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> Ask students to solve harder problems, assuming they will use AI to learn more effectively. What does this look like? Like asking children learning to read t

by aaplok 1y ago

> Ask students to solve harder problems, assuming they will use AI to learn more effectively. What does this look like? Like asking children learning to read to demonstrate they can read Shakespeare? A staple of modern education is scaffolding learning, where skills are incrementally learnt and build on previously learnt simpler skills. Much of what students learn in high school and early on at university is meant as a stepping stone to acquiring more applicable skills. Just like you can't start assessing learning abilities from Shakespeare, students simply need to be told whether they master those simpler skills before moving up. Doing away with assessing simpler skills just because AI can now perform them isn't the solution to addressing a lack of critical thinking. What will need to happen is that early subjects will need to stop being used for gatekeeping. Rather than treating education as an adversarial game, we should make it a collaborative one and instead of trying to make it more difficult for students to pass assessments with AI (and mechanically making it harder to pass them without as well), we should give students a stake in learning what they need to learn.

theptip 1y ago
> What does this look like? Like asking children learning to read to demonstrate they can read Shakespeare? A staple of modern education is scaffolding learning We definitely need to rethink some assumptions. I view education as serving at least two goals: one is job-specific training (eg you will go on to do an English Lit PhD) and the other is proving you can do sit in a chair for long enough to do a job, and do critical thinking (you will graduate and get a “degree required” job). I think we are mostly worried about how the death of the essay affects the latter. In some sense what you are studying is irrelevant for this case, what is important going forward is developing critical reasoning skills _in partnership with AI_. Not claiming to have solved this, but some ideas would be: - ask students to produce way more papers, but now you are an editor checking for high level understanding and catching falsehoods/errors. - stop asking students to write essays, instead offer them simulated conversations with AI experts where they need to display knowledge to keep up (eg “Art Museum Curator Simulator”), or tutoring kids from lower years. - stop asking people to do 4 year degrees and use AI to give much better apprenticeships for the real work (this might be my favorite). > we should give students a stake in learning what they need to learn. I strongly agree with this one, I think for many people the college degree has fallen victim to Goodheart’s law. Trade schools might actually be better but it took ZIRP to create those for software engineering.

by aaplok 1y ago

theptip 1y ago

> What does this look like? Like asking children learning to read to demonstrate they can read Shakespeare? A staple of modern education is scaffolding learning We definitely need to rethink some assumptions. I view education as serving at least two goals: one is job-specific training (eg you will go on to do an English Lit PhD) and the other is proving you can do sit in a chair for long enough to do a job, and do critical thinking (you will graduate and get a “degree required” job). I think we are mostly worried about how the death of the essay affects the latter. In some sense what you are studying is irrelevant for this case, what is important going forward is developing critical reasoning skills _in partnership with AI_. Not claiming to have solved this, but some ideas would be: - ask students to produce way more papers, but now you are an editor checking for high level understanding and catching falsehoods/errors. - stop asking students to write essays, instead offer them simulated conversations with AI experts where they need to display knowledge to keep up (eg “Art Museum Curator Simulator”), or tutoring kids from lower years. - stop asking people to do 4 year degrees and use AI to give much better apprenticeships for the real work (this might be my favorite). > we should give students a stake in learning what they need to learn. I strongly agree with this one, I think for many people the college degree has fallen victim to Goodheart’s law. Trade schools might actually be better but it took ZIRP to create those for software engineering.