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AI 4 Ed
ai
education
There’s a gold rush underway right now in educational technology. Everyone is trying to cash in on generative AI to “democratize education”, to offer the ultimate “personalized, infinitely patient tutors”, and to “free educators to do the most important part of the job, interact with students”.
Crystals of Thought
gpt
thought
metaphor
ai
llm
future
When salt is mixed into water, the atomic components of salt, sodium and chlorine, dissolve. The ionic bond between the atoms is broken. The individual ions are freed to migrate around in a sea of water molecules, buffeted randomly in a never ending maelstrom.
GPT Is Not All You Need
gpt
ai
expertise
ethics
policy
One of the pillars of my life mission is that humans don’t have to earn the right to think critically. The sneering “You’re not an expert, so you’ll just have to let your betters tell you what to think” crowd has been a consistent frustration for decades. To me, one of the goals of education is freedom from the “tyranny of experts”, not to replace expertise, but to learn enough to be able to ask good questions to inform critical judgements.
Caves
ai
llm
gpt
future
The allegory of the cave from Plato presents a model of human interaction with the world as human imprisoned inside a cave, chained against a wall so all we can see are the shadows cast against the back wall. We spend our time observing those shadows, constructing theories that explain and help us understand their behavior, thinking that the shadows are “real”. Farther up toward the mouth of the cave, behind us where we can’t see, there is a light source and objects moving around, casting the shadows we see on the far wall. These objects are the “real” ones. Philosophers are supposed to get themselves unchained, leave the cave, and see the real world. Then they’re supposed to come back and try to free the rest of the imprisoned.
Sports Metaphors
ai
llm
gpt
future
sports
training
How many kids play youth sports every year? All of them? To a first approximation.
Unit Tutor
ct
units
physics
js
I’ve had this idea for years to make a unit-conversion calculator tool for use by students as they are learning dimensional analysis and unit conversion. I was imagining tile cards showing quantities and conversion factors that they could move around on the page, snapping them into a “picket fence” style grid, flipping them over to form reciprocals, automatically showing unit cancellation, and displaying the result of a unit-ful multiplication with the resulting units at the push of a button.
Labelling Demo
ct
labelling
students
education
In the high school class I teach about AI and the Future, I’ve been struggling to figure out which concepts we’ve covered the students really get and which they don’t. In my physics and math classes I have an easier time with this formative assessment, because at least some of what I want from them is the ability to perform certain skills. So I assess those skills and I have some (imperfect) sense of what I need to do next.
Four Circles
circle
geometry
trigonometry
algebra
problems
construction
safety
letting go
I showed the hole in the floor solution to the colleague who had told me about the problem yesterday– he was really pleased with the answer. The key insight for him was the solution to the simple harmonic oscillator differential equation, which, as a math person, he wasn’t familiar with. Another colleague saw the problem and had to get in on the act, so he proposed this problem, which I worked on for much of the day.
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