That's amazing! Anything that can help people from all backgrounds and ethnicities achieve greatness through knowledge is wonderful! Great work, Google!
Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
181–190 of 244 posts
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound like I was arguing with you. It was more vehement agreement.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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’m not going to use force against him. Threatening to take away the computer or tablet is generally plenty. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that a precondition to using these things is ‘go to school’.
I’m referring to governments, not parents. If I don’t send my child to school, the state of Washington will have a word to say about it. There are laws.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#184Quite a number of my clients are school teachers.
They seem perversely proud of having been in the worst quartile of students while they were at school.
We are letting terrible students become terrible teachers who go on to teach terribly and produce the next generation of terrible students.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound like I was arguing with you. It was more vehement agreement.
My bad, I didn't realize :)
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#186I'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…
What is terrifying ,
'the best pedagogy' ,
OpenAI parents are not allowing chatgpt to curate pedagogy ... we all have a bookshelf thats it (our pedagogy) ,
but copyright strategies means the ai must mutilate / offuscate way best padagogy away ... they train on it and effectively say dont sound that good , too good is copyrighted
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#187I have been doing a lot of solo tinkering around this very idea —contextualizing learning for every middle school through college student according to their career and personal interests. Props for this team for actual piloting with real students. What I’ve found however is that students’ interests (in terms of novel engagement) move at the speed of culture. It’s the quirky TikTok personality, the local slang, aura farming memes and other stuff I hardly understand at my age. So really it boils down to how you decrease the lag time between creation of students’ cultural phenomena and updating/tuning models to account for this new (or localized) information. It also requires a UI/UX that accurately flags what part of this information students actually engage with —an even harder tasks since kids can’t write or communicate this type of information in language LLMs draw patterns from (if they can write descriptively at all). Great teachers who are in constant socioemotional and cultural exchange with their students figure this out at the classroom level… not sure it’s a solution that technology can replicate at scale but it’s still fun to tinker.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the text books I've ever seen had practical examples in them. Like determining the height of a tree or a house simply based on trigonometry. Your suggestion is interesting but I am not convinced that a student would be helped by aligning the examples with their interests. I could see a student asking how trig relates to computer games and the example the LLM generates becoming much more involved. I see no problem…
> All the text books I've ever seen had practical examples in them. Like determining the height of a tree or a house simply based on trigonometry. The trouble is a lot of those practical examples fall into the, "why would I care category". I had a high school physics teacher who described his university antics, one of which included a funny story of a bunch of his friends climbing on top of each other to measure the…
I agree with your point in general, but I do find myself actually using trigonometry for fairly basic real-world purposes more often than one might expect. For example: how big of a piece of material fits in a particular position if it’s not parallel or perpendicular to the stuff around it? If a rope supports a load in the middle, how much tension does the rope need? How much of an angle should be cut into a door to comfortably clear the jamb? (If you’ve never contemplated this before: a door with a rectangular cross-section will have less clearance to the jamb when almost closed than when fully closed.)
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#189I’m entertained by the Newton’s Third Law example. The leveled-to-fifth-grade example is actually decent. The leveled-to-eleventh-grade example is outrageously bad — I’m sorry, Google, but Newton’s Third Law does not say that, when I dribble a basketball, the downward force from my hand on the ball is equal but opposite to the upward force from the floor when the ball bounces. Nor are those forces even close to equal.
(In very, very slight fairness to Google here, the time-averaged forces from my hand, gravity, the floor, and minor things like air resistance, do add up to zero, and this follows from Newton’s Second Law and the fact that there is no net change to the ball’s velocity over a dribbling cycle. But this is not what they’re saying, and it isn’t even a particularly credible example of Newton’s Third Law. Google should add a whole lot more thinking to their model or they should just stick with fifth grade.)
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#190This seems like it has some pretty great potential. Human teachers don't have infinite patience.
I recall my high school chemistry teacher's response when I was trying to understand why certain reactions happened: "just accept that these reactions happens and memorise them for the test. Don't try to understand it"
I did not become a chemist.
Now I'm in my thirties and I kinda wish I had studied something involving chemistry in university. It just seems fascinating. Unfortunately my teacher at the time did an excellent job of killing that curiosity and when I was choosing what to study in uni my first criteria was "anything but chemistry"
I can't help but imagine how different my life could've been if I had this available to me at the time!
On the other hand this AI could never hold a candle to my history teacher who showed up in full medieval armour, complete with a real sword. He even knew actual sword fighting techniques used by different nations at different times and have approximate demonstrations (slowly, no students were maimed) along with theoretical explanations of the pros and cons of each.
2 of my old classmates are now history buffs: one PhD(dissertation was on the topic of WW2) and one archeologist. That's gotta be above average for a class of ~20 kids.
But teachers like him are a rarity.