this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
233 points (95.7% liked)
Technology
57472 readers
3655 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
100%, and this is really my main point. Because it should be hard and tedious, a student who doesn't really want to learn - or doesn't have trust in their education - will bypass those tedious bits with the AI rather than going through those tedious, auxiliary skills that you're expected to pick up, and use the AI was a personal tutor - not a replacement for those skills.
So often students are concerned about getting a final grade, a final result, and think that was the point, thus, "If ChatGPT can just give me the answer what was the point", but no, there were a bunch of skills along the way that are part of the scaffolding and you've bypassed them through improper use of available tools. For example, in some of our programming classes we intentionally make you use worse tools early to provide a fundamental understanding of the evolution of the language ergonomics or to understand the underlying processes that power the more advanced, but easier to use, concepts. It helps you generalize later, so that you don't just learn how to solve this problem in this programming language, but you learn how to solve the problem in a messy way that translates to many languages before you learn the powerful tools of this language. As a student, you may get upset you're using something tedious or out of date, but as a mentor I know it's a beneficial step in your learning career.
Maybe it would help to teach students about learning early, and how learning works.
I'm 100% in agreement. I think that our school system fails deeply in expressing the point. What I liked about college was what even if it was tedious, etc my professors took the time to explain why I needed to do it this way first and what the dangerous of not having some of these skills were. Did I always believe them? No, but now that I'm out in the world working I definitely know they were always right and I'm glad I did it anyway even if I didn't always believe them.
Grade school is a different beast and I spent so much time frustrated and bored and not knowing what the point was. If it wasn't for the fact that I just really wanted to be a roboticist and there was only one school in my state I could so that at, I probably would have done the least effort thing all the time.
I did appreciate my calculus teacher who gave us word problems. It really helped me understand the point of calculus. Those words problems showed me there were scenarios where algebra was not gonna cut it. I wish more of my grade school classes explained the point of it all after it became less obvious from middle school onwards.
The core issue here is we don't know how to measure the skill of learning directly.