Thread

1. glitchc · 1790263552 · focus · HN ↗

   A calculator, Youtube and iPad tried to replace teachers. They all failed but this time it's different.

   1. piltdownman · 1790265001 · focus · HN ↗

      A calculator is a tool that replaced the slide-rule or Abacus - no one contended the Abacus replaced teaching or teachers. Ditto an iPad which is effectively just a fancy calculator in this context.

      Similarly Youtube didn't replace teachers - it afforded remote learning and correspondence courses a new medium for transmission, recording, and playback of teaching.

      More to the point none of those were trained on a corpus containing the history of human pedagogy, were capable of inference, or of generating dynamic learning resources based on best-practice models with inherent self-correction and pedagogical reinforcement mechanisms.

   2. analog31 · 1790265135 · focus · HN ↗

      This time around, AI being able to do student homework means that AI is replacing students not teachers.

      1. layman51 · 1790288212 · focus · HN ↗

         This line of reasoning makes sense, but also I would say that a lot of technologists who are interested in education realize that they have to design something that wouldn't just give the answers away because that's not the point of learning. That seems like it can be pretty difficult to accomplish with LLMs because I bet if a student keeps pestering them, they will give up the answer or give a clue that makes the problem way too obvious.

         So usually the claims about replacing tutors like in this article come from a place where they usually give a caveat that maybe for highly motivated and ambitious students, they can figure out how to accelerate their learning with AI. But then that undermines the whole argument of transforming education if it wouldn't work with students who are average or below-average in their academic achievement.

   3. hinkley · 1790288584 · focus · HN ↗

      One thing that I've noticed as I've gotten older is that the introduction of calculus has slowly moved to younger and younger students. I suspect the tools are partly responsible for this. Less time on basic math and algebra.

      When I first started calculus, I was furious at being taught Newtonian Physics and some bits of chemistry without calculus. It's a stupid bunch of equations you have to learn, which Newton worked out from calculus. I'm glad people are getting it more often together now, but also just a bit jealous at the same time.

   4. maxlin · 1790305480 · focus · HN ↗

      You can't ask any of those direct questions in natural language. They are either rigid or uninteractive
   5. harry8 · 1790310862 · focus · HN ↗

      printing press tried it first.

      All failed and all useful. This time ...

   6. __rito__ · 1790331853 · focus · HN ↗

      > Youtube

      Not really. I learned far more from YouTube in subjects and topics that I was deeply interested in. School or college teachers didn't go that deep.

      Whether it's pc or not, there are there are bad teachers. I skipped those classes in college and learned from MIT OCW and random tutorials.

      So, YT did replace some teachers for me, and it continues to do so for many people.

      1. mitxela · 1790336705 · focus · HN ↗

         I didn't. People who think they're learning from YouTube are mostly not learning, just thinking they did. I watched someone design a common-base amplifier. Can I design a common-base amplifier now? No, I can't. I now have a slight awareness of what one does, but I couldn't design it.

         1. __rito__ · 1790442415 · focus · HN ↗

            That's an extremely weird thing to say?

            Not everyone uses YT the same way?

            I did most psets, assignments, etc.

            And at your standard of "learning", 95% of students don't learn anything anywhere. I also align with what you must think of as "true learning", but at that standard, most people are "mostly not learning" at regular schools and unis.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.