showyourwork's recent activity
-
Comment on Some thoughts on emergent technology and the future of education in ~tech
-
Comment on Some thoughts on emergent technology and the future of education in ~tech
showyourwork I've been part of this community for a while, however, I really didn't want to dox my main account. Been teaching internationally for some time, and over the past few months decided to write more...I've been part of this community for a while, however, I really didn't want to dox my main account.
Been teaching internationally for some time, and over the past few months decided to write more publicly. I have been trying to share my thoughts on whatever crosses my mind for tech and education on my website.
While some of my colleagues are my readers, I have been trying to get a wider diversity of perspectives on things I write about (building an audience can be hard). I find I gain a lot of value from perspectives and fields outside of education. For example, Stronger By Science led me to a paper titled Learning vs. Performance: An Integrative Review, which led me to reading much more current research on learning than has been presented in my field at any professional development conference.
When it comes to any emergent technology (and this piece definitely leans more to the generative AI side of things) I find that most schools are not being bold enough in how different society may look, nor are they bold enough in their usage. Most conversations simply stop at...how to use generative AI to write report card comments, change a word problem, or level a text. There is a lot more potential that I find is being left on the table, that could be genuine industry use cases such as entire VFX productions.
I have some previous pieces that I hope people find interesting. When o1 Pro Mode was released, I took a look at it's use for Mathematics to try and find where the actual frontier of it's use was for my use case (and found it lacking for a lot in Mathematics). When I first started the website, I wrote a personal piece on AI (and I was trying to get used to writing again as I have not done so in a while).
My next piece is likely to be focused on OpenAI's Deep Research, or talking about a responsibility to provide equity of access to AI models in schools.
Looking for readers, and looking for different perspectives, conversations, and critiques of my writing so that I can accelerate my own learning, and the value I can bring in my writing to others.
-
Some thoughts on emergent technology and the future of education
10 votes
Happy that someone here found it enjoyable! Debated on if there would be much value given to others here for the topics I write on.
The biggest disruption, one that I have enjoyed, is the old models in education that were already broken but were exposed. The in-class or take home essay has been a broken assessment practice for...at least two decades now. The practice ended up being more of an assessment of syntax and external revision rather than actual idea generation, evaluation, and synthesis. Teachers also all suddenly seemed to care about cheating, which has been pretty amusing overall, considering 60-70% of students were cheating before anyways and there has been no significant change since. Complete misunderstanding on why cheating happens in the first place, and a shift of blame again to try and cling to our old models.
Your point on a "real human" selling point I do think will hold true, for now. One thing I never ended up writing in this article, as I haven't had time to really dig deep into the thought, is how much value that we place on human interaction is unique to our generations experiences? We see people moving towards AI models for companionship and therapy more and more. In 30-40 years, once people grow up with AI integrated much more closely in their lives, is the "real human" selling point still going to hold up? We may value in person interactions as I grew up in between a large technological change, but still had a childhood where technology was a specific place in my household I interacted with and could get away from. Hard to tell, but was a thought that popped in my head as I was writing.
Thanks for engaging with the piece, and writing back.