Oh wow. This is actually a really bad idea and if your first thoughts are “oh wow this is awesome!” I don’t know what to tell you.
Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
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Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#92I 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…
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.
Theres a reason why theres a grave yard of Google's dead projects.
Its annoying that software is such a high gross margin industry - I would love to see Googles cash get taken away so they cant take these vanity projects.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s both. Technology is a component (I’d we wouldn’t have books, recorded videos, multimedia aids, etc.).
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.
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Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#94I’m not sure this approach is the right one, but the problem resonates with me. I vividly remember hitting some blocker (7th grade chem, 4th grade reading, 2nd grade dinosaurs), where I had a question that the teacher dismissed. My mind was stuck (blocked) as it couldn’t get past the question I had, and in a public school setting, it wasn’t worth the time for the teacher to dive down the tangent (or they simply weren…
Another anecdote: In university, I ended up taking Circuits 1&2 before Calc 4 (diff. eqs). This was fantastic, because everything I learned about Laplace, Fourier, etc. had an immediate connection to another area of interest, which made the class much more engaging.
This is an underrated strategy
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#95Whenever I see things promoting AI, the first question that comes to mind is;
"Who gets held accountable when the AI lies in harmful destructive ways?".
None of the people promoting these things address this question in any tangible or productive way, it is almost always yes its a problem, or dissembling.
Its not an uncommon or unworthy question. They just don't like the only possible answer preferring the the opaqueness is nobody gets held accountable because that is what the given incentives produce.
Ask and answer. Its a worthy question.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#96I 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…
It's a cute "how do I reach these kids?" idea -- find what they like and explain the concepts with custom-tailored analogues. I don't think the failure mode here is really "7th graders will see through the superficiality of this really quick". I think the failure mode here will be: > Explain computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in poop and butt-sniffing Although who knows... maybe this will unleash a g…
> It's a cute "how do I reach these kids?" idea
But... which kids? Do we have a fundamental problem reaching kids who are interested in basketball? My kid had a period of being interested in dinosaurs, but I never felt the need to reframe everything in dinosaur-terms because of that. In fact, you kinda want them to broaden their horizons beyond dinosaurs?
The real challenges in education are elsewhere, and a lot of it has to do with socioeconomic status and bad influences early in life.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s both. Technology is a component (I’d we wouldn’t have books, recorded videos, multimedia aids, etc.).
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 think LLMs will have a role to play in making learning more accessible and enjoyable for everyone, not just kids.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#98I'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…
Yeah, as a student, I have to agree. The issue with learning things isn't that it hasn't been tailored to be interesting or relatable to me, it's just that it's a lot of content and it's hard. The solution is figuring out how to set up a type of spoon feed algorithm that checks that I'm understanding little bite size pieces along the way in addition to giving layman's terms for things that don't necessitate the forma…
Khan academy and brilliant are both excellent. They're hand crafted and limited in subjects and depth, but i think establish the current "roof" in how perfectly structured self-learning materials would look. I've heard from teachers using them in schools and found excellent results.
AI rephrasing words better to each individual isn't interesting to me. Automatic Interactive small quizzes, puzzles, and self adjusting difficulty level would be amazing, but i don't see AI really reaching that level.
When i see AI "quiz me on this" it gets stuck asking direct factual question about the text. But a good question challenges assumptions, and prod deeper understanding.
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#99I love learning new things, Khan academy got me all the way through college, and I use ChatGPT / Claude to help me study papers regularly. I got frustrated really fast. Here is an example: https://learnyourway.withgoogle.com/scopes/1KNlGW5E/immersiv... It starts with just this sentence, followed by a quiz on that sentence: > When we are born, we inherit our genetic makeup and biological features. However, our identit…
> I'm sure this is a fixable bug
I'm sure it is, but the bar for accuracy in education is way too high for a mistake as blatant as this to be allowed to slip through.
(I'm sure someone will chime in about their useless Hum 10 teacher making an even bigger gaffe, and how this can be excused, it's just a beta...)
Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI
#100I would be interested to see how capable it would be at going against cultural standards to preserve accuracy.
It's very hard for humans to imagine some mundane things when they go against their expectations. I would imagine AI would suffer similar issues, but there is a potential for them to do better. It strikes me as fascinating because I would consider it to be a sign of a greater level of reasoning, but because it goes against expectations would be considered worse by many.
Some examples of what I am thinking about.
Grass is only around 60 million years old, depictions of earth earlier than that frequently show grass.
Jesus did not grow a beard until a couple of hundred years after his death.