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Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

(research.google)
359 points FromTheArchives | 3 comments | 18 Sep 25 17:42 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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cjs_ac ◴[18 Sep 25 18:52 UTC] No.45293534[source]▶
I'm a former physics teacher, and while I'm impressed by the technology, I think this is a low efficacy innovation.

The real challenge in teaching Newton's laws of motion to teenagers is that they struggle to deal with the idea that friction isn't always there. When students enter the classroom, they arrive with an understanding of motion that they've intuited from watching things move all their lives, and that understanding is the theory of impetus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_impetus

An AI system that can interrogate individual students' understanding of the ideas presented and pose questions that challenge the theory of impetus would be really useful, because 'unteaching' impetus theory to thirty students at once is extremely difficult. However, what Google has presented here, with slides and multiple guess quizzes, is just a variation on the 'chalk and talk' theme.

The final straw that made me leave teaching was the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject. Discussions about 'the best pedagogy' never make any consideration of what is being taught; there's an implicit assumption that every idea and subject should be taught the same way. School systems have improved markedly since they were introduced in the nineteenth century, but I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement, and we need to start engaging with the detail of what's being taught to further improve.

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SJMG ◴[18 Sep 25 19:56 UTC] No.45294211[source]▶
> the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject.

Tell me this wasn't foreign languages? :face_palm:

Okay, I was totally with you until this,

> but I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement, and we need to start engaging with the detail of what's being taught to further improve

I think if you walk into the bottom 80% of classrooms you would not see, interleaving, spaced repetition, recall-over-reread, or topic shuffling to avoid interference.

There's a load of understanding we've gained in pedagogy and human learning that has not affected how we structure formal education yet.

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1. apsurd ◴[18 Sep 25 20:51 UTC] No.45294873[source]▶
You may not be wrong that tactics aren't sufficiently widespread, but that's the thing they're just tactics.

Spaced-repetition is a good example. It's so objectively better than other forms of memorization, but it's just one tactic for learning.

In this sense "teaching well requires a specific set of tools and tactics" is exactly how "a good teacher can teach anything" would make sense.

The problem is it doesn't make sense.

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2. SJMG ◴[18 Sep 25 22:34 UTC] No.45295850[source]▶
Yeah there seems to be some confusion. I agreed with the comment I replied to in the sense that teaching well requires specific domain knowledge and some specific pedagogy. Where I disagree is the assertion that the "tactics", to use your term, have been perfused through the system and there's nothing left to gain here.

He specifically says, "I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement"

So we all agree that subjects would benefit from specific interventions. The difference is he's going further and saying this is the only way forward; there are no general gains left to be had.

From the strength of the claim alone, this is hard to believe. Where do you stand on this?

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3. apsurd ◴[18 Sep 25 23:22 UTC] No.45296214[source]▶
Agree, it's unnecessarily limiting to say the well is entirely dried up re: improving status quo tools.

Charitable pov though, i'd say it's about leverage. Learning outcomes globally suffer steep steep cliffs and it's inevitably due to socioeconomic factors.

It's hard to argue that more chromebooks, spaced repetition, and catering to learning styles are the missing pieces johnny needs to get out of the hood.

as a person in tech i believed for a long time that if only we had better learning materials, people could orient and better self motivate around subjects. (learning needs to be hard. it's biology. brain takes notice and retains new and challenging stimuli. so "making learning easier" is a misnomer. the insight becomes how do we get people to self-motivate into hard things?)

I still think that's true, to your point, but all these takes are one of many many problems, and they aren't equal in leverage and i think that's where OP is coming from. there's outsized leverage in domain specific pedagogy.