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But not much closer, if content, rather than delivery, is the pressing bottleneck. My experience has been, that of the few first-tier astronomy graduate studen

But not much closer, if content, rather than delivery, is the pressing bottleneck. My experience has been, that of the few first-tier astronomy graduate students that aren't mistaken about the color of the Sun, as many learned it in seminar coverage of common misconceptions in astronomy education, as learned it in their own atypically extensive and successful astronomy education. Current content is really, really bad. A "Primer" will require much better. AI doesn't help much if your large textbook publisher's science education content is written by inexpensive liberal arts majors with no science background, consulting with "scientists". If one instead uses science graduate students, double majoring in education, with misconception lists in hand, you might get that Sun color right. Maybe. And interviewing researchers about their own research areas is even better. But... Say you're writing a children's picture book about atoms. What magnitude of domain expertise support do you need? How about a small room full of MIT physics professors? Is that enough? Can you see a bare atomic nucleus with your naked eye? Why not? Did you just now say too small, rather than beyond-violet "color"? That much is easy. But what if you wish to discover that a couple of atypical atomic nuclei can be seen with your room-lit naked eye, can be made to brightly fluoresce visibly (a multi-step spin-isomer decay, with one step visible)? So you can include a photo, of a glowing green dot in a vacuum vessel, in your picture book, to reinforce that nuclei are real physical objects. My experience has been that a room of MIT professors, most with some nuclear physics background, is likely an insufficient gathering of expertise. Unless it's a lunch for a visiting professor, whose focus is nucleus simulation, who self-describes their focus as a (with emphasis) "small" subfield, and who perhaps thinks all this obvious. Reflect on that: A room full of MIT physics professors is insufficient domain expertise to write an excellent children's picture book about atoms. How might we then go about writing a Primer, if it takes such an awesome gathering of expertise? Before Primers can be airdropped, they need to be written. And I suggest we're not yet even at the point of recognizing and acknowledging the primary challenge there, let alone scoping, funding, and addressing it. It's not pedagogy and ed tech that's blocking the road to a Primer. It's the sciences. And their incentives and funding. It's something I'd love to be working on, but finding people to work with has been a challenge.

newguy1234 7y ago
Interesting idea and I completely agree. I have delved into my ed tech projects and reached more or less the same conclusion - content is a bottleneck. Now I don't know if your overall critique is correct but I think the major thing we can agree on is this: we need high-quality source material that is preferably free. I think the solution is something similar to wikibooks (which I personally think is a failed project at this point) but it needs to solve the incentive problem...to encourage people to contribute similar to how people contribute to wikipedia. Writing an article is easy for a few people to do....but an entire book or curriculum for an entire course...now that's a different story. I do think there is a solution to it which is mainly just a hybrid approach of paying people to write the high-level draft and then allowing a community of people to edit and revise it. If that doesn't work then we simply need a funding mechanism to write open source books. Once we have these open source books then it becomes significantly easier to build additional tools on top of that source material - exams, practice questions, lecture videos, study notes etc. Most of the ed tech players I see are simply developing tools that are trying to fit into a broken system. Simply put - the current system needs to be scrapped and replaced with something better, built with the internet in mind and built to be a major disruptor of GLOBAL education. I am currently working on a side project trying to bring it to MVP stage. This is the idea I have in mind: Let's build a new platform that rebuilds education for the 21st century - start with writing open source textbooks. At the beginning, they don't need to be perfect, they can be revised as the platform grows. Then build a bunch of innovative self-study type tools using the latest in technology to make learning efficient, easy and fun. In terms of monetization - simple advertising and premium services (tutoring, live streamed classes with teachers etc.) and of course a simple credentialing system with the possibly to have proctored exams to add validity. Long-term vision would be this: a type 1 civilization university - all major subjects would have a course with a free textbook and an amazing set of tools to self-study it (or affordable options to get tutoring/view live streamed lectures with real teachers). Add in localization tools to translate all of these courses into the top 20+ languages. Each course would have a rigorousness protected exam for students to get a employment worthy credential. Eliminate all admission requirements and allow everyone to attend for free.
- mncharity 7y ago

newguy1234 7y ago

Interesting idea and I completely agree. I have delved into my ed tech projects and reached more or less the same conclusion - content is a bottleneck. Now I don't know if your overall critique is correct but I think the major thing we can agree on is this: we need high-quality source material that is preferably free. I think the solution is something similar to wikibooks (which I personally think is a failed project at this point) but it needs to solve the incentive problem...to encourage people to contribute similar to how people contribute to wikipedia. Writing an article is easy for a few people to do....but an entire book or curriculum for an entire course...now that's a different story. I do think there is a solution to it which is mainly just a hybrid approach of paying people to write the high-level draft and then allowing a community of people to edit and revise it. If that doesn't work then we simply need a funding mechanism to write open source books. Once we have these open source books then it becomes significantly easier to build additional tools on top of that source material - exams, practice questions, lecture videos, study notes etc. Most of the ed tech players I see are simply developing tools that are trying to fit into a broken system. Simply put - the current system needs to be scrapped and replaced with something better, built with the internet in mind and built to be a major disruptor of GLOBAL education. I am currently working on a side project trying to bring it to MVP stage. This is the idea I have in mind: Let's build a new platform that rebuilds education for the 21st century - start with writing open source textbooks. At the beginning, they don't need to be perfect, they can be revised as the platform grows. Then build a bunch of innovative self-study type tools using the latest in technology to make learning efficient, easy and fun. In terms of monetization - simple advertising and premium services (tutoring, live streamed classes with teachers etc.) and of course a simple credentialing system with the possibly to have proctored exams to add validity. Long-term vision would be this: a type 1 civilization university - all major subjects would have a course with a free textbook and an amazing set of tools to self-study it (or affordable options to get tutoring/view live streamed lectures with real teachers). Add in localization tools to translate all of these courses into the top 20+ languages. Each course would have a rigorousness protected exam for students to get a employment worthy credential. Eliminate all admission requirements and allow everyone to attend for free.

mncharity 7y ago