Yes, Large Language Models May Soon be Smarter than Humans…
But not for the reason you thinkToo many students are not learning how to think and write; they are learning how to use LLMs — no matter that LLM responses cannot be trusted.
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Are Colleges Beyond Saving?
They need to rediscover the purpose of higher educationThe impact of AI and tech addiction is obvious everywhere. But is every college student falling prey to the trends?
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A Library Without Books Is Like a Book Without Pages
There is a disturbing new phenomenon afoot – babies and toddlers are turning up at nurseries and schools not knowing what books are, or how to use themIncreasingly, library staff are told to ‘free up’ their bookshelves by discarding books, that one day libraries won’t have books but rather fun and games.
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Michael Shermer: Wokeness Poisons Science and I Am No Longer Woke
A number of well-known one-way skeptics and atheists are beginning to feel the consequences of prescribed insufferable virtueMaybe we need to believe that there is a Mind behind the universe in order to provide guardrails against deeply crazy stuff claiming to be science.
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Chegged Out: How ChatGPT Schooled a Study Giant
AI has transformed how students approach both learning and cheatingAI is going to both create and destroy businesses. An interesting victim of AI is the academic assistance business. Academic dishonesty, the dark side of academic assistance, is a fancy term for cheating. With profit-motivated websites like Chegg.com, cheating became easier. When taking an exam, a student could take a photo of a difficult problem and send it to Chegg. In literally minutes, the student would be sent the answer over a cell phone. How do they do it? Often Chegg employs smart nerds from poor countries who, by local standards, are paid big bucks for their efforts. To use Chegg, a subscription is needed. But why include a human in the loop when AI can give you a quicker Read More ›
Free Speech Report at Harvard: Professors Afraid to Speak Up
The elite college still fails to promote free speechPerhaps no sphere of society has become more vulnerable to “groupthink” than the modern American university. Concerns about free speech rights have long circled the discourse over the last couple of years, with cancel culture coming for everyone who even hints at heterodox viewpoints. Rikki Schlott, a writer for the New York Post, recently wrote a report on how some professors at Harvard University, the most prestigious academic institution in the United States, feel hemmed in by the prevailing campus consensus. At a place where the quest for truth is engraved on its founding banner, academics no longer feel comfortable doing just that: professing what they take to be different reflections on what counts as the truth. Schlott writes, Harvard Read More ›
Will More Computers in Schools Help Students Learn?
Or is it just the smartphone problem, only bigger? A veteran teacher respondsThe veteran teacher is assuming, of course, that the computer is there to assist in learning tasks, not to import the student’s social whirl into the classroom.
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Ivy League Schools Are the Worst for Censoring Free Expression
The top five for freedom of expression were state universities, says intellectual freedom watchdog FIRE in its fifth annual report; some schools are improvingSchools that are rediscovering a commitment to intellectual freedom may have an edge after a decade of declining enrolment, with worse to come.
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The Smartphone is the Enemy of Learning
Digital devices are hijacking kids' ability to concentrate in the classroomHow can students be expected to read and study or engage in discussions when educators are competing with TikTok videos and Instagram in the classroom?
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Finally Something the Politicians Agree On: Phone-free Schools
Governors in both red and blue states are getting screens out of classroomsI grew up in a “phone-free” school in the 2010s and would highly recommend it. Phones represented clear threats to learning, collaboration, and creativity.
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Scholars Association Changes Policy, Now Backs Academic Boycotts
If AAUP members have run out of challenging new ideas themselves, they can at least suppress them when they are introduced by othersIdea boycotts have been known to suppress new ideas for centuries. It used to be thought of as a negative idea, a sort of dark ages…
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How can someone who fails be faulted when everyone else is failing?
Market turbulence can cause endowment fund managers to travel with the herd — sacrifice returns in order to reduce annual volatilityThe current, widely-favored 60/40 strategy has little or nothing to recommend it beyond the fact that it is what everyone else is doing.
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Ban the Phones and Bring Back the Books
It's time for the book, a time-tested vehicle of delight and instruction, to make a comeback in the classroomThis summer, several states have proposed banning smartphones in public schools or introducing programs that will limit kids’ phone use during school hours. So far New York, Indiana, Ohio, California, and Oklahoma have proposed bans or restrictions, showing rare bipartisan concern over the issue. The impetus for this movement came in May when Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders sent a letter to every fellow governor in the United States with a complimentary copy of The Anxious Generation, a new book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt shows how starting in the early 2010s kids’ mental health steeply declined. The main culprit? The smartphone, which soon became an ensnaring substitute for “real life.” Gen Z, those born after 1995, were the first Read More ›
A World-Famous Pediatrician on How To Help Kids Learn Better
Start, Ben Carson says, by eliminating the distractions created by constant input from media. Today, that must include the smartphoneBen Carson is a world-famous pediatric neurosurgeon and professor of medicine emeritus at Johns Hopkins. He … performed the first successful separation of conjoined twins who were attached at the back of the head (occipital craniopagus twins). The operation, which took place in 1987, lasted some 22 hours and involved a 70-member surgical team. Carson also refined a technique known as hemispherectomy, in which one-half of the brain is removed to prevent seizures in persons with severe epilepsy. – Britannica Carson started out comparatively disadvantaged but his mother made sure he got a good education: He later became active in politics, serving as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (1917–21). But he also retained a longstanding concern for education, especially Read More ›
Arts major cracks hard math through practice, practice, practice
She became an engineering prof that way. The war on math is certainly not over but the warriors may be starting to find themselves on the back footMathematics underlies our entire universe at its most basic level. Correct answers conform to reality. The war on 2 + 2 = 4 is just plain doomed.
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At Chronicle of Higher Ed: Critical Thinking Isn’t Just Chat
Gary Smith and Jeffrey Funk test Big Tech’s chatbots for critical thinking skills before an academic audience — with sobering but often hilarious resultsOn a serious note, Smith and Funk stress that — despite chatbot buzz — we must both practice critical thinking skills and teach them to students.
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Why Do Universities Ignore Good Ideas?
Funding agencies see if the researcher is tenured or has already received funding. It's a vicious cycle.Katalin Karikó’s Nobel Prize didn’t prove that universities don’t fund good ideas. It merely reminded us that they rarely do.
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Artificially Smart: Artificial Intelligence and Higher Education
Understanding needs to remain the metric by which students are evaluatedIf steps aren’t taken to ensure that conceptual mastery remains the standard for higher education, most students will complete their degrees as technicians.
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Why Do People Who Want to Dumb Down Education Pick Math?
When right and wrong answers are clear, rewarding the wrong answer is an easier victory for them to celebrate.If “data science” is a way of teaching math without teaching math, it will just be another way for teachers to fail upward.
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The Kids Aren’t Taking Notes
Colleges have become too dependent on digital methods of learning and communication.Visit a typical classroom in the United States and you’re bound to see just about every student “taking notes” behind a computer screen as the professor lectures at the helm.
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