alt Hacker NewsThe other day I read this piece on how AI is already being used in schools, and it left quite an impression on me. https://archive.is/IW4B3
> The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is there, if she ever wants to talk to no one.
I'm not as anti-AI as the author of the piece, and I think that AI could have a role as a teaching aid. It's infinitely patient and it's able to adapt to a student's needs better than a textbook. Still, I hate the idea of students being encouraged to entirely offload their cognitive work onto an online service rather than think for themselves. The point of making fifth graders write essays, make art, design presentations, etc isn't the end product, it's that they now have the experience of having done the assignment. I would rather see students get taught how to think creatively, analyze a piece of writing, coherently explain an opinion, or draw a picture on their own, instead of giving this up in exchange for the nebulous skill of being "AI native" (aka being able to ask a computer to produce work for you).
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It’s such a lazy way of integrating AI as well, as if they asked AI to do it.
Why has no one tackled the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer? We know what AI-enhanced education should be, and we finally have the tech to build it.
> If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.”
To be fair, making slideshows sucks and I've never met anyone that actually enjoys the experience. I'm sure some people out there enjoy it, but anything that gets me out of PowerPoint faster is a win in my book.
It's the same thing as shoeing away Clippy, right? I don't know, I'm a little out of the loop. I do feel like there's some societal backlash to technology that's cascading down to the younger generations now that the negativity of social media is bearing fruit. Right?
> I'm not as anti-AI as the author of the piece,
It's not about being anti-AI, it's about being anti-distractions in education.
These companies don't want to raise "AI literacy", they want to get to their future users young.
We had chromebooks in schools before AI - or iPads, depending on the area. We're about to repeat that disaster.
dystopian :( i hope schools put more pressure on keeping that off their devices. or switch to neos.
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Yeah, I cannot imagine how anyone could learn anything well with access to AI. I am grateful that I finished my schooling before AI hit mainstream, because it is just too easy to turn your brain off and just AI a question before thinking about it. Great for getting things done, useless for learning. I guess hallucinations still keep us on our toes.