Get Ready To Be Replaced By AI

[Antiphon1]

Meanwhile, at Georgia Tech: http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/explore-oms-cs.

Low cost revenue stream.

And offering the equivalent degree at a more affordable price to people all over the world is bad how? (Not sure I understand your argument.)

No argument.  Just an observation about the purpose.  I do often wonder about the outcomes data for fully online programs, though. 

[polly_mer]

If the point of education is to become a member of society, then why do some many classrooms still have a form that would be recognizable to Dewey, dead more than 50 years now?

Why is Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, also 50 years old, still so relevant?

[ciao_yall]

If the point of education is to become a member of society, then why do some many classrooms still have a form that would be recognizable to Dewey, dead more than 50 years now?

Why is Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, also 50 years old, still so relevant?

Same reason people make babies the same way they did in Dewey's day. They like it, and it works.

[Caracal]

Education, as John Dewey argued, isn't really about learning particular things. It is mostly about learning how to be a member of society.

This.

That may have been true in 1950 when you learned everything you needed at the assembly line. But that was also a time when you were almost always better off staying at home than going to a hospital, because of how unscientific medicine was.

Today's information environment is massively more complex and navigating the world (or being part of society) requires an ability to navigate and work with data. That's going to be even more true 20 years from now.

Nope. First of all you're off by 50 years. Dewey was writing at a time around the turn of the century where technological innovation seemed to be happening at a dizzying pace. That was exactly his point. He didn't think that nobody needed to learn anything, because the 20th century was a simple quaint place. He argued that the pace of technological change highlighted the folly of obsessively focusing on students acquiring particular skills and pointed out that lots of important jobs in 1890 hadn't existed in 1870. Really, though, he wanted to create people who could be democratic citizens in an era when he feared that people could be turned into cogs in the machine.

[Caracal]

If the point of education is to become a member of society, then why do some many classrooms still have a form that would be recognizable to Dewey, dead more than 50 years now?

Why is Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, also 50 years old, still so relevant?

Same reason people make babies the same way they did in Dewey's day. They like it, and it works.

Yes, I mean first of all classrooms are quiet different than they were 50 years ago in a number of ways both in terms of pedagogy and technological delivery. So I assume what Poly means is "why do we all still try to learn things at the same time instead of just setting everyone up with some computers and letting them do their own thing." There was a story a year or so ago about schools in Kansas who had gotten grants from someone (maybe Zuckerberg?) to implement a radical new method of individual learning. Basically, the students spent most of their time doing their own work on the computers. The students hated it, it left them feeling depressed and disconnected, because it turns out that most of us need social connection and context to make our learning relevant and enjoyable.

[Stockmann]

Education, as John Dewey argued, isn't really about learning particular things. It is mostly about learning how to be a member of society.

If that's what it's about, it sure has a funny way of going about it. For example, in K-12 precise chronological age is the most important, or often the sole criterion, for who goes into what class. This happens in no other area of life - most certainly not in the workplace. This wasn't the way kids were raised prior to mass schooling, either. There is even evidence kids socializing in mixed-age groups (as was the case before mass schooling) mature faster. The nearest thing to "real-world" settings that work on a similar basis are army bootcamp and nursing homes.
Same for the "everyone gets prizes" ethos - it's the exact opposite of how just about any aspect of the real world (say, the job market) works.

[pigou]

There was a story a year or so ago about schools in Kansas who had gotten grants from someone (maybe Zuckerberg?) to implement a radical new method of individual learning. Basically, the students spent most of their time doing their own work on the computers. The students hated it, it left them feeling depressed and disconnected, because it turns out that most of us need social connection and context to make our learning relevant and enjoyable.

What's so ridiculous about Zuckerberg's initiative is that it's basically half a dozen engineers and a few million dollars in scope. The US government spends about $700bn on primary and secondary education... it's off by orders of magnitude from the kind of investment that's actually needed to pull it off.

Also, schools implementing individualized learning for the most part seem to do so in an effort to cut costs. But it's entirely possible -- and perhaps even likely -- that individualized learning done well requires more teachers, not fewer, and is actually more expensive, not less. And it wouldn't replace all education, but could be connected back to the class.

[Anselm]

There was a story a year or so ago about schools in Kansas who had gotten grants from someone (maybe Zuckerberg?) to implement a radical new method of individual learning. Basically, the students spent most of their time doing their own work on the computers. The students hated it, it left them feeling depressed and disconnected, because it turns out that most of us need social connection and context to make our learning relevant and enjoyable.

What's so ridiculous about Zuckerberg's initiative is that it's basically half a dozen engineers and a few million dollars in scope. The US government spends about $700bn on primary and secondary education... it's off by orders of magnitude from the kind of investment that's actually needed to pull it off.

Also, schools implementing individualized learning for the most part seem to do so in an effort to cut costs. But it's entirely possible -- and perhaps even likely -- that individualized learning done well requires more teachers, not fewer, and is actually more expensive, not less. And it wouldn't replace all education, but could be connected back to the class.

I believe that in other nations it is more common to repeat grades.   In the USA people fall behind in math and never catch up when maybe they just need more practice with material from earlier years.

[mouseman]

The title of this thread assumes that I am not, in fact, AI.