Filtering yes, ranking no.

I already know with time constraints I'm going to mostly focus on my initial thoughts, but I think reading this alongside Cronon's "Only Connect" essay would be a great exercise.

This is such a great basic skill for (I think) anyone to have, whether it's while working, talking with others, raising kids, etc.

Understanding other people have mental models you don't have, and that they're ignorant of your own mental models (or that what you have is a personal model, a version of truth, not "the" truth) is helpful in treating humanity like it's human.

I have ranted a lot, while I was teaching and after, about the various "coding for Kindergarteners" initiatives I saw back in the day. And primarily my rants were about how no one knew whether we'd need developers in 20 years (I still think we do, but I know plenty of folks in our current LLM-based world who think we don't, or that day is coming) and maybe what we'd really need then is expert qualitative decision making and we'd wish all those Kindergarteners went and became Art History majors or something.

Anyway, I often think of education as helping make you a more whole person, for (what I believe is) a similar reason to the author's point. You don't know what's coming, and being the most complete version of yourself is probably the best way to be prepared.

Absolutely. If your goal is to make a good product, it's not enough to build it to spec (even if the specs are very thorough). Understanding why someone wants something a specific way helps you design the thing they actually want, not the thing they've described. Maybe if they're thinking if perfectly clear and well thought out, you'll find the thing they've written does in fact match their vision, but I'd bet that at least some times it does not.

Maybe less ephemeral if you find yourself somewhat immediately and repeatedly use that same acquired knowledge over and over again, but generally I agree.

We used to call some of this the differences between "skills and knowledges" and "ways of thinking". Do you know how to "thinking like a scientist", "think like a historian", "this like a musician", etc. It was meant to be a high level way of acknowledging both that the ways of thinking in different disciplines are different (to use some of the author's words, I'd say how you go about exploring, questioning, examining, etc., is different between disciplines) and also that part of a student's education is to learn more than the skills and knowledges, but also these many other approaches and tools which make up discipline-specific reasoning.

As a teacher, my goal was to make sure my students would no longer need me. That meant giving them specific knowledge when they needed it, but also giving them the tools they'd need to grow in that knowledge, use it, outgrow it, etc.

I can know I got a "A" on a paper, but do I understand why I got that A? If not, can I hope to replicate that level of work consistently? Can I even understand why getting an "A" was important if I didn't understand (and thus get to agree with) why it was given?

What long-term education did I get from writing that paper. I believe almost every paper I've written had long term benefits; an obvious take for at least some of them would be helping me learn the research and then analysis skills I use now all the time.

I've see a regression in some public schools with this, where High School students especially are asked earlier and earlier to specify a "track" they want to be on that limits their choices in which classes they get to take. So if you choose a science track you might not get space in your schedule for, say, a photography class.

In High School! Who knows at 14 or 15 or 16 what the rest of their life is going to be like!

I get that parents want to feel some security in their child's future (even though I think, and this article I feel strongly indicates, that this is a false security, as those parents also don't really know what kinds of skills or ways of thinking will benefit their children in the longer term) and I think businesses in particular would like to pass off their training needs on to schools (college, high school, whatever, just to save themselves time and money; though again, I think this is disadvantageous to the worker, who's bargaining power against a business either comes with collectivism (a dirty word in the USA) or having the flexibility to move to new employers (something a holistic education greatly helps with)) and I think there are even some political figures who'd prefer citizens are, say, less well-rounded, less critical, and less civically informed.

These "tracks" and tight and tighter specificity in education only constrain the futures of students, they don't brighten it, and as the world moves on a constrained future has a greater chance of being squeezed out.

Absolutely! Whole students for their whole lives. I'd bet that software engineers who are well-read, thoughtful, engaged in their community, etc, make better software engineers.

I'd double bet that they'd certainly make for more empathetic and thoughtful software engineers who will, say, care enough about user privacy that they'd push back again bad practices bad business goals.

For the folks who haven't read this yet: https://www.bu.edu/cas/files/2015/06/Cronon_The-Goals-of-a-Liberal-Education.pdf.

And in case that link goes dead one day, it's Cronon's essay entitled "Only Connect...".

In fact, I'd bet the people doing the enslaving don't want them having anything other than vocational skills.

I sometimes get stuck on what appears to be a societal preference for things like radical individualism, and also a denigration of education. As if individualism isn't supported by more education!

I don't think society is fixated on college as an educational path, I think society is fixated on a college education as a form of credentialling to divide workers into more and less skilled groups. Which we've seen falling apart, and which I think is part of the reason we're seeing huge pressure on educational institutions (both from lower enrollment as the credential no longer shows as much worth, and from government and business as a way of making sure these intuitions are measure as credentialing institutions with the purpose of aligning with business needs).

Higher Ed is one way, but not the only way, to fulfill the need to grow ourselves, become more curious, become more thoughtful. I think it's a very good way, if you have the means and if your curiosity can be developed in that environment. But i also think for too long schools accepted they would continue to have enrollment based on that credentialling scheme, and as its falling apart I haven't seen much push from them to identify themselves as places where students will be challenged, mentored, and ultimately grow as complete people.

Bang on slogan.

Man, if nothing else, I'd love every student to view every course they take (higher ed and not) though that lens. And realize that the unknown encompasses both known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.

When I taught in a less economically advantaged north shore MA city, a step rep at our of our neighbor (and much more advantaged) cities was trying to sell his constituents on some kind of state-wide program that would benefit people outside of their city. And he did it by explaining that his constituents' children would be "captains of industry" and they'd do better if the future works from my little city had had sufficient education to be "good employees" (with the implication that the education we were giving them now wouldn't even get them to "good").

Most of us in the "city of sin" didn't really love that line of reasoning.

Yeah. Both of these. Because even chromebooks and programming classes for kids isn't necessarily "access". It's more than some of them would have had on their own, yes, but it's a lot less than the kids who get to try everything get. And it's another form of restriction, when other people (with their dubious wisdom - again, a serious person cannot believe that in twenty years the payscales of the software industry vs other industries will still be the same as it is now) have picked just what advantages the children with less or no access get to have, and which access they don't get to have.

That could be its own essay, and I'd throw in what structures that thwart curiously are intentionally difficult to undermine, and are designed to throw blame at the party struggling to participate in education as opposed to the ones who structure the opportunities for education.

test

Hey @asebastian and @rbless . It looks like you're using our Public group for document editing (which is fine, but sometimes folks prefer the privacy of a private group).

But I think you've misunderstood the purpose of our moderation flag. That's sending messages to our moderation team who then have to review the flag to see if the post violates our community guidelines.

The thing that flag doesn't do is show up for your fellow editors as a signal that you've competed whatever edit they've proposed. There are other ways to signal this, like a reply to their annotation.

On future projects please consider using a private group, where the flag will signal the group creator, as opposed to our moderation team.

Thanks!

@ortizj I'm curious why you all are using the Hypothesis Public group for what appear to be document edits, and if you intend on deleting these comments or if Hypothesis users visiting your site to annotate will forever see your commentary here?

annotation!

Hi there. Can you all please stop using our Moderation button in our world-readable Public group for document editing? That's the little flag button in the corner of the annotation Card.

Every time you click the flag it sends a notification to our Support team.

We do not moderate annotations based on document edits. Some people choose to do document editing in a private group so that their edits don't show up in Public.

Our app's mission is to facilitate social annotation, not document editing.

@tn_2 and whomever else you're working with.

This is a great suggestion to keep in one's toolkit.

Obviously you cannot.

Not only to catch AI use, but also to better understand student deficits and provide their own substantive feedback, of course.

One of the fundamental problems here is severely overloading and underpaying adjunct faulty (or any faculty, for that matter).

This quote is from the comments. I think this is an excellent point about where LLMs (at least currently) fall down, and where a professor's insights and feedback is the "special sauce". And importantly, for professors, would you be comfortable not knowing whether or not an LLM had graded on something substantive vs surface level in a student's work?

I have had highly varied experiences with this, as some few professors I've had were clearly reading off slides or lecture materials they didn't prepare themselves, and didn't bother to review ahead of time.

It's absolutely true that supports like textbooks, slides, etc, are common, justifiable, and useful in a classroom. But again, you can purchase the textbook yourself, what has the professor added to make the course worth the cost of taking it?

Even worse! This is completely irresponsible teaching.

Even pre-LLMs, I remember taking an open book math test who's questions, when I examined them after the exam, were very clearly cribbed from practice tests published by a number of other universities (changing a few constants in an overall identical set of equations to be solved, for instance).

This approach made me lose a lot of faith in the quality of my instructors who couldn't be bothered to write their own novel math exam.

Yes, though I would also add "and have our teaching be responsive to the trends we see in student data, quantitative and qualitative".

And there's the natural consequence.

Again, the actual core problems here. Using AI to address this problem is putting the prof in danger of irrelevance. Anyone can write an (attempted) anthro paper and ask an LLM for grades, feedback, etc.

I think this is actually central to the problem. LLMs are being used to solve a problem rooted not in a need to access information, but rather to solve: - existing problems in higher ed, like attitudes towards who is responsible for student learning, and - newer problems in higher ed, like fundamental changes to funding which institutions are trying to solve by overloading class sizes (a solution that might not have been considered if there weren't already outdated opinions w/r/t the first point).

I think students' views that this is hypocritical may be reactionary, but it's up to professors to delineate, I think, how their ChatGPT use is fundamentally different from students'.

IMO, the use of LLMs to create novel works (course syllabus, answers to quiz questions, etc) robs the writer of a very crucial aspect of writing, the construction of new knowledge and analysis that's produced as part of the writing process.

Is this necessary to write and re-write a syllabus over each year? Probably not.

Is it necessary when writing quiz answers, essays, and other aspects of student work? Certainly. Importantly, students (and maybe some faculty) think that assessments need to reflect what is already learned and memorized, when in reality assessments provide more opportunities for learning though the process of assimilation and analysis of ideas.

Now, is this necessary for professors who are writing feedback and responses to student work? Yes. Using LLMs for feedbacks gets back to the central idea in this article; if the feedback comes from an LLM, what are students paying for? Importantly, how are professors factoring student work into their next lecture and overall into their instruction if they're not reading it?

Alongside this, is this necessary overall for professors? Probably yes. Lacking an understanding of what obstacles students are facing in their learning can only lead to an unresponsive class experience.

What is the special sauce students are getting out of a class?

If the professor isn't applying their personal experience and knowledge to their notes, what is the benefit of the student taking the class with that particular professor?

@chrisaldrich, @mrcolbyrussell, @steelwagstaff, @remikalir, @heatherstaines, @judell

We've quietly launched at-mentions in the Hypothesis web app. Yours were among the first names that popped into my head; feel free to suggest others (or at-mention them yourself).

Various marketing campaigns are coming, but I thought I'd ping you all here first.

test @mdiroberts

annotate in this open group!

You actually need /profile/settings.

LTI 1.1 grading result

annotation gamma

anno alpha

anno beta

test

page note

"TC" definition

LTI roles

LTI roles

Is this saying that Canvas' parameter User.id matches exactly the LTI parameter user_id?

Found under "Group Categories"

Found under "Group Categories"

Found under "Groups"

Found under "Courses"

Found under "Sections"

Found under "Courses"

Found under "Files"

Found under "Files"

Canvas scopes are, to me anyway, found in some unintuitive places. Creating annotations to help us find these again in the future.

Reason for the grades being 1-10.

Hypothesis is reporting the HTML of this selection contains a number of newlines that don't appear in the HTML on the page.

This is better known as the alt attribute!

$$\begin{pmatrix} 1 & 0\\ 0 & 1 \end{pmatrix}$$

$$\int_\gamma\|\gamma'\|$$

"Text feature" is defined in this document, but "text details" isn't. Giving students both definitions would help ensure they understand the author's intent.

Tags would also be a great way to practice metacognition! One technique would be to have a list of categories you use when annotating (such as "Evidence", "Central Idea", and "Vocab") and apply one of these as a tag to each annotation.

The goal is to go beyond analyzing the text and identify why you're analyzing that part of the text. You can read more about metacognition here.