14 items tagged “education”
2024
AI versus old-school creativity: a 50-student, semester-long showdown (via) An interesting study in which 50 university students “wrote, coded, designed, modeled, and recorded creations with and without AI, then judged the results”.
This study seems to explore the approach of incremental prompting to produce an AI-driven final results. I use GPT-4 on a daily basis but my usage patterns are quite different: I very rarely let it actually write anything for me, instead using it as brainstorming partner, or to provide feedback, or as API reference or a thesaurus. # 10th January 2024, 11:49 pm
2023
In the long term, I suspect that LLMs will have a significant positive impact on higher education. Specifically, I believe they will elevate the importance of the humanities. [...] LLMs are deeply, inherently textual. And they are reliant on text in a way that is directly linked to the skills and methods that we emphasize in university humanities classes.
— Benjamin Breen # 13th September 2023, 3:40 am
Simulating History with ChatGPT (via) Absolutely fascinating new entry in the using-ChatGPT-to-teach genre. Benjamin Breen teaches history at UC Santa Cruz, and has been developing a sophisticated approach to using ChatGPT to play out role-playing scenarios involving different periods of history. His students are challenged to participate in them, then pick them apart—fact-checking details from the scenario and building critiques of the perspectives demonstrated by the language model. There are so many quotable snippets in here, I recommend reading the whole thing. # 13th September 2023, 3:36 am
2022
AI assisted learning: Learning Rust with ChatGPT, Copilot and Advent of Code
I’m using this year’s Advent of Code to learn Rust—with the assistance of GitHub Copilot and OpenAI’s new ChatGPT.
[... 2661 words]2019
What the Hell is Going On? (via) David Perell discusses how the shift from information scarcity to information abundance is reshaping commerce, education, and politics. Long but worthwhile. # 17th March 2019, 4:50 pm
2018
Computational and Inferential Thinking: The Foundations of Data Science. Free online textbook written for the UC Berkeley Foundations of Data Science class. The examples are all provided as Jupyter notebooks, using the mybinder web application to allow students to launch interactive notebooks for any of the examples without having to install any software on their own machines. # 25th August 2018, 10:13 pm
At Harvard we’ve built out an infrastructure to allow us to deploy JupyterHub to courses with authentication managed by Canvas. It has allowed us to easily deploy complex set-ups to students so they can do really cool stuff without having to spend hours walking them through setup. Instructors are writing their lectures as IPython notebooks, and distributing them to students, who then work through them in their JupyterHub environment. Our most ambitious so far has been setting up each student in the course with a p2.xlarge machine with cuda and TensorFlow so they could do deep learning work for their final projects. We supported 15 courses last year, and got deployment time for an implementation down to only 2-3 hours.
— Chris Rogers # 5th June 2018, 7:37 pm
Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you’ve taken? Most useful Hacker News thread I’ve seen in a while: a torrent of great recommendations for online courses to learn everything from machine learning to astrophysics to songwriting. # 3rd April 2018, 5:17 pm
2009
Teaching users to be secure is a shared responsibility
Ryan Janssen: Why an OAuth iframe is a Great Idea.
[... 570 words]I propose that the World Wide Web would serve well as a framework for structuring much of the academic Computer Science curriculum. A study of the theory and practice of the Web’s technologies would traverse many key areas of our discipline.
— Tim Bray # 16th July 2009, 10:16 am
Jeffrey Zeldman: XHTML WTF. Reading the comments, it’s scary how many people are totally ill-informed about HTML5 and XHTML5. # 4th July 2009, 1:22 am
Ask MetaFilter’s best introductory books. Part of Phil Gyford’s ongoing quest to “learn about everything”, a list of the best introductory books to a wide range of topics collated from a thread on Ask MetaFilter. # 12th May 2009, 11:23 am
2008
Schools and colleges should make pupils, teachers and parents aware of the range of free-to-use products (such as office productivity suites) that are available, and how to use them.
— Becta # 12th January 2008, 10:35 am
2007
Algorithm Education in Python (via) A paper describing the usage of Python in Algorithm courses at UC Irvine. I found Python invaluable when I was at university and would have loved to see it become part of the official curriculum. # 19th March 2007, 1:46 pm