“The moment that the AI feels like it’s not giving you good feedback, if it feels like it’s getting confusing, talk to someone else, talk to your teacher, talk to a parent about what’s going on.”
Er.. how will a student figure out if it's confused, or confidently hallucinating?
What's the point of Khanmigo, or any other chatbot that aims to help students learn maths anyway? What is the argument here?
Is it that teachers cannot pay enough attention, provide enough support, guidance and feedback, hence we need such a bot for help?
Why don't we simply take a closer look at the issue here instead?
- Why can't a teacher do their job properly?
- Well, the class sizes are too big to provide a more personalised approach, let alone differentiated instruction.
- Why don't we downsize the classes then?
- Seriously?! There already is a huge teacher shortage, and you are suggesting to create more classes?!
- Why is there a teacher shortage?
- Well, young graduates don't consider teaching as a good paying, respectable job, even though some of them really want to teach. Veteran teachers are quitting with the same reasons + overwhelming workload.
- This is the issue. Why don't we start from here?
The Klein quote reminds me of something that science writer Ed Yong says, which is (roughly paraphrasing) that problems with sentences are often really problems with structure and problems with structure are often really problems with understanding.
It follows that the thing to do when we encounter sentence problems is often to step back and work on structure problems and the thing to do when we encounter structural problems is often to step back and work on understanding. Or, to look at this a little differently, the *value* of sentence-level struggles is that they help us recognize structural and intellectual work that needs to be done. If we respond to such challenges only as problems of verbal manipulation, we miss a lot of that value.
“The moment that the AI feels like it’s not giving you good feedback, if it feels like it’s getting confusing, talk to someone else, talk to your teacher, talk to a parent about what’s going on.”
Er.. how will a student figure out if it's confused, or confidently hallucinating?
What's the point of Khanmigo, or any other chatbot that aims to help students learn maths anyway? What is the argument here?
Is it that teachers cannot pay enough attention, provide enough support, guidance and feedback, hence we need such a bot for help?
Why don't we simply take a closer look at the issue here instead?
- Why can't a teacher do their job properly?
- Well, the class sizes are too big to provide a more personalised approach, let alone differentiated instruction.
- Why don't we downsize the classes then?
- Seriously?! There already is a huge teacher shortage, and you are suggesting to create more classes?!
- Why is there a teacher shortage?
- Well, young graduates don't consider teaching as a good paying, respectable job, even though some of them really want to teach. Veteran teachers are quitting with the same reasons + overwhelming workload.
- This is the issue. Why don't we start from here?
On another note, why is Khanmigo paid anyway?!
Not to add to your reading list Dan, but here's a really well-reported story on recent failures to turn chatbots into tutors: https://www.the74million.org/article/a-cautionary-ai-tale-why-ibms-dazzling-watson-supercomputer-made-a-lousy-tutor/
Hope our paths cross in San Diego!
The Klein quote reminds me of something that science writer Ed Yong says, which is (roughly paraphrasing) that problems with sentences are often really problems with structure and problems with structure are often really problems with understanding.
It follows that the thing to do when we encounter sentence problems is often to step back and work on structure problems and the thing to do when we encounter structural problems is often to step back and work on understanding. Or, to look at this a little differently, the *value* of sentence-level struggles is that they help us recognize structural and intellectual work that needs to be done. If we respond to such challenges only as problems of verbal manipulation, we miss a lot of that value.
In the comments Sal Khan himself is mentioning that they don't see AI as a replacement to a human teacher.
https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/3sb98d?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share