1,961 karma · joined August 17, 2010
A name people use for this phenomenon now with AI is cognitive offloading.
I coincidentally took advantage of the cheap DeepSeek Flash pricing the past couple of weeks to compile & synthesize a knowledge base/wiki of hundreds of educational AI research studies like this one here: https://edtechdev.github.io/aied/ Here's the summary of this article: https://edtechdev.github.io/aied/articles/stromberg-generati...
There are separate contexts involved here: the coder, the compiler, the runtime, a person trying to understand the code (context of this article), etc. What's better for one context may not be better for another, and programming languages favor certain contexts over others.
In this case, since programming languages primarily favor making things easier for the compiler and have barely improved their design and usability in 50 years, both coders and readers should employ third party tools to assist them. AI can help the reader understand the code and the coder generate clearer documentation and labels, on top of using linters, test driven development, literate documentation practices, etc.
Students learn and understand college math more when the classes are contextualized (usually engineering, biology, but you can also use everyday examples). See decades of research on situated learning and related approaches. https://careerladdersproject.org/docs/Contextual%20Approache...
Developmental courses can also be compressed https://blog.careertech.org/research-review-promising-practi...
Dual enrollment saves time and money and improves success. Let high school students take college math courses.
Corequisite remediation is the current best practice. Let students take regular (not remedial) math courses, and improve advising and support. https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/easyblog/future-of-corequisite-... https://strongstart.org/resource/corequisite-mathematics-too...
Me personally I'd like to see something that supports easily creating and using different types of objects besides pages (such as: events, books, recipes, etc.), like content types and fields and views in wordpress or drupal, ideally aligned with schema.org like https://www.drupal.org/project/schemadotorg I think Hugo might support content types in YAML or something.
Another non-activitypub alternative is nostr, where your identity is a public/private key pair: https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr
A recent meta-analysis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338494581_Meta-Anal... and the What Works Clearinghouse have summaries of the evidence for different strategies for improving early reading skills: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/practiceguide/14 Direct Instruction (also championed by one political side) is not an effective strategy: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/EvidenceSnapshot/139
Here's just one post with a little more info on the political context: https://radicalscholarship.com/2023/01/14/does-the-science-o...
A bigger scandal is how states like Florida game the system to make their reading score rankings look higher: https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2023/01/05/floridas-educati...
The good news is there are a lot of strategies that help with reading in various contexts. There's even research on how reading to dogs (or even robots) helps students with reading :)
See the instructions on the bottom of this page, for example: https://joinfediverse.wiki/How_to_host_your_own_Fediverse_in...
Here's a list of all the server apps Yunohost supports: https://yunohost.org/en/apps?q=%2Fapps
including from David Dunning himself https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-35/april-2022/dunn...
My only issues are: they are focusing more on the desktop and (now) mobile apps, instead of the web app. You can't quickly share items to the app or web version to quickly save links, etc. They did have github integration built into the web version but are abandoning that to work on their own paid sync solution that isn't out yet. But you can manually sync the files as I mentioned.
For now I'm mainly sticking with a wiki but keeping an eye on developments to logseq and similar open source apps like Athens Research, Bangle, etc. See this twitter list of different knowledge management tools: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1396562498002825240
Click on the 'Circuits' menu to see dozens of example circuits.
One issue with the hydraulic/fluid analogy is the "empty pipe" misconception - we forget or don't know that in electrical circuits, the circuit is a closed loop. An example of this misconception is that beginners sometimes think the current "wears out" as it goes along the wire. The Falstad simulation shows a line of moving dots that move faster or slower depending on the current - a little more like a train moving in a pipe - which helps counter this misconception, although it, too, isn't perfect. As a next level, I like showing animations/simulations that show the role of charge on the 'outside' of the wire in steering current flow, as well as magnetic fields surrounding the wire.
Of course we have limits to how much we can do at once, but learning isn't like filling a bucket. Learning takes active work, effort. An analogy would be like saying 'weight lifting is easier with tiny weights' or 'don't lift too much weight.' Yes, but that's obvious, useless, and forgets the presumed goal of weight lifting, which requires putting in some effort. Similarly, you wouldn't force kids to listen to lectures about baseball or other sports and memorizing all the rules before letting them play.
Some of the other things mentioned on the poster article are false or only apply to rote, trivial learning. Remember most of this type of traditional psych research “includes participants who have no specific interest in learning the domain involved and who are also given a very short study time.”
Worked examples, like other passive learning situations, can cause an 'illusion of knowledge' - feeling like you know and understand, but not really.
Look at pre-worked answers, build rote knowledge, etc, before trying to solve problems? We learn more doing the exact opposite - see research on 'productive failure'. We learn best in context, when we have a need to learn.
Our intuitions about learning, teaching, etc, are often the exact opposite of reality. Here are just a couple of examples:
Khan Academy and the effectiveness of science videos https://youtu.be/eVtCO84MDj8
Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom https://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19251?cid=nwsltrtn&sourc...
Browser vendors (controlled by the same huge companies) blocking websql and poorly supporting things like pwa are other examples of this issue.
Mainly just needs wiki style links and backlinks and a search function.