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Ivy Kong's avatar

When I first read this, my gut response was, "No, it can't be. It's a chat program that's been trained on available data." I decided to toy around with your prompt and asked a whole bunch of follow-up questions to refine the results. It was then I understood that because I know my field and my audience, which is middle school students, I knew the right questions to ask. This suggests that to properly use this tool, one needs specific knowledge and experience.

The generative nature of GPT is beneficial, but only if the user has the knowledge to separate the good from the bad.

So, despite the lack of a human touch, it's not quite ready to outshine traditional writing created by someone with a strong grasp of pedagogy and content knowledge.

Oh and btw, test this one out to see if you think it’s really adopting your voice ;)

[Assume the role of a mathematician and a seasoned math educator at the K-12 level. Adopt the voice of Dan Meyer in math education to answer this question:

“How can algebraic notation help us understand how different quantities are changing in a scenario? Use an example from solid geometry.”]

P.S. Use GPT4.0 instead of 3.5!

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Scott Kim's avatar

Generative textbooks are worse than traditional textbooks, it's true, along traditional metrics, in the same way that most YouTube is worse than traditional TV in terms of production values, editorial oversight, since budgets are far lower and production skills are usually far worse. But YouTube has the unique advantage of allowing individual voices to shine, and that is enough to let it overtake traditional media. I suspect, like you say, that "generative textbook" is a "horseless carriage" linguistic misfire based on history, just as Google Search is a fundamentally different beast from Yahoo! indexing. The interesting question to me is whether people will put in the active effort to use tools like ChatGPT to sharpen their learning. I love the idea of active learners participating in their learning, but I think it will take more than the existence of ChatGPT to make this happen.

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