Comment by jumploops
8 months ago
A bit off-topic, but I think AI has the potential to supercharge learning for the students of the future.
Similar to Montessori, LLMs can help students who wander off in various directions.
I remember often being “stuck” on some concept (usually in biology and chemistry), where the teacher would hand-wave something as truth, this dismissing my request for further depth.
Of course, LLMs in the current educational landscape (homework-heavy) only benefit the students who are truly curious…
My hope is that, with new teaching methods/styles, we can unlock (or just maintain!) the curiosity inherent in every pupil.
(If anyone knows of a tool like this, where an LLM stays on a high-level trajectory of e.g. teaching trigonometry, but allows off-shoots/adventures into other topical nodes, I’d love to know about it!)
>>> Of course, LLMs in the current educational landscape (homework-heavy) only benefit the students who are truly curious
I think you hit on a major issue: Homework-heavy. What I think would benefit the truly curious is spare time. These things are at odds with one another. Present-day busy work could easily be replaced by occupying kids' attention with continual lessons that require a large quantity of low-quality engagement with the LLM. Or an addictive dopamine reward system that also rewards shallow engagement -- like social media.
I'm 62, and what allowed me to follow my curiosity as a kid was that the school lessons were finite, and easy enough that I could finish them early, leaving me time to do things like play music, read, and learn electronics.
And there's something else I think might be missing, which is effort. For me, music and electronics were not easy. There was no exam, but I could measure my own progress -- either the circuit worked or it didn't. Without some kind of "external reference" I'm not sure that in-depth research through LLMs will result in any true understanding. I'm a physicist, and I've known a lot of people who believe that they understand physics because they read a bunch of popular books about it. "I finally understand quantum mechanics."
> I'm 62, and what allowed me to follow my curiosity as a kid was that the school lessons were finite, and easy enough that I could finish them early, leaving me time to do things like play music, read, and learn electronics.
I see both sides of this. When I was a teenager, I went to a pretty bad middle school where there were fights everyday, and I wasn’t learning anything from the easy homework. On the upside, I had tons of free time to teach myself how to make websites and get into all kinds of trouble botting my favorite online games.
My learning always hit a wall though because I wasn’t able to learn programming on my own. I eventually asked my parents to send me to a school that had a lot more structure (and a lot more homework), and then I properly learned math and logic and programming from first principles. The upside: I could code. The downside: there was no free time to apply this knowledge to anything fun
>I'm 62, and what allowed me to follow my curiosity as a kid was that the school lessons were finite, and easy enough that I could finish them early, leaving me time to do things like play music, read, and learn electronics.
Yeah I feel like teachers are going to try and use LLMs as an excuse to push more of the burden of schooling to their pupils homelife somehow. Like, increasing homework burdens to compensate.
Spare time, haha, most people nowadays have a hard time having some dead time. The habitual checking of socials or feeds has killed the mind wandering time. People feel uncomfortable or consiser life boring with the device induced dopamine fix. Corporations got us by the balls.
The last thing I need when researching a hard problem is an interlocutor who might lie to me, make up convincing citations to nowhere, and tell me more or less what I want to hear.
Still better than the typical classroom experience. And you can always ask again, there's no need to avoid offending the person who has a lot of power over you.
Typical classroom experience works and has worked for thousands of years.
Edutech is pretty new and virtually all of it has been a disaster. Sitting in a lecture and taking notes on paper is tried, tested, and research backed. It works. Not for everyone, but for a lot of people.
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The longer I go without seeing cases of ai supercharging learning, the more suspicious I get that it just won’t. And no, self reports that it makes internet denizens feel super educated, don’t count.
Wasn't this the promise of MOOCs in the 2010s?
The problem is that many students come to university unequipped with the discipline it takes to actually study. Teaching students how to effectively learn is a side-effect of university education.
Yes, I think curiosity dies well before university for most students.
The specific examples I recall most vividly were from 4th grade and 7th grade.
> I remember often being “stuck” on some concept (usually in biology and chemistry), where the teacher would hand-wave something as truth, this dismissing my request for further depth.
This resonates with me a lot. I used to dismiss AI as useless hogwash, but have recently done a near total 180 as I realised it's quite useful for exploratory learning.
Not sure about others but a lot of my learning comes from comparison of a concept with other related concepts. Reading definitions off a page usually doesn't do it for me. I really need to dig to the heart of my understanding and challenge my assumptions, which is easiest done talking to someone. (You can't usually google "why does X do Y and not Z when ABC" and then spin off from that onto the next train of reasoning).
Hence ChatGPT is surprisingly useful. Even if it's wrong some of the time. With a combination of my baseline knowledge, logic, cross referencing, and experimentation, it becomes useful enough to advance my understanding. I'm not asking ChatGPT to solve my problem, more like I'm getting it to bounce off my thoughts until I discover a direction where I can solve my problem.
Indeed. I never really used AI until recently but now I use it sometimes as a smarter search engine that can give me abstracts.
Eg. it's easy to ask copilot: can you give me a list of free, open source mqtt brokers and give me some statistics in the form of a table
And copilot (or any other ai) does this quite nicely. This is not something that you can ask a traditional search engine.
Offcourse you do need to know enough of the underlying material and double check what output you get for when the AI is hallucinating.
I am building such an AI tutoring experience, focusing on a Socratic style with product support for forking conversations onto tangents. Happy to add you to the waitlist, will probably publish an MVP in a few weeks.
Do you have capacity for more developers? I’ve been wanting to help make this for a long time
I haven’t personally tried it, but the high-level demos of “khanmigo” created by khan academy seem really promising. I’ll always have a special place in my heart (and brain) for the work of Sal Khan and the folks at khan academy.
yeah this is a good point, just adjust coursework from multiple choice tests and fill in the blank homework to larger scale projects.
Putting together a project using the AI help will be a very close mimicry of what real work will be like and if the teacher is good they will learn way more than being able to spout information from memory.