's so many ideas to make learning more exciting, with more meaningful interactions. Edtech is not a major threat, it can be a sort of freedom.
Edit language.