Brian Eno has spent decades pushing the boundaries of music and technology, but when it comes to artificial intelligence, his biggest concern isn’t the tech — it’s who controls it.
It’s also pretty telling whenever I ask someone if they ever studied for a test and forgot all the material on the subject right after. That is contradictory to the whole purpose of education.
Yeah. I immediately think of gamified language learning apps here, cause it’s something I’ve been into in recent years. I get what I can out of them, but a lot of them have the same formula of basic answer correct/incorrect and either keep trying until they’re all correct to complete the lesson, or get high enough % correct to complete the lesson and move on. Whether you are actually comprehending it and integrating it as knowledge into an understanding of the particular language is a whole other question. And personally, I often feel like I’m understanding just enough to get by. I don’t feel like those apps tend to spend even close to long enough on any given concept and generally cram too much into one lesson. But also, the impersonal nature of it (not unlike the impersonal nature of large classes where the teacher doesn’t have much time for personal attention, but even worse than that, cause there’s zero personal attention) means there’s no way to “check in” and see how a person understands what they’re learning. And without that, you’re just sort of hoping that they’re getting something from it.
I remember some time back, someone I think in early childhood education talking about methods they used for understanding what the child was learning, so they could adjust if need be. I don’t remember the details now, but that kind of thing seems very important for education at all ages. And it’s something more organically present in tutoring from a human teacher, but doesn’t automatically come with the mass education setups.
Yeah. I immediately think of gamified language learning apps here, cause it’s something I’ve been into in recent years. I get what I can out of them, but a lot of them have the same formula of basic answer correct/incorrect and either keep trying until they’re all correct to complete the lesson, or get high enough % correct to complete the lesson and move on. Whether you are actually comprehending it and integrating it as knowledge into an understanding of the particular language is a whole other question. And personally, I often feel like I’m understanding just enough to get by. I don’t feel like those apps tend to spend even close to long enough on any given concept and generally cram too much into one lesson. But also, the impersonal nature of it (not unlike the impersonal nature of large classes where the teacher doesn’t have much time for personal attention, but even worse than that, cause there’s zero personal attention) means there’s no way to “check in” and see how a person understands what they’re learning. And without that, you’re just sort of hoping that they’re getting something from it.
I remember some time back, someone I think in early childhood education talking about methods they used for understanding what the child was learning, so they could adjust if need be. I don’t remember the details now, but that kind of thing seems very important for education at all ages. And it’s something more organically present in tutoring from a human teacher, but doesn’t automatically come with the mass education setups.