““They’re voting with their enrollment, to start with—it’s an impressive sign of interest with the first semester alone,” UT system chancellor James B. Milliken said. “Everything I hear from students, from employers and others is they welcome this as an additional resource to prepare them for the marketplace.””
“Another surprising result is that students, on average, benefited from solving the same problems, without assigning easier ones to weaker students and harder ones to stronger students… when 30 students are each working on 20 different, customized problems, it’s a lot harder to figure out which of those 600 problems should be reviewed in class. There are other advantages to having a class work on a common set of problems. It allows kids to work together, something that motivates many extroverted tweens and teens to do their homework. It can also trigger worthwhile class discussions, in which students explain how they solved the same problem differently.”
“Between 2016 and 2022, I spoke to around 10,000 children and young people aged between six and 22 about the impact of pornography on their lives. These children were from right across the UK and a range of backgrounds. I met children in classrooms, youth theatres and clubs.”
“I’m told that the top search term at Spotify among teens is “sad.” And it’s more than music. Sadness is so widespread among youngsters (especially teen girls) that the Centers for Disease Control is now tracking it. So we shouldn’t be surprised that music and cultural indicators reflect the same reality… So what songs do sad teens want to hear during a bummer summer?”
“Combating grade inflation, however difficult in practice, is actually the easier of the two existing problems ChatGPT has exacerbated. More difficult is coming to agreement on what exactly we are evaluating in student papers. It seems to me that every discipline will have to engage in their own process of discerning what they want from student writing, and what — in a world where most low-level cognitive tasks may soon be automated — they want to teach students.”
“Neuroscientists have long had an explanation for our somnolent twitches. During rem sleep, they say, our bodies are paralyzed to prevent us from acting out our dreams; the twitches are the movements that slip through the cracks. They’re dream debris—outward hints of an inner drama… Increasingly, these facts struck Blumberg as odd… Blumberg decided to put the dream-debris theory to the test.”
“Given the high rates of disengagement and burnout, especially for those in historically marginalized groups, companies need a new approach. The author argues for fostering four freedoms at work: the freedom to be, the freedom to become, the freedom to fade, and the freedom to fail.”
“Stories told about “successful” teachers and the counting of what these teachers actually do in classrooms are very compelling, even persuasive at times. But such evidence remains stories and lists. They neglect systematically collected data from comparison groups of teachers and students to sufficiently pass muster as evidence of which teacher actions cause students to learn.”
“The foremost principle: Math instruction must be systematic and explicit. Teachers need to give clear and precise instructions and introduce new concepts in small chunks while building on older concepts. Such approaches have been endorsed by dozens of studies highlighted by the Institute of Education Sciences, an arm of the U.S. Education Department that evaluates teaching practices.”
“We also found something else interesting, an effect that is increasingly apparent in other studies of AI: it works as a skill leveler. The consultants who scored the worst when we assessed them at the start of the experiment had the biggest jump in their performance, 43%, when they got to use AI. The top consultants still got a boost, but less of one. Looking at these results, I do not think enough people are considering what it means when a technology raises all workers to the top tiers of performance. It may be like how it used to matter whether miners were good or bad at digging through rock… until the steam shovel was invented and now differences in digging ability do not matter anymore.”
“The disaster was not natural, they said in a flurry of false posts that spread across the internet, but was the result of a secret “weather weapon” being tested by the United States. To bolster the plausibility, the posts carried photographs that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence programs, making them among the first to use these new tools to bolster the aura of authenticity of a disinformation campaign.”
“Thanks to open-source resources, we’re beginning to see a pattern where industry hits certain benchmarks and then academia steps in to refine the model. After DeepMind’s release of AlphaFold, Minkyung Baek and David Baker at the University of Washington released RoseTTAFold, which uses DeepMind’s framework to predict the structures of protein complexes instead of only the single protein structures that AlphaFold could originally handle.”
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson