Learning and Education
The extraordinary ignorance on questions of society and history displayed by the men and women reshaping society and history has been the defining feature of the social-media era.
Stephen Marche • The Undergraduate Essay Is About to Die
Are colleges even preparing your kid for real jobs anymore? @myfirstmilpod #degreefree
instagram.comThe best, and perhaps the only, way out of AI’s college takeover would be to embark on a redesign of classroom practice. But with so many other things to worry about, who has the time? In this way, professors face the same challenge as their students in the year ahead: A college education will be what they make of it too. At some point, everyone on... See more
Ian Bogost • This Year Will Be the Turning Point for AI College
I wonder if I would have loved reading in high school if I was reading the what I now love. Is the selection to blame or are my tastes so very different? If I read The Scarlet Letter today, would I resent it like I have or find it as profound as my teachers promised it would be?
Many are wailing that this technology spells “the end of high school English,” meaning those classes where you read some books and then write some pro forma essays that show you sort of read the books, or at least the Spark Notes, or at least took the time to go to Chegg or Course Hero and grab someone else’s essay, where you changed a few words to... See more
John Warner • ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving
Stay safe
instagram.comContemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine. In a tech-centered world, language matters, voice and style matter, the study of eloquence matters, history matters, ethical systems matter. But the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their... See more
Stephen Marche • The Undergraduate Essay Is About to Die
Self destructive doubt, when it is an academic’s job to doubt?
Where social questions are concerned, knowing how best to approach them is more important than providing immediate responses to why things happen or how to deal with them. The aim is to learn how to confront problems, for these are always different, since every generation is new, and faces new challenges, dreams and questions.
Just a moment...
For Lieber, AI’s allure seems more about the promise of achievement than efficiency. As with most students who are accepted to and graduate from an elite university, he and his classmates have been striving their whole life. As Lieber put it, if a course won’t have “a tangible impact on my ability to get a good job,” then “it’s not worth putting a... See more
Ian Bogost • This Year Will Be the Turning Point for AI College
misplaced motivation caused by societal incentives and pressures. To succeed or even survive, the bar is so high. When assignments/classes feel arbitrary, a means to an end, an obstacle to overcome or an obligatory box to check, there is every incentive to expedite the process of learning and none to engage with it.