I love the perspective you share in your weekly posts. This one especially...
"As technology advances, what value do we offer each other".
These are the questions that should keep us going. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of listening to a podcast from a fellow Substack author, Varun Godbole-a former Google employee that is really taking some time to think about similar things to you. He suggested in the podcast "there's a lot of similarity between the various processes for the proactive cultivation of wisdom and the proactive cultivation of curiosity, open-mindedness, exploration, overall adaptability" as he advocated for a "tech perspective" moving technology closer to an agent that makes humans more wise, thus enabling human flourishing at scale. I can only cross my fingers and hope that there are many more humans such as yourself and Varun and we just don't know about all of you yet but the work of you and others will transform the space into a wiser world! Every educator and human needs to work towards systems that advocate for exploration and curiosity-especially in math.........with first line "import humans".
"it doesn't exist if you can't measure it". I do think you can't measure "it" if you can't define "it". Or perhaps better, you can't measure "it" if you do not understand what "it" does well enough to know how to measure "it". Do you see an "aha" moment as the experience of coming to the understanding that you understand X for your self. Isn't it the case that for AI, "it" cannot exist unless it is related to what it was trained to recognize/measure?
I was talking about teaching with an ed-tech exec once and he said, "well, if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist." I struggled to square that with what was happening in my classroom. I was seeing so much growth and chatter and "aha" moments - i.e., existence. I was really proud of those moments, but I recognized how hard it would be to measure them. To the dominant paradigm, that teaching, in all its mess and beauty, doesn't exist and will not exist until they can measure it. Unfortunately the way it was framed was as if the immeasurability of those important moments was my problem not theirs.
This feels akin to "Humans do not compile like software." Really excited to see what happens after the cliffhanger in your post Dan!
I love that the guy who invented a push-button learning machine was named "Presser."
I love the perspective you share in your weekly posts. This one especially...
"As technology advances, what value do we offer each other".
These are the questions that should keep us going. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of listening to a podcast from a fellow Substack author, Varun Godbole-a former Google employee that is really taking some time to think about similar things to you. He suggested in the podcast "there's a lot of similarity between the various processes for the proactive cultivation of wisdom and the proactive cultivation of curiosity, open-mindedness, exploration, overall adaptability" as he advocated for a "tech perspective" moving technology closer to an agent that makes humans more wise, thus enabling human flourishing at scale. I can only cross my fingers and hope that there are many more humans such as yourself and Varun and we just don't know about all of you yet but the work of you and others will transform the space into a wiser world! Every educator and human needs to work towards systems that advocate for exploration and curiosity-especially in math.........with first line "import humans".
"it doesn't exist if you can't measure it". I do think you can't measure "it" if you can't define "it". Or perhaps better, you can't measure "it" if you do not understand what "it" does well enough to know how to measure "it". Do you see an "aha" moment as the experience of coming to the understanding that you understand X for your self. Isn't it the case that for AI, "it" cannot exist unless it is related to what it was trained to recognize/measure?
Every damn word of this. Every. Damn. Word.
I was talking about teaching with an ed-tech exec once and he said, "well, if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist." I struggled to square that with what was happening in my classroom. I was seeing so much growth and chatter and "aha" moments - i.e., existence. I was really proud of those moments, but I recognized how hard it would be to measure them. To the dominant paradigm, that teaching, in all its mess and beauty, doesn't exist and will not exist until they can measure it. Unfortunately the way it was framed was as if the immeasurability of those important moments was my problem not theirs.
This feels akin to "Humans do not compile like software." Really excited to see what happens after the cliffhanger in your post Dan!
Yep, as always, Dan "gets it".