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I wish education went the other way, focusing on integrating educational tools to adapt to a world where everyone has access to the world's full repertoire of k

I wish education went the other way, focusing on integrating educational tools to adapt to a world where everyone has access to the world's full repertoire of knowledge at all times. Teach kids to integrate these powerful tools as part of their learning and problem solving skills. By the time a kid is out of high school they should have a powerful index of knowledge accessible from all devices to help them tackle complex problems. I was always resentful in high school when teachers said you wouldn't have access to informational charts or calculators in the real world. At that time I considered my integration with some electronic devices an extension of myself and an external index, it was like having a bunch of additional limbs for problem solving. Not having access to my tech devices was equivalent to being artificially lobotomized. And kids growing up will have access to even more powerful tools thanks to LLMs. Societies that adapt and integrate tech devices as part of the educational experience will have a competitive advantage in the long run.

unethical_ban 3y ago
How do you integrate Instagram into a lesson plan, and why? Banning personal smartphones and forcing kids to focus on the class is the objective, not to be arbitrarily Luddite.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
  There are more uses for smartphones than just Instagram and TikTok. My point is that we should be developing tools to help students organize and index everything they learn so it can be put to use when they need to solve problems in the real world. Education as it's currently done mostly focuses on getting students to be able to pass some exam, after which they will quickly forget everything learned because it's no longer needed. Taking away a student's most powerful tool is crippling their development capabilities. Education should focus on integrating and leveraging existing modern tools to empower student capabilities and problem solving skills. A trite example: imagine a student has to solve a word search. For an older person the only way to solve this would've been to perform the task manually. But younger students could learn how to scan the grid with OCR tools, and then write a simple script to search for the words. Ideally students would be familiarized with a full set of advanced capabilities and programming tools to be able to outperform someone doing a manual search. This example is basic, but it can be extrapolated to far more practical real world problems. Instead of giving students basic problems, unleash them on more complex domains without instructions and get them to engage with LLMs and other tools to try and solve the problem. Then if they get stuck, help walk them through arriving at the solution. This is what education should be about. I want students to learn to leverage all of their tools to maximum efficiency. The goal isn't to get students to pass some stupid exam, it's for them to be able to solve complex problems in the real world. An analogy. If we had a tree-climbing competition, where some students are allowed to use their hands and feet while others are only allowed to use their feet, I bet you that the ones that are allowed to use both hands and feet will be far more effectively at climbing. And the ones forced to just use their feet will be left wondering why they weren't allowed to use their hands.
  - unethical_ban 3y ago
    "For an older person the only way to solve this would've been to perform the task manually." It's quite possible the purpose of the word search is to train the child on their own visual pattern recognition, not their problem solving. Solving manually and writing an OCR program are teaching to two very different skillsets. But more fundamental to my point is this: "There are more uses for smartphones than just Instagram and TikTok." Yes, but without administrative-level filters and lockdowns, social media and garbage are inseparable from the phone. The solution would be for the school to offer a standard issue mobile device with whitelisted resources for the purposes of teaching. Allowing students to have their personal, unrestricted phones out during class is to invite them to distract themselves from lessons and learning. It is to invite them to learn how not to focus on meatspace.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
The problem is that most kids aren’t using these tools like you might. They are just wasting time doom scrolling junk content in the place of learning.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
  That is a problem! But it can be solved by developing better tools and teaching kids to use em. We have access to magical oracles and immense problem solving capabilities right in our pockets, but it gets wasted and used for doomscrolling. Is it really the kid's fault if nobody in their lives is teaching them how to use these tools more effectively though? We should be developing problem solving toolboxes and teaching kids how to use them effectively. When I was in school we had multiple seminars on how to navigate library systems and research data. Because it's not obvious to kids what capabilities are available from existing systems unless someone teaches them. The problem with banning smartphones is that it will limit development of problem solving capabilities to the same tier as prior generations and fail to teach students how to maximally leverage the tools to which they have access. Educational systems must adapt and evolve. The older generation is responsible for developing new tools and getting children acquainted with their usage.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    The thing is, most academic work up to perhaps your upperclassman work in college is very much not about going off into the woods and coming back with knowledge from far off. Its about being on topic with whats actually being covered in class, and merely paying attention should be sufficient. I have graded student essays in this internet era, and you can tell when they refer to outside sources. Not a bad thing if its not plagiarized and cited, but its almost like knowledge vomit. I am testing them on X and Y since I talked about X and Y in class, and you get full marks by showing you paid attention to x and y in class and understand them. These knowledge vomit essays, I see they don’t really understand X or Y and desperately try and fill the page with everything from alpha to omega that was linked on the wikipedia article. It probably takes more work, in a panicked state the night before the deadline I imagine, parsing this stuff out gauging validity from various online sources and trying to meet teacher expectations, than just taking notes in class and studying solely from that content. I even offer recordings and slides of my lectures so students are encouraged to study solely that material, and not go down some rabbit hole off topic.
opportune 3y ago
Most HS teachers aren’t world class debaters and may have been arguing from faulty premises, but that doesn’t mean the point stands that learning how to do X, Y, and Z without a phone can be a valuable skill. If you were to be overly reliant on phones for easy problem solving, or even medium problem solving (more and more enabled by LLMs), you’d not be building the underlying skills to deal with novel but simple problems that the internet/LLMs don’t know about. And you’d not build the foundation to help you with solving harder problems. Plus, while computers are great for allowing us to “know” much more information than before without actually knowing it, it is still a different kind of knowing. The things you know in your head you can internalize and use to build connections between ideas, a more accurate world view, quickly connect disparate ideas. You also, even if you don’t remember all the details, know the general gist. If you rely too much on the internet, you don’t know that some concepts even exist, and you can fail to internalize or truly understand something. I’ll give you one example: sometimes I look up programming stuff on the internet if I get stuck. If I immediately jumped to that every time I had a problem, I would not learn very much. Since I treat this as a last resort, I have learned a lot about programming from the process of figuring things out myself first by reading code. This has allowed me to build the skill of seeing an answer and thinking “oh, they got the general gist, but what they suggest is actually a bit over complicated” or “this is a good answer but for a different problem than the question/I am asking” - something noobs don’t discern as well.

unethical_ban 3y ago

How do you integrate Instagram into a lesson plan, and why? Banning personal smartphones and forcing kids to focus on the class is the objective, not to be arbitrarily Luddite.

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
There are more uses for smartphones than just Instagram and TikTok. My point is that we should be developing tools to help students organize and index everything they learn so it can be put to use when they need to solve problems in the real world. Education as it's currently done mostly focuses on getting students to be able to pass some exam, after which they will quickly forget everything learned because it's no longer needed. Taking away a student's most powerful tool is crippling their development capabilities. Education should focus on integrating and leveraging existing modern tools to empower student capabilities and problem solving skills. A trite example: imagine a student has to solve a word search. For an older person the only way to solve this would've been to perform the task manually. But younger students could learn how to scan the grid with OCR tools, and then write a simple script to search for the words. Ideally students would be familiarized with a full set of advanced capabilities and programming tools to be able to outperform someone doing a manual search. This example is basic, but it can be extrapolated to far more practical real world problems. Instead of giving students basic problems, unleash them on more complex domains without instructions and get them to engage with LLMs and other tools to try and solve the problem. Then if they get stuck, help walk them through arriving at the solution. This is what education should be about. I want students to learn to leverage all of their tools to maximum efficiency. The goal isn't to get students to pass some stupid exam, it's for them to be able to solve complex problems in the real world. An analogy. If we had a tree-climbing competition, where some students are allowed to use their hands and feet while others are only allowed to use their feet, I bet you that the ones that are allowed to use both hands and feet will be far more effectively at climbing. And the ones forced to just use their feet will be left wondering why they weren't allowed to use their hands.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  "For an older person the only way to solve this would've been to perform the task manually." It's quite possible the purpose of the word search is to train the child on their own visual pattern recognition, not their problem solving. Solving manually and writing an OCR program are teaching to two very different skillsets. But more fundamental to my point is this: "There are more uses for smartphones than just Instagram and TikTok." Yes, but without administrative-level filters and lockdowns, social media and garbage are inseparable from the phone. The solution would be for the school to offer a standard issue mobile device with whitelisted resources for the purposes of teaching. Allowing students to have their personal, unrestricted phones out during class is to invite them to distract themselves from lessons and learning. It is to invite them to learn how not to focus on meatspace.

kjkjadksj 3y ago

The problem is that most kids aren’t using these tools like you might. They are just wasting time doom scrolling junk content in the place of learning.

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
That is a problem! But it can be solved by developing better tools and teaching kids to use em. We have access to magical oracles and immense problem solving capabilities right in our pockets, but it gets wasted and used for doomscrolling. Is it really the kid's fault if nobody in their lives is teaching them how to use these tools more effectively though? We should be developing problem solving toolboxes and teaching kids how to use them effectively. When I was in school we had multiple seminars on how to navigate library systems and research data. Because it's not obvious to kids what capabilities are available from existing systems unless someone teaches them. The problem with banning smartphones is that it will limit development of problem solving capabilities to the same tier as prior generations and fail to teach students how to maximally leverage the tools to which they have access. Educational systems must adapt and evolve. The older generation is responsible for developing new tools and getting children acquainted with their usage.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  The thing is, most academic work up to perhaps your upperclassman work in college is very much not about going off into the woods and coming back with knowledge from far off. Its about being on topic with whats actually being covered in class, and merely paying attention should be sufficient. I have graded student essays in this internet era, and you can tell when they refer to outside sources. Not a bad thing if its not plagiarized and cited, but its almost like knowledge vomit. I am testing them on X and Y since I talked about X and Y in class, and you get full marks by showing you paid attention to x and y in class and understand them. These knowledge vomit essays, I see they don’t really understand X or Y and desperately try and fill the page with everything from alpha to omega that was linked on the wikipedia article. It probably takes more work, in a panicked state the night before the deadline I imagine, parsing this stuff out gauging validity from various online sources and trying to meet teacher expectations, than just taking notes in class and studying solely from that content. I even offer recordings and slides of my lectures so students are encouraged to study solely that material, and not go down some rabbit hole off topic.

opportune 3y ago

Most HS teachers aren’t world class debaters and may have been arguing from faulty premises, but that doesn’t mean the point stands that learning how to do X, Y, and Z without a phone can be a valuable skill. If you were to be overly reliant on phones for easy problem solving, or even medium problem solving (more and more enabled by LLMs), you’d not be building the underlying skills to deal with novel but simple problems that the internet/LLMs don’t know about. And you’d not build the foundation to help you with solving harder problems. Plus, while computers are great for allowing us to “know” much more information than before without actually knowing it, it is still a different kind of knowing. The things you know in your head you can internalize and use to build connections between ideas, a more accurate world view, quickly connect disparate ideas. You also, even if you don’t remember all the details, know the general gist. If you rely too much on the internet, you don’t know that some concepts even exist, and you can fail to internalize or truly understand something. I’ll give you one example: sometimes I look up programming stuff on the internet if I get stuck. If I immediately jumped to that every time I had a problem, I would not learn very much. Since I treat this as a last resort, I have learned a lot about programming from the process of figuring things out myself first by reading code. This has allowed me to build the skill of seeing an answer and thinking “oh, they got the general gist, but what they suggest is actually a bit over complicated” or “this is a good answer but for a different problem than the question/I am asking” - something noobs don’t discern as well.