6 ms·

"too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale" this is changing as we speak with language models.

by ohhhhhh 4y ago

c0brac0bra 4y ago
Makes me think of the book in Diamond Age.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  What's that book called?
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", which also happens to be the subtitle of The Diamond Age (by Neal Stephenson). It's an interactive e-book, of sorts.
pantalaimon 4y ago
A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
nullc 4y ago
"A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer"
yboris 4y ago
Education Automation: Freeing the scholar to return to his studies by Buckminster Fuller (1964) https://www.amazon.com/Education-Automation-Freeing-scholar-studies/dp/0809301377 https://www.amazon.com/Education-Automation-Freeing-scholar-...
dredmorbius 4y ago
The history of proposed technological replacements for human teachers is filled with highly enthusiastic and widely touted failures. It's not simply a matter of presenting information --- a book, or streamed lecture, or audio or video recording can do this --- or even interactive engagement ("educational software"), but a highly-attentive in-the-moment back-and-forth and with the student, sensing where they do and don't follow or understand a lesson, and most critically allowing them to discover for themselves a principle, concept, or fact. It's not that these cannot happen alone, via self-directed (autodidactic) study, or with the assistance of technologically-mediated aides. But time and again the effectiveness of such methods falls far short of direct human instruction. LLM AI chatbots can respond to written or verbal cues, to an extent, but as yet lack an underlying pedagogical framework and understanding of the context of a communication. From what I've seen so far of such models, "lacking an underlying framework", the bones and skeleton of a conversation, if you will, which can be subsequently fleshed out, seems to be a general failing of the models, so far. I'm not saying that this cannot emerge, and parts of this may in fact be a relatively simple additional step or advance. Given other advances such as sentiment and mood assessment and analysis they may even be largely in-place. What's left however is the motivation of such efforts, and alignment with the educational mission, again a place where previous technological education programmes have foundered, as most have been coopted by, if not outright conceived as, propaganda and cultural programming tools. (A part of traditional education as well, but far less effectively and uniformly delivered when mediated at 1:15 -- 1:30 or so ratios amongst millions of instructors[1]). It will all but certainly be difficult for corporate-based LLM models to resist such temptations, see the earlier case of Backrub and perverse incentives.[2] ________________________________ Notes: 1. Figure based on an off-the-cuff estimate, though substantiated by US Dept. Ed. statistics, see: <https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372>. 2. "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" (1998), Appendix A: <http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html>
- zozbot234 4y ago
  How many teachers in the real world are actually engaged in "a highly-attentive in-the-moment back-and-forth and with the student, sensing where they do and don't follow or understand a lesson"? A lot of the time, the pretense of "allowing them to discover for themselves" simply turns into not teaching at all. This whole notion that students will simply educate themselves on their own may be a comforting idea, but plenty of evidence shows that it's just not true.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    The question is how effective human teachers are relative to alternate technological methods, which I've already addressed: But time and again the effectiveness of such methods falls far short of direct human instruction. How human teachers perform relative to some abstract ideal isn't particularly interesting if that ideal isn't viably attainable. All pedagogical methods are relative. Teaching efficacy does of course vary, though most studies show that other factors, including both environmental (e.g., student's home life, parents, neighbourhood, income/wealth) and institutional (school or district as a whole) matter far more than any individual teacher. This is a key point in Cathy O'Neill's book Weapons of Math Destruction, mentioned in her Ted Talk here (at about 3 minutes): <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=_2u_eHHzRto https://yewtu.be/watch?v=_2u_eHHzRto>. Of NYC public school teachers tested, 665 had two scores, for which there was virtually no correlation. Keep in mind that "institutional factors" frequently involves "eliminating educationally-disadvantaged students", by many methods. One such discussed in the past month at the New York Times, "How Educators Secretly Remove Students With Disabilities From School" (10 Feb 2023) <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/us/students-disabilities-informal-removal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/us/students-disabilities-...> There's a long history of ed-tech failures. You might find Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education by Justin Reich to be a useful introduction: <https://cmsw.mit.edu/failure-to-disrupt-why-technology-alone-cant-transform-education/ https://cmsw.mit.edu/failure-to-disrupt-why-technology-alone...>
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      The "institutional factor" described in the NYT article is teachers "informally removing" students that they view as disruptive from the classroom. If anything, this looks like a case where human teachers are being ineffective (if perhaps sometimes through no fault of their own) wrt. the goal of educating these students, whereas better ed tech might be especially helpful.

"too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale" this is changing as we speak with language models.

c0brac0bra 4y ago

Makes me think of the book in Diamond Age.

hgsgm 4y ago
What's that book called?
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", which also happens to be the subtitle of The Diamond Age (by Neal Stephenson). It's an interactive e-book, of sorts.

pantalaimon 4y ago

A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

nullc 4y ago

"A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer"

yboris 4y ago

Education Automation: Freeing the scholar to return to his studies by Buckminster Fuller (1964) https://www.amazon.com/Education-Automation-Freeing-scholar-studies/dp/0809301377 https://www.amazon.com/Education-Automation-Freeing-scholar-...

dredmorbius 4y ago

The history of proposed technological replacements for human teachers is filled with highly enthusiastic and widely touted failures. It's not simply a matter of presenting information --- a book, or streamed lecture, or audio or video recording can do this --- or even interactive engagement ("educational software"), but a highly-attentive in-the-moment back-and-forth and with the student, sensing where they do and don't follow or understand a lesson, and most critically allowing them to discover for themselves a principle, concept, or fact. It's not that these cannot happen alone, via self-directed (autodidactic) study, or with the assistance of technologically-mediated aides. But time and again the effectiveness of such methods falls far short of direct human instruction. LLM AI chatbots can respond to written or verbal cues, to an extent, but as yet lack an underlying pedagogical framework and understanding of the context of a communication. From what I've seen so far of such models, "lacking an underlying framework", the bones and skeleton of a conversation, if you will, which can be subsequently fleshed out, seems to be a general failing of the models, so far. I'm not saying that this cannot emerge, and parts of this may in fact be a relatively simple additional step or advance. Given other advances such as sentiment and mood assessment and analysis they may even be largely in-place. What's left however is the motivation of such efforts, and alignment with the educational mission, again a place where previous technological education programmes have foundered, as most have been coopted by, if not outright conceived as, propaganda and cultural programming tools. (A part of traditional education as well, but far less effectively and uniformly delivered when mediated at 1:15 -- 1:30 or so ratios amongst millions of instructors[1]). It will all but certainly be difficult for corporate-based LLM models to resist such temptations, see the earlier case of Backrub and perverse incentives.[2] ________________________________ Notes: 1. Figure based on an off-the-cuff estimate, though substantiated by US Dept. Ed. statistics, see: <https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372>. 2. "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" (1998), Appendix A: <http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html>

zozbot234 4y ago
How many teachers in the real world are actually engaged in "a highly-attentive in-the-moment back-and-forth and with the student, sensing where they do and don't follow or understand a lesson"? A lot of the time, the pretense of "allowing them to discover for themselves" simply turns into not teaching at all. This whole notion that students will simply educate themselves on their own may be a comforting idea, but plenty of evidence shows that it's just not true.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  The question is how effective human teachers are relative to alternate technological methods, which I've already addressed: But time and again the effectiveness of such methods falls far short of direct human instruction. How human teachers perform relative to some abstract ideal isn't particularly interesting if that ideal isn't viably attainable. All pedagogical methods are relative. Teaching efficacy does of course vary, though most studies show that other factors, including both environmental (e.g., student's home life, parents, neighbourhood, income/wealth) and institutional (school or district as a whole) matter far more than any individual teacher. This is a key point in Cathy O'Neill's book Weapons of Math Destruction, mentioned in her Ted Talk here (at about 3 minutes): <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=_2u_eHHzRto https://yewtu.be/watch?v=_2u_eHHzRto>. Of NYC public school teachers tested, 665 had two scores, for which there was virtually no correlation. Keep in mind that "institutional factors" frequently involves "eliminating educationally-disadvantaged students", by many methods. One such discussed in the past month at the New York Times, "How Educators Secretly Remove Students With Disabilities From School" (10 Feb 2023) <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/us/students-disabilities-informal-removal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/us/students-disabilities-...> There's a long history of ed-tech failures. You might find Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education by Justin Reich to be a useful introduction: <https://cmsw.mit.edu/failure-to-disrupt-why-technology-alone-cant-transform-education/ https://cmsw.mit.edu/failure-to-disrupt-why-technology-alone...>
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    The "institutional factor" described in the NYT article is teachers "informally removing" students that they view as disruptive from the classroom. If anything, this looks like a case where human teachers are being ineffective (if perhaps sometimes through no fault of their own) wrt. the goal of educating these students, whereas better ed tech might be especially helpful.