Kind of think if someone's sold you a bridge three different times already, we should be pretty embarrassed the fourth time the conversation is going
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Kind of think if someone's sold you a bridge three different times already, we should be pretty embarrassed the fourth time the conversation is going
Salman Khan’s third attempt to change the world of education
Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, talks to Tes about how AI can transform education by freeing up more time for teachers to spend on teaching
Tes Magazine (www.tes.com)
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I agree that there's a level of hype, cash grab, etc. around AI. The influx of VC money beings up a number of concerns.
That said, what gives me a good deal of pause in this article is the way in which Kahn's earlier attempts have been dismissed
The reforms he's argued for have been:
- Improve teaching teaching by empowering students to learn at their own page, with the ability to rewind when necessary
- Optimize classroom time away from lectures and focus on hands on
- Utilize out of classroom quizzes to quickly identify where students may be struggling to intervene
Where is the problem with this?
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@serge nothing is wrong with these arguments, because they are the bog standard arguments that everyone who's worked in education reform long enough makes, take a look at some of the research I'm an author on and you'll start to see some evidence for why I have an opinion here
The criticisms are about the proposed solutions. Anyone (with a good PR team) can give a good TED talk and say things we all agree with. The solutions have been very lacking.
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Paul Cantrellreplied to Cat Hicks last edited by [email protected]
@grimalkina @serge
Yup. As somebody whose teaching life focuses •heavily• on those first two points Serge made, I can say that they’re great ideas and execution is •everything•.Using AI to accomplish those worthy goals is dubious for the same reason that it’s dubious to have a machine generate random code instead of having developers think through the problem.
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@inthehands @serge as with anyone with a large platform people have mixed opinions about Dan Meyer, I am not enough in the inside baseball of Education Discourse to know :). But I thought this piece was quite sharp and well represented my own views during many agonizing years I spent trying to amplify the voices of students (including during school closures, during which the lack of listening to students was a big turning moment in my life and a reason I left this work)
Andrej Karpathy Is in Trouble
Karpathy helped build ChatGPT and now he's taking on the much larger challenge of helping people learn stuff.
(danmeyer.substack.com)
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@serge my wife also teaches the most hands on courses imaginable, lab courses, which she invented from scratch and receives almost no recognition from research faculty for, a heroic activity as you well know @inthehands ! The plan facts are that even when that is your goal it's absurdly hard to do, that there are many reasons that in some situations the choice has been "NO class AT ALL" or "a lecture class," rather than a choice between a lecture and hands on personalized learning.
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I feel like I'm missing context. I think it's a well known phenomenon that in many higher education institutions, research is given much higher value than teaching, despite the criticality of teaching.
While I'm sure someone will argue that I'm wrong, I can't help but notice the ways in which this mirrors/parallels the ways in which women are traditionally burdened with additional administrative and social labor in the workplace.
The other part, the "class at all or lecture class" part, I feel like I've missed some critical part of the conversation.
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@serge @inthehands I think the overall point I'm trying to share is just that many powerful figures like to make universal statements about what education "needs" (like that everything should be a flipped classroom model), but then when you get into the real world you recognize that the universal doesn't work as there are many difficult tradeoffs, including the goal of reaching more students but with less ideal pedagogy vs reaching a small number of students with the most ideal pedagogy.
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@grimalkina @serge
That’s a good piece. It wanders a bit, but I like the keen observation that if receptive learning worked all the time, then the printing press would have “solved” education already.A maxim I love: learning is relational, not transactional. IOW, learning happens as the result of meaningful human relationships (teacher/student, student/student), not students acquiring ideas as if they were objects placed in a box.
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@grimalkina @serge
“many powerful figures like to make universal statements about what education needs…but when you get into the real world”Brings to mind the Kofi Annan Earmuff Parable:
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/110079454709159458 -
@grimalkina @serge
Hats off to your wife doing that work swimming upstream. I’m in a department where hands-on / active work is a high priority for all of us, and highly valued — and we share those hands-on materials for a course across instructors and improve them collaboratively over years. That’s •huge•, with compounding dividends, and it’s •still• really hard work! To go it alone is incredibly tough. -
@inthehands @serge I shouldn't overstate, they have a lovely teaching faculty community and she's ridiculously successful, but yeah the divide is still very real and comes up in wild ways (from my outside perspective), just so many ways in which teaching expertise and impact is not treated as a real expert skill across STEM and tech. We actually are about to launch something we worked on together on this topic...!! Stay tuned
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@grimalkina
I am eager to hear about whatever it is! -
@grimalkina
Scrolling past this in my mentions just now:“just so many ways in which teaching expertise and impact is not treated as a real expert skill across STEM and tech”
…realized I should add: half the time teaching expertise and impact is not treated as a real expert skill ••in education••
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@grimalkina @inthehands @serge As not-a-teacher, I really don't think the problem is "not enough ed tech".
I think the problem is "we don't have a sustainable funding model capable of supporting the amount and type of one-on-one and small group student-teacher interaction that would be effective at helping each student achieve their goals".
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@robotistry
Yes and