10 ms·

English professors double down on requiring printed copies of readings

148 points by cmsefton 8mo ago

zkmon 8mo ago
>This academic year, some English professors have increased their preference for physical copies of readings, citing concerns related to artificial intelligence. I didn't get it. How can printing avoid AI? And more importantly is this AI-resistance sustainable?
- secabeen 8mo ago
  You can't easily copy and paste from a printout into AI. Sure, you can track down the reading yourself online, and then copy and paste in, but not during class, and not without some effort.
  - xigoi 8mo ago
    LLM services have pretty much flawless OCR for printed text.
  - stephenbez 8mo ago
    It’s easy to take a picture of a printout and then ask AI about it. Not that hard even when it’s many pages.
    - layer8 8mo ago
      It takes more initial effort than just starting reading, or even just skim-reading the material.
- Flavius 8mo ago
  This approach is just cheap theater. It doesn't actually stop AI, it just adds a step to the process. Any student can snap a photo, OCR the text and feed it into an LLM in seconds. All this policy accomplishes is wasting paper and forcing students to engage in digital hoop-jumping.
  - ulrashida 8mo ago
    Students tend to be fairly lazy, so this may simply mean another x% of the class reads the material rather than scanning in the 60 pages of reading for the assignment.
  - mbreese 8mo ago
    It’s not theater. It introduces friction into the process. And when there is friction in both choices (read the paper, or take a photo and upload the picture), you’ll get more people reading the physical paper copy. If students want to jump through hoops, they will, but it will require an active choice. At this point auto AI summaries are so prevalent that it is the passive default. By shifting it to require an active choice, you’ve make it more likely for students to choose to do the work.
    - Flavius 8mo ago
      That friction is trivial. You are comparing the effort of snapping a photo against the effort of actually reading and analyzing a text. If anyone chooses to read the paper, it's because they actually want to read it, not because using AI was too much hassle.
      - randcraw 8mo ago
        You can certainly make it harder to cheat. AIs will inevitably generate summaries that are very similarly written and formatted -- content, context, and sequence -- making it easy for a prof (and their AI) to detect the presence of AI use, especially if students are also quizzed to validate that they have knowledge of their own summary. Alternately, the prof can require that students write out notes, in longhand, as they read, and require that a photocopy of those notes be submitted, along with a handwritten outline / rough draft, to validate the essays that follow. I think it's inevitable that "show your work" soon will become the mantra of not just the math, hard science, and engineering courses.
    - blell 8mo ago
      Any AI app worth its salt allows you to upload a photo of something and it processes it flawlessly in the same amount of time. This is absolutely worthless teather.
- coffeefirst 8mo ago
  The students were reading AI summaries rather than the original text. Does this literally work? It adds slightly more friction, but you can still ask the robot to summarize pretty much anything that would appear on the syllabus. What it likely does it set expectations. This doesn't strike me as being anti-AI or "resistance" at all. But if you don't train your own brain to read and make thoughts, you won't have one.
  - epolanski 8mo ago
    I was reading summaries online 25 years ago as well. Hell, in Italy we used to have an editor called Bignami make summaries of every school topic. https://www.bignami.com/ https://www.bignami.com/ In any case, I don't know what to think about all of this. School is for learning, if you skip the hard part you not gonna learn, your lost.
    - skeptic_ai 8mo ago
      Instead of learning the things that can be done by ai, learn how to use the ai as that’s the only edge you got left.
      - subhobroto 8mo ago
        I honestly think (you and) I'm missing something! What you say is obvious to me and provably correct. I just can't argue with your statement no matter what and have been making comments in alignment with yours, just with way, way more text. We are both being downvoted - I can't even see your post (it's so grayed out) and I've started to get those "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." myself, that is indicative of post throttling that kicks in on heavy downvotes. It took me 5 retries, waiting ~40 minutes each time and failing between tries to get this to finally post but I waited because this comment was important for me to put out there. I'm not going to stick around to keep waiting, retrying and posting again as I have other things to do in my life, so I will just abandon commenting altogether. "AI" is changing society fundamentally forever and education needs to change fundamentally with it. I am personally betting that humans in the future, outside extreme niches, are generalists and are augmented by specialist agents. I have a hypothesis that future software engineers will be a human generalist (the person) augmented by a large diverse group of specialist agents (the tools). The human generalist will keep their specialist agents fine-tuned, trained and upto date so that they generate implementations precisely as the human generalist specifies them. This won't be limited to software engineering but looking at how well this thought process is polling here on HN, I'll pause :). Are you and I missing something big or is the bigger crowd in denial?
- mold_aid 8mo ago
  >How can printing avoid AI? Every online service in the university has an AI summarization tool in it. This includes library services. >And more importantly is this AI-resistance sustainable? It can get in line. Engl academics have been talking about sustainability for decades. Nobody cared before, professors aren't going to care now.
everybodyknows 8mo ago
> This semester, she is requiring all students to have printed options. What could it mean for an "option" to be "required"?
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
bko 8mo ago
Who is behind this over digitization of primary school? My understanding is that in the Us pretty much all homework and tests are done on computers or iPads. This obv isn’t a push by parents because I can’t imagine parents I know want their kids in front of a screen all day. At best they’re indifferent. My only guess is the teachers unions that don’t want teachers grading and creating lesson plans and all the other work they used to do. And since this trend kid scores or performance has not gotten better, so what gives? Can anyone comment if it’s as bad as this and what’s behind it.
- el_benhameen 8mo ago
  My kids are in elementary school in the SF area (although pretty far in the ‘burbs) and this is not my experience. The older one has a chromebook and uses it for research and production of larger written projects and presents—the kind of things you’d expect. The younger one doesn’t have any school-supplied device yet. Both kids have math exercises, language worksheets, short writing exercises, etc., all done on paper. This is the majority of homework. I’m fine with this system. I wish they’d spend a little more time teaching computer basics (I did a lot of touch typing exercises in the 90’s; my older one doesn’t seem to have those kind of lessons). But in general, there’s not too much homework, there’s good emphasis on reading, and I appreciate that the older one is learning how to plan, research, and create projects using the tool he’ll use to do so in future schooling.
- michaelt 8mo ago
  A few decades ago: * People needed to be taught digital skills that were in growing demand in the workplace. * The kids researching things online and word-processing their homework were doing well in class (because only upper-middle-class types could afford home PCs) * Some trials of digital learning produced good results. Teaching by the world's greatest teachers, exactly the pace every student needs, with continuous feedback and infinite patience. * Blocking distractions? How hard can that be?
  - nine_k 8mo ago
    Reading with AI summaries jumping into your eyes is like writing in a word processor that completes sentences and paragraphs for you. Writing with a word processor that just helps you type, format, and check spelling is great. Blocking distractions on a general-purpose computer (like a phone or a tablet) is as hard as handing locked-down devices set up for the purpose, and banning personal devices.
Mathnerd314 8mo ago
If you are flipping through the reading to find a quote, then printed readings are hard to beat, unless you can search for a word with digital search. But speed reading RSVP presentation beats any kind of print reading by a mile, if you are aiming for comprehension. So, it is hard to say where the technology is going. Nobody has put in the work to really make reading on an iPad as smooth and fluid as print, in terms of rapid page flipping. But the potential is there. It is kind of laughable how the salesman will be saying, oh it has a fast processor, and then you open up a PDF and scroll a few pages fast and they start being blank instead of actually having text.
anilakar 8mo ago
At 150 eurobucks apiece, printed freshman coursebooks were prohibitively expensive in uni. We just pirated everything as a consequence.
- Flavius 8mo ago
  That's the whole point. They don't care about students or education, they care about wasting resources and making a lot of money in the process.
  - mistrial9 8mo ago
    some do and some don't. the "outrage" button is appropriate for the first part (don't care about students; waste resources to increase profits), but destructive for the second (we do care about students; we use resources in the classroom). It is hard to discuss this important topic when things go to "yelling" immediately? > They don't care about students or education, they care about wasting resources and making a lot of money in the process.
- Symbiote 8mo ago
  At my university in actual Europe, many copies of the required textbooks were available in the library. Printing was free.
jmclnx 8mo ago
While I fully agree with this, this quote bothers me: >Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option Does a student need to print out multiple TYCO Packets ? If so, only the very rich could afford this. I think educations should go back to printed books and submitting you work to the Prof. on paper. But submitting printed pages back to the Prof. for homework will avoid the school saying "Submit only Word Documents". That way a student can use the method they prefer, avoiding buying expensive software. One can then use just a simple free text editor if they want. Or even a typewriter :)
recursivedoubts 8mo ago
I have mentioned this in a few comments: for my CS classes I have gone from a historical 60-80% projects / 40-20% quizzes grade split, to a 50/50 split, and have moved my quizzes from being online to being in-person, pen-on-paper with one sheet of hand-written notes Rather than banning AI, I'm showing students how to use it effectively as a personalized TA. I'm giving them this AGENTS.md file: https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac And showing them how to use AI to summarize the slides into a quiz review sheet, generate example questions with answer walk throughs, etc. Of course I can't ensure they aren't just having AI do the projects, but I tell them that if they do that they are cheating themselves: the projects are designed to draw them into the art of programming and give them decent, real-world coding experience that they will need, even if they end up working at a higher level in the future. AI can be a very effective tool for education if used properly. I have used it to create a ton of extremely useful visualizations (e.g. how twos complement works) that I wouldn't have otherwise. But it is obviously extremely dangerous as well. "It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good."
- buckle8017 8mo ago
  hopefully you've also modified the quizzes to be handwriting compatible. I once got "implement a BCD decoder" with about a 1"x4" space to do it.
  - recursivedoubts 8mo ago
    We just had our first set of in person quizzes and I gave them one question per page, with lots of space for answers. I'm concerned about handwriting, which is a lost skill, and how hard that will be on the TAs who are grading the exams. I have stressed to students that they should write larger, slower and more carefully than normal. I have also given them examples of good answers: terse and to the point, using bulleted lists effectively, what good pseudo-code looks like, etc. It is an experiment in progress: I have rediscovered the joys of printing & the logistics moving large amounts of paper again. The printer decided half way through one run to start folding papers slightly at the corner, which screwed up stapling. I suppose this is why we are paid the big bucks.
crazygringo 8mo ago
> TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option. This made sense a couple of decades ago. Today, it's just bizarre to be spending $150 on a phonebook-sized packet of reading materials. So much paper and toner. This is what iPads and Kindles are for.
- nine_k 8mo ago
  No, the cost of the paper, toner, and binding is the cost of providing of a provably distraction-free environment. To make it more palpable for an IT worker: "It's just bizarre to give a developer a room with a door, so much sheetrock and wood! Working with computers is what open-plan offices are for."
  - crazygringo 8mo ago
    What kind of distraction are you getting on your Kindle...? Also, the university isn't covering the cost here. The students are. And buying the Kindle would be cheaper than the printing cost of the packet itself. So I stand by my point. If you don't want distraction, get Kindles. And even iPads are pretty good. They tend to sit flat so you're not "hiding" your screen the way you can with a laptop or phone, and people often aren't using messaging or social apps on them so there are no incoming distractions.
    - dgellow 8mo ago
      Compared to paper any software is a distraction > people often aren't using messaging or social apps on [ipad] That’s so obviously wrong
      - crazygringo 8mo ago
        > Compared to paper any software is a distraction No it's not? Why on earth would it be...? > That’s so obviously wrong ...but is it obviously wrong? People tend to use these on their phones. They don't have a lot of reason to set them up on their iPad. Until very recently, Instagram didn't even have an iPad app, that's how low the demand is.
azinman2 8mo ago
Computers have not advanced education — the data shows the opposite. I think we should just go back to physical books (which can be used!), and pen and paper for notes and assignments.
- randcraw 8mo ago
  At the very least, every school, subject, and teacher should be obliged to conduct experiments during the school year -- A/B/C trials in which various forms of note taking are explored: handwritten, computer-typed, and neither. Then see how it affects the kids' learning speed and retention of the various subjects. Then they need to compare notes with the other teachers to learn what they did differently and what did or didn't work for them. Ideally they'd also assess how this worked for different types of students, those with good vs bad reading skills, with good vs bad grades, esp those who are underperforming their potential.
  - ChadNauseam 8mo ago
    The idea that we would A/B test handwritten vs typed to see what would improve retention is focusing on the wrong thing. It's like A/B testing mayo or no mayo on your big mac to see which version is a healthier meal. No part of the school system is optimized for retention. It's common for students to take a biology class in 9th grade and then never study biology again for the rest of their lives. Everyone knows they won't remember any biology by the time they graduate, and no one cares. We know what increases retention, it's active recall and (spaced) repetition. These are basic principles of cognitive science have been empirically proven many times. Please try to implement that before demanding that teachers do A/B tests over what font to write the homework assignments in.
- ChadNauseam 8mo ago
  I disagree. I've been using Math Academy for learning math. It's far superior to any way that I've learned in class.
dlcarrier 8mo ago
In pretty much any school system, just complain that the printout is not compatible with your text-to-speech engine, and the instructor will be required to provide an electronic version, no questions asked.
- berhunter420 8mo ago
  Or you can fold your tuition dollars into cranes and burn them as performance art.
  - jfengel 8mo ago
    Students have never understood the value of school work. It's a hard thing to understand. None of the assignments are asked because the teacher wants to know the answer. They already know. So it all closely resembles busy work. AI is perfectly designed to do busy work. Students have always looked for ways to minimize the work load, and often the response has been to increase the load. In some cases it has effectively become a way to tech you to get away with cheating (a lesson this even has some real-world utility). Keeping students from wasting their tuition is an age-old, Sisyphean task for parents. School is wasted on the young. Unfortunately youth is also when your brain is most receptive to it.
  - dlcarrier 8mo ago
    Isn't that the core of how universities operate, in the first place? Sure, you could get an education for cheap from a community college, or free from various online sources, or for the best education possible, get paid to learn on the job. If you attend a university though, you're getting prestige by showing how much of your money, or someone else's money, you can burn through. It's not like anyone's taking undergraduate classes at Harvard or Stanford because the teaching assistants actually instructing are going to provide above-average instruction. They aren't even concerned with tenured professors teaching performance; they put publishing metrics first.
- gamblor956 8mo ago
  That's not true in any U.S. school system unless the student has a disability which requires the use of a text-to-speech engine.The ADA does allow schools to require the student to prove the disability through medical documentation, which is why the fake-disability doctor market exists.
raincole 8mo ago
If textbooks weren't so expensive I'd be more cheering on them. > TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option. Lol $150 for reading packets? Not even textbooks? Seriously the whole system can fuck off.
ageitgey 8mo ago
> “Over the years I’ve found that when students read on paper they're more likely to read carefully, and less likely in a pinch to read on their phones or rely on chatbot summaries,” Shirkhani wrote to the News. “This improves the quality of class time by orders of magnitude.” This is the key part. I'm doing a part-time graduate degree at a major university right now, and it's fascinating to watch the week-to-week pressure AI is putting on the education establishment. When your job as a student is to read case studies and think about them, but Google Drive says "here's an automatic summary of the key points" before you even open the file, it takes a very determined student to ignore that and actually read the material. And if no one reads the original material, the class discussion is a complete waste of time, with everyone bringing up the same trite points, and the whole exercise becomes a facade. Schools are struggling to figure out how to let students use AI tools to be more productive while still learning how to think. The students (especially undergrads) are incredibly good at doing as little work as possible. And until you get to the end-of-PhD level, there's basically nothing you encounter in your learning journey that ChatGPT can't perfectly summarize and analyze in 1 second, removing the requirement for you to do anything. This isn't even about AI being "good" or "bad". We still teach children how to add numbers before we give them calculators because it's a useful skill. But now these AI thinking-calculators are injecting themselves into every text box and screen, making them impossible to avoid. If the answer pops up in the sidebar before you even ask the question, what kind of masochist is going to bother learning how to read and think?
- thomasfortes 8mo ago
  Last weekend I was arguing with a friend that physical guitar pedals are better for creativity and exploration of the musical space than modelers even though modelers have way more resources for a fraction of the cost, the physical aspect of knobs and cables and everything else leads to something that's way more interactive and prone to "happy mistakes" than any digital interface can offer. In my first year of college my calculus teacher said something that stuck with me "you learn calculus getting cramps on your wrists", yeah, AI can help remember things and accelerate learning, but if you don't put the work to understand things you'll always be behind people that know at least with a bird eye view what's happening.
arnavpraneet 8mo ago
I might be wrong but I fear this strategy might unfairly punish e-readers which imo offer the best of both worlds
- sodality2 8mo ago
  I've brought my kindle to even the most strict of technology-banned lectures (with punishments like dropping a letter grade after one violation, and failing you after two), and never have they given me a problem when asked. They realize the issue isn't the silicon or lithium, it's the distractions it enables. I'm sure I could connect to some LLM on it, it's just that no one ever will.
- PlatoIsADisease 8mo ago
  Its obvious they don't care. That said, I always thought exams should be the moment of truth. I had teachers that spoke broken english, but I'd do the homework and read the textbook in class. I learned many topics without the use of a teacher.
- mmahemoff 8mo ago
  I’ve tried many e-readers since early Kindle but I keep coming back to two fundamental problems with e-ink, both relevant to education. First, extremely cumbersome and error-prone to type compared to swipe-typing on a soft keyboard. Even highlighting a few sentences can be problematic when spanning across a page boundary. Second, navigation is also painful compared to a physical book. When reading non-fiction, it’s vital to be able to jump around quickly, backtrack, and cross-reference material. Amazon has done some good work on the UX for this, but nothing is as simple as flipping through a physical book. Android e-readers are better insofar as open to third-party software, but still have the same hardware shortcomings. My compromise has been to settle on medium-sized (~Kindle or iPad Mini size) tablets and treat them just as an e-reader. (Similar to the “kale phone” concept ie minimal software installed on it … no distractions.) They are much more responsive, hence fairly easy to navigate and type on.
sashank_1509 8mo ago
At some level, this is a problem of unmotivated students and college mostly being just for signaling as opposed to real education. If the sole purpose of college is to rank students, and funnel them to high prestige jobs that have no use for what they actually learn in college then what the students are doing is rational. If however the student is actually there to learn, he knows that using ChatGPT accomplishes nothing. In fact all this proves is that most students in most colleges are not there to learn. Which begs the question why are they even going to college? Maybe this institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies.
- rr808 8mo ago
  It starts at admissions where learning is not a rewarded activity. You should be making impact in the community, doing some performative task that isn't useful for anything except making you different to your class mates who naively read the books and do the classwork honestly.
  - Spivak 8mo ago
    I don't think it's the admissions office's fault. This is one of the lessons I will have to impose on my future kids once they get to high school age. Being, like, really really good at school is cool and all but if what you have is a 4.25 GPA, fifteen AP classes all with 5's, a 35 on your ACT, a school sport and chess club or whatever I'm very smart extra curricular then you're competing with the other thousand identical applications. You're likely to stand out and be interesting with literally anything else, even if it makes you look less good at school. The world you occupy at that age makes it seem like being good at school is the formula to looking impressive meanwhile once you leave the bubble and enter adult world you realize that making an angsty punk band with your friends and playing at shitty dives sounds way more impressive than got an A in chemistry.
- testfoobar 8mo ago
  For elite colleges, it is a pithy aphorism that the hardest part is getting in.
2b3a51 8mo ago
Quote from OA "TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option." And later in OA it states that the cost to a student is $0.12 per double sided sheet of printing. In all of my teaching career here in the UK, the provision of handouts has been a central cost. Latterly I'd send a pdf file with instructions and the resulting 200+ packs of 180 sides would be delivered on a trolley printed, stapled with covers. The cost was rounding error compared to the cost of providing an hour of teaching in a classroom (wage costs, support staff costs, building costs including amortisation &c). How is this happening?
- lokar 8mo ago
  Two things Public universities are always underfunded. Universities can get more money by putting the cost on the students and then they cover it with gov grants and loans.
  - eesmith 8mo ago
    Except, Yale is a private university, not public, while very few universities in the UK are private (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Private_universities_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Private_universities_... lists 8 and https://studying-in-uk.org/private-universities-in-uk/ https://studying-in-uk.org/private-universities-in-uk/ lists 11) so 2b3a51 almost certainly means public college teaching experience in the UK.
    - graemep 8mo ago
      your first link implies the definitions of "private" are different.
      - eesmith 8mo ago
        Do you think the statement 'Public universities are always underfunded' is relevant when asking how it is that Yale, a private university in the US, requires fees for photocopies of class materials, while in UK universities that appears uncommon? Yale is private. That comment is therefore not relevant to Yale. Either the UK experience is with private schools, in which case the statement is irrelevant, or it is with public schools, in which case the statement is either wrong or irrelevant.
edge17 8mo ago
This is a bit off topic, but why are used books so expensive on abebooks, thriftbooks, amazon so expensive compared to booksales, etc? I recall a time when a lot of these online stores were selling them for a few cents (granted, it was a long time ago and it was still called zShops on Amazon).
- rr808 8mo ago
  Do you mean a few cents plus $5 shipping? I think they still exist but often results are ranked by total cost now which is clearer.
- subhobroto 8mo ago
  > This is a bit off topic, but why are used books so expensive on abebooks, thriftbooks, amazon so expensive compared to booksales, etc? A mix of enforcement, laws and good old market capture. 20 years ago I could bring a suitcase full of brand new books - fiction or not, from India, no questions asked. These are functionally the same as those that cost 50x more in the U.S. - just that they are black and white, paperback and use cheaper recycled paper that will yellow in 20 years and become brittle in 30. I cannot bring them with me anymore. The books clearly say they are not for export especially in the U.S., the print for this uses some kind of ink that shows up on XRays clearly and TSA enforces it. Similarly, used books in the U.S. are repurchased by bookstores to be sold at a profit. From what I see students doing - they sell or exchange books over FB Marketplace or school lists or in person.
  - edge17 8mo ago
    yea I used a lot of low price editions in college that i would order from ebay etc and would ship from india. Wow i didnt know about the ink x-ray stuff, thats pretty interesting. what i was referring to though was generic american bestsellers, nothing black/gray market. used books feel very expensive to buy online. my guess is market capture though
  - ninalanyon 8mo ago
    Do you mean that if I enter the US with an Indian version of a textbook that it will be confiscated by customs? That's outrageous.
subhobroto 8mo ago
I have been thinking about this and it seems like it's an asset that students want to do as little work as possible to get course credits. They also love playing games of various sorts. So instead of killing trees, printing pages of materials out and having students pay substantial sums to the printing press so we can inject distance between students reading the material and ChatGPT, why not turn it around completely? 1. Instead of putting up all sorts of barriers between students and ChatGPT, have students explicitly use ChatGPT to complete the homework 2. Then compare the diversity in the ChatGPT output 3. If the ChatGPT output is extremely similar, then the game is to critique that ChatGPT output, find out gaps in ChatGPT's work, insights it missed and what it could have done better 4.If the ChatGPT output is diverse, how do we figure out which is better? What caused the diversity? Are all the outputs accurate or are there errors in some? Similarly, when it comes to coding, instead of worrying that ChatGPT can zero shot quicksort and memcpy perfectly, why not game it: 1. Write some test cases that could make that specific implementation of `quicksort` or `memcpy` fail 2. Could we design the input data such that quicksort hits its worst case runtime? 3. Is there an algorithm that would sort faster than quicksort for that specific input? 4. Could there be architectures where the assumptions that make quicksort "quick", fail to hold true? Instead, something simpler and worse on paper like a "cache aware sort" actually work faster in practice than quicksort? I have multiple paragraphs more of thought on this topic but will leave it at this for now to calibrate if my thoughts are in the minority
6stringmerc 8mo ago
My thesis paper about a course for Freshman Composition Writing to stress fundamentals by way of using quill, pencil, pen, and finally a typewriter, was written 20 YEARS AGO in response to Spell Check and Auto Predict at the time...2006... This isn't my article nor do I know this Educator but I like her approach and actions taken: https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5631779/ai-schools-teachers-students https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5631779/ai-schools-teac...
jrm4 8mo ago
College instructor here. One thing I'm seeing here that's kind of funny is how badly so many of you are misunderstanding the value of "friction." You see a policy, and your clever brains come up with a way to get around it, "proving" that the new methodology is not perfect and therefore not valuable. So wrong. Come on people, think about it -- to an extent ALL WE DO is "friction." Any shift towards difficulty can be gained, but also nearly all of the time it provides a valuable differentiator in terms of motivation, etc.
hilbert42 8mo ago
""When you read a book or a printed course packet, you turn real pages instead of scrolling, so you have a different, more direct, and (I think) more focused relationship with the words,” Fadiman wrote." I concur completely with Fadiman's comment as that has been my experience despite that I have been using computer screens and computers for many decades and that I am totally at ease with them for reading and composing documentation. Books and printed materials have physical presence and tactility about them that are missing from display screens. It is hard to explain but handling the physical object, pointing to paragraphs on printed pages, underlining text with a pencil and sticking postit notes into page margins adds an ergonomic factor that is more conducive to learning and understanding than when one interacts with screens (including those where one can write directly to the screen with a stylus). I have no doubt about this, as I've noticed over the years if I write down what I'm thinking with my hand onto paper I am more likely to understand and remember it better than when I'm typing it. It's as if typing doesn't provide as tighter coupling with my brain as does writing by hand. There is something about handwriting and the motional feedback from my fingers that makes me have a closer and more intimate relationship with the text. That's not to say I don't use screens—I do but generally to write summaries after I've first worked out ideas on paper (this is especially relevant when mathematics is involved—I'm more cognitively involved when using pencil and paper).
cbfrench 8mo ago
Over a decade ago now, I was teaching college English as a grad student, and my colleagues and I were always trying to come up with ways to keep kids from texting and/or being online in class. My strategy was to print out copies of an unassigned shorter poem by an author covered in lecture. Then I’d hand it out at the beginning of class, and we’d spend the whole time walking through a close reading of that poem. It kept students engaged, since it was a collaborative process of building up an interpretation on the basis of observation, and anyone is capable of noticing patterns and features that can be fed into an interpretation. They all had something to contribute, and they’d help me to notice things I’d never registered before. It was great fun, honestly. (At least for me, but also, I think, for some of them.) I’d also like to think it helped in some small way to cultivate practices of attention, at least for a couple of hours a week. Unfortunately, you can’t perform the same exercise with a longer work that necessitates reading beforehand, but you can at least break out sections for the same purpose.
- ninalanyon 8mo ago
  > my colleagues and I were always trying to come up with ways to keep kids from texting and/or being online in class. That's just weird. Why would you bother. These are young adults paying to be taught. But teaching is only half of it, learning is the other. If they can't be bothered to learn the surely they will just fail the course and you can kick them out to make way for someone who actually wants to learn. Perhaps it's just a difference between UK (and other European unis) and US unis. When I studied applied physics in the UK (half a century ago) attendance at lectures was not even compulsory. You were expected to behave like a student, that is one who studies, and if you wanted help all you had to do was ask. Those who didn't work simply failed the end of year exams and the finals.
  - cbfrench 8mo ago
    The tech ban was not just about trying to create better individual learning outcomes or whatever; it was also a matter of respect to one’s colleagues in the class. I was teaching a discussion section of a larger class, so there was a minimal expectation that one would be attentive to what one’s classmates were saying. Allowing students to retreat into their screens effectively undermines the whole project and is, quite frankly, extremely rude to everyone else. That doesn’t strike me as overly “weird.” If someone was entirely unwilling to be present and engaged or couldn’t go fifty minutes without access to a screen, that student could just be absent from class (with the consequent negative grade impacts).
kkfx 8mo ago
Nothing strange nor new: the average teacher is reactionary even at top universities, generally incapable of evolving, much like the stereotypical average vegetable seller. We continue to teach children (at least in the EU) to write by hand, to do calculations manually throughout their entire schooling, when in real life, aside from the occasional scrap note, all writing is done on computers and calculations are done by machine as well. And, of course, no one teaches these latter skills. The result on a large scale is that we have an increasingly incompetent population on average, with teaching staff competing to see who can revert the most to the past and refusing to see that the more they do this, the worse the incompetent graduates they produce. The computer, desktop, FLOSS, is the quintessential epistemological tool of the present, just as paper was in the past. The world changes, and those who fall behind are selected out by history; come to terms with that. Not only, those who lag behind ensure that few push forward an evolution for their own interest, which typically conflicts with that of the majority.
- subhobroto 8mo ago
  > Nothing strange nor new: the average teacher is reactionary even at top universities, generally incapable of evolving It feels to me like teaching has always been bandwidth constrained and providing 1:1 feedback to students have always been a bottleneck. I believe that AI agents are the true gateway to fixing that limitation and education should be embracing AI agents to increase bandwidth of 1:1 teacher student interaction. I worry that everytime I talk to a teacher about how they're adapting to AI, it's almost as if they are trying to figure out how they can continue to use the same teaching techniques that they had seen their teachers practice decades ago. Printed books are expensive and they should be. We already have paper equivalents that allow highlighting, rewriting, annotating, sharing notes - recyclable materials in all ways superior to paper that can be reused by multiple students - these are things we should be embracing instead of going back to one time use printed materials that are heavy to carry around, take up space in a room and will need to be disposed of soon. If current technology is creating an issue for teachers - teachers need to pivot, not block current technology. Society typically cares about work getting done and not much about how it got done - for some reason, teachers are so deep into the weeds of the "how", that they seem to forget that if the way to mend roads since 1926 have been to learn how to measure out, mix and lay asphalt patches by hand, in 2026 when there are robots that do that perfectly everytime, they should be teaching humans to complement those robots or do something else entirely. > We continue to teach children (at least in the EU) to write by hand, to do calculations manually throughout their entire schooling, when in real life, aside from the occasional scrap note, all writing is done on computers and calculations are done by machine as well. And, of course, no one teaches these latter skills Is your intuition that the EU will continue down it's path of technical irrevelance? If so, what are the top 5 reasons this is happening?
globalnode 8mo ago
It only struck me recently how geared universities are towards careers and many of the requirements are set by industry, not necessarily by whats good for the student. If you want to enjoy learning for its own sake or enjoy a particular subject I'd suggest ditching uni and going for self learning. Ofc if you need a job you probably need certification, but not if you're learning for fun. Also if you want to make sure you're well rounded, browse uni websites and have a look at the syllabus / reading list and filter out any obvious industry requirements if they don't suit you.
bahmboo 8mo ago
Seems like an easy job for cheap e-ink tablets. Even with network access there's not much temptation to stray from reading and potentially scribing.
- rajnathani 8mo ago
  This exactly.
Zababa 8mo ago
>Last semester, professor Pamela Newton, who also teaches the course, allowed students to bring readings either on tablets or in printed form. While laptops felt like a “wall” in class, Newton said, students could use iPads to annotate readings and lie them flat on the table during discussions. However, Newton said she felt “paranoid” that students could be texting during class. >This semester, Newton has removed the option to bring iPads to class, except for accessibility needs, as a part of the general movement in the “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay” seminars to “swim against the tide of AI use,” reduce “the infiltration of tech,” and “go back to pen and paper,” she said. Is this about teaching efficiency or managing the teacher's feelings? If "the infiltration of tech" allowed for better learning, would this teacher even be open to it?
lunias 8mo ago
I don't think that the format or method of information consumption matters at all when compared to the ability of the individual to retrieve and expound the information consumed. Printing out reading materials, while well-intentioned, seems to miss the point.
joshstrange 8mo ago
If they provided the packets I could sort of understand but no, they are just shifting the cost to the students to the tune of $20-$150/packet, insane. And the line > Regarding the printing cost, Newton and Shirkhani both emphasized that Yale has programs to help students who need financial assistance paying for printing. Does not solve the issue. Not every school has programs like that, they aren't always easy to take advantage of, and often have extra hoops to jump through. It's really hard to not see this through the same lense as the scam of textbooks and other required (paid) readings for classes. Even more so when the professor wrote the book and/or gets a kickback. See also: new editions every year that are required so you can buy used or an online key that is one-time-use and costs as much as the book.
scrubs 8mo ago
Love it. Practical advice that helps everyone. All us tech guys know Jobs limited his kids' time on iphones (allegedly). Never let tech screw up the fundamentals.

148 points by cmsefton 8mo ago

zkmon 8mo ago

>This academic year, some English professors have increased their preference for physical copies of readings, citing concerns related to artificial intelligence. I didn't get it. How can printing avoid AI? And more importantly is this AI-resistance sustainable?

secabeen 8mo ago
You can't easily copy and paste from a printout into AI. Sure, you can track down the reading yourself online, and then copy and paste in, but not during class, and not without some effort.
- xigoi 8mo ago
  LLM services have pretty much flawless OCR for printed text.
- stephenbez 8mo ago
  It’s easy to take a picture of a printout and then ask AI about it. Not that hard even when it’s many pages.
  - layer8 8mo ago
    It takes more initial effort than just starting reading, or even just skim-reading the material.
Flavius 8mo ago
This approach is just cheap theater. It doesn't actually stop AI, it just adds a step to the process. Any student can snap a photo, OCR the text and feed it into an LLM in seconds. All this policy accomplishes is wasting paper and forcing students to engage in digital hoop-jumping.
- ulrashida 8mo ago
  Students tend to be fairly lazy, so this may simply mean another x% of the class reads the material rather than scanning in the 60 pages of reading for the assignment.
- mbreese 8mo ago
  It’s not theater. It introduces friction into the process. And when there is friction in both choices (read the paper, or take a photo and upload the picture), you’ll get more people reading the physical paper copy. If students want to jump through hoops, they will, but it will require an active choice. At this point auto AI summaries are so prevalent that it is the passive default. By shifting it to require an active choice, you’ve make it more likely for students to choose to do the work.
  - Flavius 8mo ago
    That friction is trivial. You are comparing the effort of snapping a photo against the effort of actually reading and analyzing a text. If anyone chooses to read the paper, it's because they actually want to read it, not because using AI was too much hassle.
    - randcraw 8mo ago
      You can certainly make it harder to cheat. AIs will inevitably generate summaries that are very similarly written and formatted -- content, context, and sequence -- making it easy for a prof (and their AI) to detect the presence of AI use, especially if students are also quizzed to validate that they have knowledge of their own summary. Alternately, the prof can require that students write out notes, in longhand, as they read, and require that a photocopy of those notes be submitted, along with a handwritten outline / rough draft, to validate the essays that follow. I think it's inevitable that "show your work" soon will become the mantra of not just the math, hard science, and engineering courses.
  - blell 8mo ago
    Any AI app worth its salt allows you to upload a photo of something and it processes it flawlessly in the same amount of time. This is absolutely worthless teather.
coffeefirst 8mo ago
The students were reading AI summaries rather than the original text. Does this literally work? It adds slightly more friction, but you can still ask the robot to summarize pretty much anything that would appear on the syllabus. What it likely does it set expectations. This doesn't strike me as being anti-AI or "resistance" at all. But if you don't train your own brain to read and make thoughts, you won't have one.
- epolanski 8mo ago
  I was reading summaries online 25 years ago as well. Hell, in Italy we used to have an editor called Bignami make summaries of every school topic. https://www.bignami.com/ https://www.bignami.com/ In any case, I don't know what to think about all of this. School is for learning, if you skip the hard part you not gonna learn, your lost.
  - skeptic_ai 8mo ago
    Instead of learning the things that can be done by ai, learn how to use the ai as that’s the only edge you got left.
    - subhobroto 8mo ago
      I honestly think (you and) I'm missing something! What you say is obvious to me and provably correct. I just can't argue with your statement no matter what and have been making comments in alignment with yours, just with way, way more text. We are both being downvoted - I can't even see your post (it's so grayed out) and I've started to get those "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." myself, that is indicative of post throttling that kicks in on heavy downvotes. It took me 5 retries, waiting ~40 minutes each time and failing between tries to get this to finally post but I waited because this comment was important for me to put out there. I'm not going to stick around to keep waiting, retrying and posting again as I have other things to do in my life, so I will just abandon commenting altogether. "AI" is changing society fundamentally forever and education needs to change fundamentally with it. I am personally betting that humans in the future, outside extreme niches, are generalists and are augmented by specialist agents. I have a hypothesis that future software engineers will be a human generalist (the person) augmented by a large diverse group of specialist agents (the tools). The human generalist will keep their specialist agents fine-tuned, trained and upto date so that they generate implementations precisely as the human generalist specifies them. This won't be limited to software engineering but looking at how well this thought process is polling here on HN, I'll pause :). Are you and I missing something big or is the bigger crowd in denial?
mold_aid 8mo ago
>How can printing avoid AI? Every online service in the university has an AI summarization tool in it. This includes library services. >And more importantly is this AI-resistance sustainable? It can get in line. Engl academics have been talking about sustainability for decades. Nobody cared before, professors aren't going to care now.

everybodyknows 8mo ago

> This semester, she is requiring all students to have printed options. What could it mean for an "option" to be "required"?

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

bko 8mo ago

Who is behind this over digitization of primary school? My understanding is that in the Us pretty much all homework and tests are done on computers or iPads. This obv isn’t a push by parents because I can’t imagine parents I know want their kids in front of a screen all day. At best they’re indifferent. My only guess is the teachers unions that don’t want teachers grading and creating lesson plans and all the other work they used to do. And since this trend kid scores or performance has not gotten better, so what gives? Can anyone comment if it’s as bad as this and what’s behind it.

el_benhameen 8mo ago
My kids are in elementary school in the SF area (although pretty far in the ‘burbs) and this is not my experience. The older one has a chromebook and uses it for research and production of larger written projects and presents—the kind of things you’d expect. The younger one doesn’t have any school-supplied device yet. Both kids have math exercises, language worksheets, short writing exercises, etc., all done on paper. This is the majority of homework. I’m fine with this system. I wish they’d spend a little more time teaching computer basics (I did a lot of touch typing exercises in the 90’s; my older one doesn’t seem to have those kind of lessons). But in general, there’s not too much homework, there’s good emphasis on reading, and I appreciate that the older one is learning how to plan, research, and create projects using the tool he’ll use to do so in future schooling.
michaelt 8mo ago
A few decades ago: * People needed to be taught digital skills that were in growing demand in the workplace. * The kids researching things online and word-processing their homework were doing well in class (because only upper-middle-class types could afford home PCs) * Some trials of digital learning produced good results. Teaching by the world's greatest teachers, exactly the pace every student needs, with continuous feedback and infinite patience. * Blocking distractions? How hard can that be?
- nine_k 8mo ago
  Reading with AI summaries jumping into your eyes is like writing in a word processor that completes sentences and paragraphs for you. Writing with a word processor that just helps you type, format, and check spelling is great. Blocking distractions on a general-purpose computer (like a phone or a tablet) is as hard as handing locked-down devices set up for the purpose, and banning personal devices.

Mathnerd314 8mo ago

If you are flipping through the reading to find a quote, then printed readings are hard to beat, unless you can search for a word with digital search. But speed reading RSVP presentation beats any kind of print reading by a mile, if you are aiming for comprehension. So, it is hard to say where the technology is going. Nobody has put in the work to really make reading on an iPad as smooth and fluid as print, in terms of rapid page flipping. But the potential is there. It is kind of laughable how the salesman will be saying, oh it has a fast processor, and then you open up a PDF and scroll a few pages fast and they start being blank instead of actually having text.

anilakar 8mo ago

At 150 eurobucks apiece, printed freshman coursebooks were prohibitively expensive in uni. We just pirated everything as a consequence.

Flavius 8mo ago
That's the whole point. They don't care about students or education, they care about wasting resources and making a lot of money in the process.
- mistrial9 8mo ago
  some do and some don't. the "outrage" button is appropriate for the first part (don't care about students; waste resources to increase profits), but destructive for the second (we do care about students; we use resources in the classroom). It is hard to discuss this important topic when things go to "yelling" immediately? > They don't care about students or education, they care about wasting resources and making a lot of money in the process.
Symbiote 8mo ago
At my university in actual Europe, many copies of the required textbooks were available in the library. Printing was free.

jmclnx 8mo ago

While I fully agree with this, this quote bothers me: >Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option Does a student need to print out multiple TYCO Packets ? If so, only the very rich could afford this. I think educations should go back to printed books and submitting you work to the Prof. on paper. But submitting printed pages back to the Prof. for homework will avoid the school saying "Submit only Word Documents". That way a student can use the method they prefer, avoiding buying expensive software. One can then use just a simple free text editor if they want. Or even a typewriter :)

recursivedoubts 8mo ago

I have mentioned this in a few comments: for my CS classes I have gone from a historical 60-80% projects / 40-20% quizzes grade split, to a 50/50 split, and have moved my quizzes from being online to being in-person, pen-on-paper with one sheet of hand-written notes Rather than banning AI, I'm showing students how to use it effectively as a personalized TA. I'm giving them this AGENTS.md file: https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac And showing them how to use AI to summarize the slides into a quiz review sheet, generate example questions with answer walk throughs, etc. Of course I can't ensure they aren't just having AI do the projects, but I tell them that if they do that they are cheating themselves: the projects are designed to draw them into the art of programming and give them decent, real-world coding experience that they will need, even if they end up working at a higher level in the future. AI can be a very effective tool for education if used properly. I have used it to create a ton of extremely useful visualizations (e.g. how twos complement works) that I wouldn't have otherwise. But it is obviously extremely dangerous as well. "It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good."

buckle8017 8mo ago
hopefully you've also modified the quizzes to be handwriting compatible. I once got "implement a BCD decoder" with about a 1"x4" space to do it.
- recursivedoubts 8mo ago
  We just had our first set of in person quizzes and I gave them one question per page, with lots of space for answers. I'm concerned about handwriting, which is a lost skill, and how hard that will be on the TAs who are grading the exams. I have stressed to students that they should write larger, slower and more carefully than normal. I have also given them examples of good answers: terse and to the point, using bulleted lists effectively, what good pseudo-code looks like, etc. It is an experiment in progress: I have rediscovered the joys of printing & the logistics moving large amounts of paper again. The printer decided half way through one run to start folding papers slightly at the corner, which screwed up stapling. I suppose this is why we are paid the big bucks.

crazygringo 8mo ago

> TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option. This made sense a couple of decades ago. Today, it's just bizarre to be spending $150 on a phonebook-sized packet of reading materials. So much paper and toner. This is what iPads and Kindles are for.

nine_k 8mo ago
No, the cost of the paper, toner, and binding is the cost of providing of a provably distraction-free environment. To make it more palpable for an IT worker: "It's just bizarre to give a developer a room with a door, so much sheetrock and wood! Working with computers is what open-plan offices are for."
- crazygringo 8mo ago
  What kind of distraction are you getting on your Kindle...? Also, the university isn't covering the cost here. The students are. And buying the Kindle would be cheaper than the printing cost of the packet itself. So I stand by my point. If you don't want distraction, get Kindles. And even iPads are pretty good. They tend to sit flat so you're not "hiding" your screen the way you can with a laptop or phone, and people often aren't using messaging or social apps on them so there are no incoming distractions.
  - dgellow 8mo ago
    Compared to paper any software is a distraction > people often aren't using messaging or social apps on [ipad] That’s so obviously wrong
    - crazygringo 8mo ago
      > Compared to paper any software is a distraction No it's not? Why on earth would it be...? > That’s so obviously wrong ...but is it obviously wrong? People tend to use these on their phones. They don't have a lot of reason to set them up on their iPad. Until very recently, Instagram didn't even have an iPad app, that's how low the demand is.

azinman2 8mo ago

Computers have not advanced education — the data shows the opposite. I think we should just go back to physical books (which can be used!), and pen and paper for notes and assignments.

randcraw 8mo ago
At the very least, every school, subject, and teacher should be obliged to conduct experiments during the school year -- A/B/C trials in which various forms of note taking are explored: handwritten, computer-typed, and neither. Then see how it affects the kids' learning speed and retention of the various subjects. Then they need to compare notes with the other teachers to learn what they did differently and what did or didn't work for them. Ideally they'd also assess how this worked for different types of students, those with good vs bad reading skills, with good vs bad grades, esp those who are underperforming their potential.
- ChadNauseam 8mo ago
  The idea that we would A/B test handwritten vs typed to see what would improve retention is focusing on the wrong thing. It's like A/B testing mayo or no mayo on your big mac to see which version is a healthier meal. No part of the school system is optimized for retention. It's common for students to take a biology class in 9th grade and then never study biology again for the rest of their lives. Everyone knows they won't remember any biology by the time they graduate, and no one cares. We know what increases retention, it's active recall and (spaced) repetition. These are basic principles of cognitive science have been empirically proven many times. Please try to implement that before demanding that teachers do A/B tests over what font to write the homework assignments in.
ChadNauseam 8mo ago
I disagree. I've been using Math Academy for learning math. It's far superior to any way that I've learned in class.

dlcarrier 8mo ago

In pretty much any school system, just complain that the printout is not compatible with your text-to-speech engine, and the instructor will be required to provide an electronic version, no questions asked.

berhunter420 8mo ago
Or you can fold your tuition dollars into cranes and burn them as performance art.
- jfengel 8mo ago
  Students have never understood the value of school work. It's a hard thing to understand. None of the assignments are asked because the teacher wants to know the answer. They already know. So it all closely resembles busy work. AI is perfectly designed to do busy work. Students have always looked for ways to minimize the work load, and often the response has been to increase the load. In some cases it has effectively become a way to tech you to get away with cheating (a lesson this even has some real-world utility). Keeping students from wasting their tuition is an age-old, Sisyphean task for parents. School is wasted on the young. Unfortunately youth is also when your brain is most receptive to it.
- dlcarrier 8mo ago
  Isn't that the core of how universities operate, in the first place? Sure, you could get an education for cheap from a community college, or free from various online sources, or for the best education possible, get paid to learn on the job. If you attend a university though, you're getting prestige by showing how much of your money, or someone else's money, you can burn through. It's not like anyone's taking undergraduate classes at Harvard or Stanford because the teaching assistants actually instructing are going to provide above-average instruction. They aren't even concerned with tenured professors teaching performance; they put publishing metrics first.
gamblor956 8mo ago
That's not true in any U.S. school system unless the student has a disability which requires the use of a text-to-speech engine.The ADA does allow schools to require the student to prove the disability through medical documentation, which is why the fake-disability doctor market exists.

raincole 8mo ago

If textbooks weren't so expensive I'd be more cheering on them. > TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option. Lol $150 for reading packets? Not even textbooks? Seriously the whole system can fuck off.

ageitgey 8mo ago

> “Over the years I’ve found that when students read on paper they're more likely to read carefully, and less likely in a pinch to read on their phones or rely on chatbot summaries,” Shirkhani wrote to the News. “This improves the quality of class time by orders of magnitude.” This is the key part. I'm doing a part-time graduate degree at a major university right now, and it's fascinating to watch the week-to-week pressure AI is putting on the education establishment. When your job as a student is to read case studies and think about them, but Google Drive says "here's an automatic summary of the key points" before you even open the file, it takes a very determined student to ignore that and actually read the material. And if no one reads the original material, the class discussion is a complete waste of time, with everyone bringing up the same trite points, and the whole exercise becomes a facade. Schools are struggling to figure out how to let students use AI tools to be more productive while still learning how to think. The students (especially undergrads) are incredibly good at doing as little work as possible. And until you get to the end-of-PhD level, there's basically nothing you encounter in your learning journey that ChatGPT can't perfectly summarize and analyze in 1 second, removing the requirement for you to do anything. This isn't even about AI being "good" or "bad". We still teach children how to add numbers before we give them calculators because it's a useful skill. But now these AI thinking-calculators are injecting themselves into every text box and screen, making them impossible to avoid. If the answer pops up in the sidebar before you even ask the question, what kind of masochist is going to bother learning how to read and think?

thomasfortes 8mo ago
Last weekend I was arguing with a friend that physical guitar pedals are better for creativity and exploration of the musical space than modelers even though modelers have way more resources for a fraction of the cost, the physical aspect of knobs and cables and everything else leads to something that's way more interactive and prone to "happy mistakes" than any digital interface can offer. In my first year of college my calculus teacher said something that stuck with me "you learn calculus getting cramps on your wrists", yeah, AI can help remember things and accelerate learning, but if you don't put the work to understand things you'll always be behind people that know at least with a bird eye view what's happening.

arnavpraneet 8mo ago

I might be wrong but I fear this strategy might unfairly punish e-readers which imo offer the best of both worlds

sodality2 8mo ago
I've brought my kindle to even the most strict of technology-banned lectures (with punishments like dropping a letter grade after one violation, and failing you after two), and never have they given me a problem when asked. They realize the issue isn't the silicon or lithium, it's the distractions it enables. I'm sure I could connect to some LLM on it, it's just that no one ever will.
PlatoIsADisease 8mo ago
Its obvious they don't care. That said, I always thought exams should be the moment of truth. I had teachers that spoke broken english, but I'd do the homework and read the textbook in class. I learned many topics without the use of a teacher.
mmahemoff 8mo ago
I’ve tried many e-readers since early Kindle but I keep coming back to two fundamental problems with e-ink, both relevant to education. First, extremely cumbersome and error-prone to type compared to swipe-typing on a soft keyboard. Even highlighting a few sentences can be problematic when spanning across a page boundary. Second, navigation is also painful compared to a physical book. When reading non-fiction, it’s vital to be able to jump around quickly, backtrack, and cross-reference material. Amazon has done some good work on the UX for this, but nothing is as simple as flipping through a physical book. Android e-readers are better insofar as open to third-party software, but still have the same hardware shortcomings. My compromise has been to settle on medium-sized (~Kindle or iPad Mini size) tablets and treat them just as an e-reader. (Similar to the “kale phone” concept ie minimal software installed on it … no distractions.) They are much more responsive, hence fairly easy to navigate and type on.

sashank_1509 8mo ago

At some level, this is a problem of unmotivated students and college mostly being just for signaling as opposed to real education. If the sole purpose of college is to rank students, and funnel them to high prestige jobs that have no use for what they actually learn in college then what the students are doing is rational. If however the student is actually there to learn, he knows that using ChatGPT accomplishes nothing. In fact all this proves is that most students in most colleges are not there to learn. Which begs the question why are they even going to college? Maybe this institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies.

rr808 8mo ago
It starts at admissions where learning is not a rewarded activity. You should be making impact in the community, doing some performative task that isn't useful for anything except making you different to your class mates who naively read the books and do the classwork honestly.
- Spivak 8mo ago
  I don't think it's the admissions office's fault. This is one of the lessons I will have to impose on my future kids once they get to high school age. Being, like, really really good at school is cool and all but if what you have is a 4.25 GPA, fifteen AP classes all with 5's, a 35 on your ACT, a school sport and chess club or whatever I'm very smart extra curricular then you're competing with the other thousand identical applications. You're likely to stand out and be interesting with literally anything else, even if it makes you look less good at school. The world you occupy at that age makes it seem like being good at school is the formula to looking impressive meanwhile once you leave the bubble and enter adult world you realize that making an angsty punk band with your friends and playing at shitty dives sounds way more impressive than got an A in chemistry.
testfoobar 8mo ago
For elite colleges, it is a pithy aphorism that the hardest part is getting in.

2b3a51 8mo ago

Quote from OA "TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option." And later in OA it states that the cost to a student is $0.12 per double sided sheet of printing. In all of my teaching career here in the UK, the provision of handouts has been a central cost. Latterly I'd send a pdf file with instructions and the resulting 200+ packs of 180 sides would be delivered on a trolley printed, stapled with covers. The cost was rounding error compared to the cost of providing an hour of teaching in a classroom (wage costs, support staff costs, building costs including amortisation &c). How is this happening?

lokar 8mo ago
Two things Public universities are always underfunded. Universities can get more money by putting the cost on the students and then they cover it with gov grants and loans.
- eesmith 8mo ago
  Except, Yale is a private university, not public, while very few universities in the UK are private (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Private_universities_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Private_universities_... lists 8 and https://studying-in-uk.org/private-universities-in-uk/ https://studying-in-uk.org/private-universities-in-uk/ lists 11) so 2b3a51 almost certainly means public college teaching experience in the UK.
  - graemep 8mo ago
    your first link implies the definitions of "private" are different.
    - eesmith 8mo ago
      Do you think the statement 'Public universities are always underfunded' is relevant when asking how it is that Yale, a private university in the US, requires fees for photocopies of class materials, while in UK universities that appears uncommon? Yale is private. That comment is therefore not relevant to Yale. Either the UK experience is with private schools, in which case the statement is irrelevant, or it is with public schools, in which case the statement is either wrong or irrelevant.

edge17 8mo ago

This is a bit off topic, but why are used books so expensive on abebooks, thriftbooks, amazon so expensive compared to booksales, etc? I recall a time when a lot of these online stores were selling them for a few cents (granted, it was a long time ago and it was still called zShops on Amazon).

rr808 8mo ago
Do you mean a few cents plus $5 shipping? I think they still exist but often results are ranked by total cost now which is clearer.
subhobroto 8mo ago
> This is a bit off topic, but why are used books so expensive on abebooks, thriftbooks, amazon so expensive compared to booksales, etc? A mix of enforcement, laws and good old market capture. 20 years ago I could bring a suitcase full of brand new books - fiction or not, from India, no questions asked. These are functionally the same as those that cost 50x more in the U.S. - just that they are black and white, paperback and use cheaper recycled paper that will yellow in 20 years and become brittle in 30. I cannot bring them with me anymore. The books clearly say they are not for export especially in the U.S., the print for this uses some kind of ink that shows up on XRays clearly and TSA enforces it. Similarly, used books in the U.S. are repurchased by bookstores to be sold at a profit. From what I see students doing - they sell or exchange books over FB Marketplace or school lists or in person.
- edge17 8mo ago
  yea I used a lot of low price editions in college that i would order from ebay etc and would ship from india. Wow i didnt know about the ink x-ray stuff, thats pretty interesting. what i was referring to though was generic american bestsellers, nothing black/gray market. used books feel very expensive to buy online. my guess is market capture though
- ninalanyon 8mo ago
  Do you mean that if I enter the US with an Indian version of a textbook that it will be confiscated by customs? That's outrageous.

subhobroto 8mo ago

I have been thinking about this and it seems like it's an asset that students want to do as little work as possible to get course credits. They also love playing games of various sorts. So instead of killing trees, printing pages of materials out and having students pay substantial sums to the printing press so we can inject distance between students reading the material and ChatGPT, why not turn it around completely? 1. Instead of putting up all sorts of barriers between students and ChatGPT, have students explicitly use ChatGPT to complete the homework 2. Then compare the diversity in the ChatGPT output 3. If the ChatGPT output is extremely similar, then the game is to critique that ChatGPT output, find out gaps in ChatGPT's work, insights it missed and what it could have done better 4.If the ChatGPT output is diverse, how do we figure out which is better? What caused the diversity? Are all the outputs accurate or are there errors in some? Similarly, when it comes to coding, instead of worrying that ChatGPT can zero shot quicksort and memcpy perfectly, why not game it: 1. Write some test cases that could make that specific implementation of `quicksort` or `memcpy` fail 2. Could we design the input data such that quicksort hits its worst case runtime? 3. Is there an algorithm that would sort faster than quicksort for that specific input? 4. Could there be architectures where the assumptions that make quicksort "quick", fail to hold true? Instead, something simpler and worse on paper like a "cache aware sort" actually work faster in practice than quicksort? I have multiple paragraphs more of thought on this topic but will leave it at this for now to calibrate if my thoughts are in the minority

6stringmerc 8mo ago

My thesis paper about a course for Freshman Composition Writing to stress fundamentals by way of using quill, pencil, pen, and finally a typewriter, was written 20 YEARS AGO in response to Spell Check and Auto Predict at the time...2006... This isn't my article nor do I know this Educator but I like her approach and actions taken: https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5631779/ai-schools-teachers-students https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5631779/ai-schools-teac...

jrm4 8mo ago

College instructor here. One thing I'm seeing here that's kind of funny is how badly so many of you are misunderstanding the value of "friction." You see a policy, and your clever brains come up with a way to get around it, "proving" that the new methodology is not perfect and therefore not valuable. So wrong. Come on people, think about it -- to an extent ALL WE DO is "friction." Any shift towards difficulty can be gained, but also nearly all of the time it provides a valuable differentiator in terms of motivation, etc.

hilbert42 8mo ago

""When you read a book or a printed course packet, you turn real pages instead of scrolling, so you have a different, more direct, and (I think) more focused relationship with the words,” Fadiman wrote." I concur completely with Fadiman's comment as that has been my experience despite that I have been using computer screens and computers for many decades and that I am totally at ease with them for reading and composing documentation. Books and printed materials have physical presence and tactility about them that are missing from display screens. It is hard to explain but handling the physical object, pointing to paragraphs on printed pages, underlining text with a pencil and sticking postit notes into page margins adds an ergonomic factor that is more conducive to learning and understanding than when one interacts with screens (including those where one can write directly to the screen with a stylus). I have no doubt about this, as I've noticed over the years if I write down what I'm thinking with my hand onto paper I am more likely to understand and remember it better than when I'm typing it. It's as if typing doesn't provide as tighter coupling with my brain as does writing by hand. There is something about handwriting and the motional feedback from my fingers that makes me have a closer and more intimate relationship with the text. That's not to say I don't use screens—I do but generally to write summaries after I've first worked out ideas on paper (this is especially relevant when mathematics is involved—I'm more cognitively involved when using pencil and paper).

cbfrench 8mo ago

Over a decade ago now, I was teaching college English as a grad student, and my colleagues and I were always trying to come up with ways to keep kids from texting and/or being online in class. My strategy was to print out copies of an unassigned shorter poem by an author covered in lecture. Then I’d hand it out at the beginning of class, and we’d spend the whole time walking through a close reading of that poem. It kept students engaged, since it was a collaborative process of building up an interpretation on the basis of observation, and anyone is capable of noticing patterns and features that can be fed into an interpretation. They all had something to contribute, and they’d help me to notice things I’d never registered before. It was great fun, honestly. (At least for me, but also, I think, for some of them.) I’d also like to think it helped in some small way to cultivate practices of attention, at least for a couple of hours a week. Unfortunately, you can’t perform the same exercise with a longer work that necessitates reading beforehand, but you can at least break out sections for the same purpose.

ninalanyon 8mo ago
> my colleagues and I were always trying to come up with ways to keep kids from texting and/or being online in class. That's just weird. Why would you bother. These are young adults paying to be taught. But teaching is only half of it, learning is the other. If they can't be bothered to learn the surely they will just fail the course and you can kick them out to make way for someone who actually wants to learn. Perhaps it's just a difference between UK (and other European unis) and US unis. When I studied applied physics in the UK (half a century ago) attendance at lectures was not even compulsory. You were expected to behave like a student, that is one who studies, and if you wanted help all you had to do was ask. Those who didn't work simply failed the end of year exams and the finals.
- cbfrench 8mo ago
  The tech ban was not just about trying to create better individual learning outcomes or whatever; it was also a matter of respect to one’s colleagues in the class. I was teaching a discussion section of a larger class, so there was a minimal expectation that one would be attentive to what one’s classmates were saying. Allowing students to retreat into their screens effectively undermines the whole project and is, quite frankly, extremely rude to everyone else. That doesn’t strike me as overly “weird.” If someone was entirely unwilling to be present and engaged or couldn’t go fifty minutes without access to a screen, that student could just be absent from class (with the consequent negative grade impacts).

kkfx 8mo ago

Nothing strange nor new: the average teacher is reactionary even at top universities, generally incapable of evolving, much like the stereotypical average vegetable seller. We continue to teach children (at least in the EU) to write by hand, to do calculations manually throughout their entire schooling, when in real life, aside from the occasional scrap note, all writing is done on computers and calculations are done by machine as well. And, of course, no one teaches these latter skills. The result on a large scale is that we have an increasingly incompetent population on average, with teaching staff competing to see who can revert the most to the past and refusing to see that the more they do this, the worse the incompetent graduates they produce. The computer, desktop, FLOSS, is the quintessential epistemological tool of the present, just as paper was in the past. The world changes, and those who fall behind are selected out by history; come to terms with that. Not only, those who lag behind ensure that few push forward an evolution for their own interest, which typically conflicts with that of the majority.

subhobroto 8mo ago
> Nothing strange nor new: the average teacher is reactionary even at top universities, generally incapable of evolving It feels to me like teaching has always been bandwidth constrained and providing 1:1 feedback to students have always been a bottleneck. I believe that AI agents are the true gateway to fixing that limitation and education should be embracing AI agents to increase bandwidth of 1:1 teacher student interaction. I worry that everytime I talk to a teacher about how they're adapting to AI, it's almost as if they are trying to figure out how they can continue to use the same teaching techniques that they had seen their teachers practice decades ago. Printed books are expensive and they should be. We already have paper equivalents that allow highlighting, rewriting, annotating, sharing notes - recyclable materials in all ways superior to paper that can be reused by multiple students - these are things we should be embracing instead of going back to one time use printed materials that are heavy to carry around, take up space in a room and will need to be disposed of soon. If current technology is creating an issue for teachers - teachers need to pivot, not block current technology. Society typically cares about work getting done and not much about how it got done - for some reason, teachers are so deep into the weeds of the "how", that they seem to forget that if the way to mend roads since 1926 have been to learn how to measure out, mix and lay asphalt patches by hand, in 2026 when there are robots that do that perfectly everytime, they should be teaching humans to complement those robots or do something else entirely. > We continue to teach children (at least in the EU) to write by hand, to do calculations manually throughout their entire schooling, when in real life, aside from the occasional scrap note, all writing is done on computers and calculations are done by machine as well. And, of course, no one teaches these latter skills Is your intuition that the EU will continue down it's path of technical irrevelance? If so, what are the top 5 reasons this is happening?

globalnode 8mo ago

It only struck me recently how geared universities are towards careers and many of the requirements are set by industry, not necessarily by whats good for the student. If you want to enjoy learning for its own sake or enjoy a particular subject I'd suggest ditching uni and going for self learning. Ofc if you need a job you probably need certification, but not if you're learning for fun. Also if you want to make sure you're well rounded, browse uni websites and have a look at the syllabus / reading list and filter out any obvious industry requirements if they don't suit you.

bahmboo 8mo ago

Seems like an easy job for cheap e-ink tablets. Even with network access there's not much temptation to stray from reading and potentially scribing.

rajnathani 8mo ago
This exactly.

Zababa 8mo ago

>Last semester, professor Pamela Newton, who also teaches the course, allowed students to bring readings either on tablets or in printed form. While laptops felt like a “wall” in class, Newton said, students could use iPads to annotate readings and lie them flat on the table during discussions. However, Newton said she felt “paranoid” that students could be texting during class. >This semester, Newton has removed the option to bring iPads to class, except for accessibility needs, as a part of the general movement in the “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay” seminars to “swim against the tide of AI use,” reduce “the infiltration of tech,” and “go back to pen and paper,” she said. Is this about teaching efficiency or managing the teacher's feelings? If "the infiltration of tech" allowed for better learning, would this teacher even be open to it?

lunias 8mo ago

I don't think that the format or method of information consumption matters at all when compared to the ability of the individual to retrieve and expound the information consumed. Printing out reading materials, while well-intentioned, seems to miss the point.

joshstrange 8mo ago

If they provided the packets I could sort of understand but no, they are just shifting the cost to the students to the tune of $20-$150/packet, insane. And the line > Regarding the printing cost, Newton and Shirkhani both emphasized that Yale has programs to help students who need financial assistance paying for printing. Does not solve the issue. Not every school has programs like that, they aren't always easy to take advantage of, and often have extra hoops to jump through. It's really hard to not see this through the same lense as the scam of textbooks and other required (paid) readings for classes. Even more so when the professor wrote the book and/or gets a kickback. See also: new editions every year that are required so you can buy used or an online key that is one-time-use and costs as much as the book.

scrubs 8mo ago

Love it. Practical advice that helps everyone. All us tech guys know Jobs limited his kids' time on iphones (allegedly). Never let tech screw up the fundamentals.