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AI has already killed academia as we know it?

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Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#31

Post by root_axis »

artyom wrote: post #23

And I welcome the change. In my long experience in academia, I've only found two types of practitioners: 1% are the absolutely brilliant minds that academia was originally created for. People that, without a doubt, leave their mark in the vast corpus of human knowledge. I consider myself fortunate for meeting and learning from them, and I thank the academia ecosystem for that. But the remaining 99% are the maximalist…

> An embarrassing lot of CS professors would stumble around your average production codebase.

As would be expected. The value of computer science has very little overlap with navigating a typical production code base.

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#32

Post by gchallen »

senshan wrote: post #25
gchallen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lectures have been an incredibly ineffective way to learn forever. Faculty continue to lecture, and we continue to build lecture-style classrooms, further enshrining this poor approach. Active learning works, and yet both faculty and students dislike it. Faculty like to talk and pretend they're teaching, and students like to listen and pretend they're learning. All to say—I wish it was this easy to change the academy…

> Lectures have been an incredibly ineffective way to learn forever. Mainly due to shortage of very good lecturers, no? I can not see a better way to cultivate the professional pride than to attend lectures of truly remarkable professors. The style, the manner, the attitude go much beyond the dry proofs. I'm an applied math major.

You're describing your response to a performance, not to a learning opportunity. Is it fun to watch a great performer? Sure. Is that an effective way to learn? No.

Does lecturing have a place in disseminating ideas? Sure. I love that scene from Oppenheimer when he attends Heisenberg's lecture, being exposed to cutting edge ideas directly from the mouth of a truly remarkable professor. Watching that gave me a better appreciation of lecturing's original purpose and historical importance. But that's very different from teaching well-understood concepts and skills.

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#34

Post by root_axis »

FloorEgg wrote: post #29
waffletower wrote: post #21

"Yes, going back to paper and pencil strains our current resources, but is a likely necessity" -- When I reached this sad, arthritic point in the article it was clear that the author has no constructive idea about what happens next in education. There is no critical dialogue regarding assessment and its necessity. There is no critical understanding and projection for what intelligence as a service represents for soci…

It frustrates me that your comment is being down voted, because I agree with your sentiment. Too many educators don't actually know how to educate, and only focus on what to educate. LLMs are offering some ways to dramatically improve how people learn (and therefore how well they learn, what they learn,etc - to rapidly accelerate and improve outcomes). However most educators, who are ignorant to the principles of how…

> LLMs are offering some ways to dramatically improve how people learn

But in practice, they are overwhelmingly having the opposite effect, and if we're realistic about the structural incentives that have no practical path to being changed in higher ed, this will continue to be the case indefinitely.

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#35

Post by majormajor »

gchallen wrote: post #19
chris_money202 wrote: post #9

Flip the classroom, make students learn the material on their own (Using AI or whatever resources they want to use) and then in-classroom time is divided on working on problems (without AI assistance which can be controlled in this environment) and quizzes/exams (again without AI). We don't need lectures anymore, they are an incredibly ineffective way to learn.

Lectures have been an incredibly ineffective way to learn forever. Faculty continue to lecture, and we continue to build lecture-style classrooms, further enshrining this poor approach. Active learning works, and yet both faculty and students dislike it. Faculty like to talk and pretend they're teaching, and students like to listen and pretend they're learning. All to say—I wish it was this easy to change the academy…

Good lectures are phenomenally useful, far better than individual unguided review of the material. They're often IME very interactive too.

STEM subjects are particularly hard to create good lectures for. And STEM expertise and speaking/communication skills don't always overlap either.

The non-STEM classes I learned the most in are the ones I learned the most in lecture in. The STEM classes, on the other hand, were pretty scattershot without as much correlation.

An LLM-based toolset could likely be much better than that and at least as good as bad lectures, but the guardrails are gonna need to be really really really good.

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#36

Post by idiotsecant »

libraryU wrote: post #11
chris_money202 wrote: post #9

Flip the classroom, make students learn the material on their own (Using AI or whatever resources they want to use) and then in-classroom time is divided on working on problems (without AI assistance which can be controlled in this environment) and quizzes/exams (again without AI). We don't need lectures anymore, they are an incredibly ineffective way to learn.

I had a chat with my state legislators to streamline education; shift all public school and university funding to libraries staffed by SMEs Mandate N hours year of and guided group work for under 18s Mandate N hours for becoming an SME for roles that require such Break the pipeline from the factory era of linearly pumping out kids who are just smart enough to run the machines

Guided group work? Have you ever learned anything in a group project other than how lazy half of your group is?

Just because an idea is different doesn't mean it's good

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#37

Post by FloorEgg »

root_axis wrote: post #34
FloorEgg wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It frustrates me that your comment is being down voted, because I agree with your sentiment. Too many educators don't actually know how to educate, and only focus on what to educate. LLMs are offering some ways to dramatically improve how people learn (and therefore how well they learn, what they learn,etc - to rapidly accelerate and improve outcomes). However most educators, who are ignorant to the principles of how…

> LLMs are offering some ways to dramatically improve how people learn But in practice, they are overwhelmingly having the opposite effect, and if we're realistic about the structural incentives that have no practical path to being changed in higher ed, this will continue to be the case indefinitely.

Yes, it's tragic.

It's as if electricity had the potential to save lives but everyone was just frantically electrocuting themselves.

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#38

Post by Avicebron »

gchallen wrote: post #32
senshan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lectures have been an incredibly ineffective way to learn forever. Mainly due to shortage of very good lecturers, no? I can not see a better way to cultivate the professional pride than to attend lectures of truly remarkable professors. The style, the manner, the attitude go much beyond the dry proofs. I'm an applied math major.

You're describing your response to a performance, not to a learning opportunity. Is it fun to watch a great performer? Sure. Is that an effective way to learn? No. Does lecturing have a place in disseminating ideas? Sure. I love that scene from Oppenheimer when he attends Heisenberg's lecture, being exposed to cutting edge ideas directly from the mouth of a truly remarkable professor. Watching that gave me a better a…

I'm not sure about your experience but most of my professors would teach classes tangentially related to their field of expertise. So we were almost always exposed to the "well-understood concepts and skills" alongside what was cutting edge in their niche at the time.

It was subtle, but easy enough to pick up on if you were being attentive in class..

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#39

Post by jltsiren »

matusp wrote: post #16
magic_hamster wrote: post #2

Solving the paper submission is easy. Just hold frontal interview where the submitter defends their paper. They can't create papers every day and still be knowledgeable about them in depth. We are hurling to a reality where the only noteworthy metric is human to human validation.

With the volume of outputs in today's academia, this is simply not possible. There are conferences with tens of thousands of submitted papers, grants have hundreds of pages, etc.

Grants typically have at most 10 pages of actual content. The rest is mostly compliance with regulations.

Re: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

#40

Post by voxl »

gchallen wrote: post #19
chris_money202 wrote: post #9

Flip the classroom, make students learn the material on their own (Using AI or whatever resources they want to use) and then in-classroom time is divided on working on problems (without AI assistance which can be controlled in this environment) and quizzes/exams (again without AI). We don't need lectures anymore, they are an incredibly ineffective way to learn.

Lectures have been an incredibly ineffective way to learn forever. Faculty continue to lecture, and we continue to build lecture-style classrooms, further enshrining this poor approach. Active learning works, and yet both faculty and students dislike it. Faculty like to talk and pretend they're teaching, and students like to listen and pretend they're learning. All to say—I wish it was this easy to change the academy…

Citation needed, the last time a colleague engaged with the education college and supposed educators they looked at an induction proof with sheer bewilderment as if teaching this at all was impossible
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