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You say that, but there are standardised learning programmes like this that were very popular 30-40 years ago, such as the SMILE System for teaching maths. Thes

You say that, but there are standardised learning programmes like this that were very popular 30-40 years ago, such as the SMILE System for teaching maths. These relied on the idea that, given the opportunity, students would find their level and progress just as well as if there was a teacher giving the whole class the same lesson. Luckily we have learnt that this was a terrible idea and moved back towards actually teaching! In terms of whether resources are actually shared, they are, and most lessons on a given subject within a given exam board will be largely the same in terms of materials and planning (school textbooks have teacher’s editions with worksheets and lesson plans), but will vary wildly depending on which concepts students find easy or difficult on the day.

29athrowaway 6y ago
I am not talking about the same thing. I am talking about teachers freely collaborating and creating material that gets constantly evaluated, ranked and improved by the community in a self-organized manner, the same way open source projects work on github. That is different to using material designed by a committee from pre-Internet times. I am talking about using a data-centric approach where the material is not assumed to be good, and it is constantly evaluated and compared against equivalent teaching material so that everyone can benefit from the best available material. But they can't, because formats like Word, Powerpoint and PDF are not version-control friendly, and Office 365 does not scale to the same level of collaboration as Github does. LaTeX is a version control friendly format, but school teachers won't use it. They prefer to spend countless hours putting together the same content in Word and Powerpoint over and over again. If I was in charge of education I would make LaTeX and version control mandatory for everything. In 2 years education would be 100x better.
- wcarey 6y ago
  As a teacher who uses versioned TeX for all of my artifacts, this isn’t the panacea you hope for. Many of my documents will only compile on my machine because I a have a bunch of dependencies scattered about. There are also many types of artifact that require an order of magnitude more work to produce in TeX compared to something like OmniGraffle or PowerPoint. Even if you could somehow overcome the technical hurdles, you’d run into the problem of teaching materials not possessing even a partial order. Even if you somehow get teachers to agree on a lattice or total order for teaching artifacts, you’d need to deal with the idea that producing teaching materials is a way for the teacher to synthesize the content they are about to teach. Often the artifact is something of a byproduct of the process of the teacher making sense of the rhetorical situation the are about to undertake. If you just snag the highest rated artifact, that process doesn’t happen.

29athrowaway 6y ago

I am not talking about the same thing. I am talking about teachers freely collaborating and creating material that gets constantly evaluated, ranked and improved by the community in a self-organized manner, the same way open source projects work on github. That is different to using material designed by a committee from pre-Internet times. I am talking about using a data-centric approach where the material is not assumed to be good, and it is constantly evaluated and compared against equivalent teaching material so that everyone can benefit from the best available material. But they can't, because formats like Word, Powerpoint and PDF are not version-control friendly, and Office 365 does not scale to the same level of collaboration as Github does. LaTeX is a version control friendly format, but school teachers won't use it. They prefer to spend countless hours putting together the same content in Word and Powerpoint over and over again. If I was in charge of education I would make LaTeX and version control mandatory for everything. In 2 years education would be 100x better.

wcarey 6y ago
As a teacher who uses versioned TeX for all of my artifacts, this isn’t the panacea you hope for. Many of my documents will only compile on my machine because I a have a bunch of dependencies scattered about. There are also many types of artifact that require an order of magnitude more work to produce in TeX compared to something like OmniGraffle or PowerPoint. Even if you could somehow overcome the technical hurdles, you’d run into the problem of teaching materials not possessing even a partial order. Even if you somehow get teachers to agree on a lattice or total order for teaching artifacts, you’d need to deal with the idea that producing teaching materials is a way for the teacher to synthesize the content they are about to teach. Often the artifact is something of a byproduct of the process of the teacher making sense of the rhetorical situation the are about to undertake. If you just snag the highest rated artifact, that process doesn’t happen.