By some strange twist of fate I have ended up home-schooling my son for the first term of secondary school (age 11).
We are both hoping he starts attending real school next term but the situation created an opportunity to explore AI in education.
It’s a path that every educator and parent needs to undertake. Whether or not it has conscious characteristics, whether or not it has emotional characteristics, we are now living on this planet with another ‘reasoning’ intelligence.
With a touch of humor . Despite what OpenAI might have us believe ^^. Intelligence isn’t made for us. It is created through the process of thinking, indeed collaborative thinking.
AI is a better judge of character than humans, if not now, in the future.
It is inevitably eventually also the best teacher in many but not all aspects. While I had no formal education after 17 I do understand how valuable having teachers and peers is, which is why I am here .
But learning is a 2 way street.
The best thing we can dream to learn in life is how to think.
How we ALL do that is the challenge that AI presents us with.
Yes, educators do worry, as they did when handheld calculators emerged. While the humanities fear for
the essay assignments, computer science worries about AI writing the programming assignments for
students. However, I have seen strong agreement in this field that while students do need to know how to
program themselves, they need to learn how to use AI, because industry will expect fluency in employing
its power.
Education lends itself naturally to using LLMs, though. Training students on techniques for LLMs as a means of replacing other education is possibly putting the cart before the horse. I just started using it on the daily about a month ago, and it’s evident to me that I’m already more effective at using it than most people. That’s because my English and history, and extracurricular, education has prepared me to know just how to draw answers out of it.
Basically, we need to be primarily training students to be Socrates and the LLM to be his interlocutor, not the other way around, although that has its place too. Teach a man to fish etc etc.
Syntax, vocabulary size, patience, specificity/vision for the answer, these are all things that result naturally from education and lead to way better LLM answers.
Furthermore, the AI learns how smart you are. If you’re like me, it won’t mince words at all. It even suggests scientific/hard knowledge that corresponds or relates to my sentiments without me asking. But it can recognize when somebody’s literacy or eclecticeness level is lower and changes its message and content accordingly. Your AI knows you type type
but the situation created an opportunity to explore AI in education.
. Despite what OpenAI might have us believe ^^. Intelligence isn’t made for us. It is created through the process of thinking, indeed collaborative thinking.