Assistant Professor @UCIEducation Interested in [foundations/history/philosophy/equity] of ed tech, ed data science, and learning sciences

Joined August 2019
I'm sure @geoffreyhinton knows you don't need AI to "draw all the curves for you" and have students "try changing the coefficients [of polynomials] and see how how the curves changes." @Desmos does that. @ddmeyer, maybe you should offer Hinton a tour?
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By the way, Ben usefully separates the evidence he's gathered from his own personal commentary. Regardless of what you think of his commentary—you don't even have to read it—I think the evidence is worth paying attention to.
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Sure there's some commentary sprinkled alongside the evidence, but I think a lot of critiques about his writing are focused on his personal commentary at the end (and some focused on his data collection methods). But why can't we have a conversation about the data itself?
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Alpha School defenders have stated that good criticisms of Alpha School are welcome, but @benjaminjriley is not serious and shouldn't be trusted. I'm curious what they think of this critique. Should it be taken seriously or is it just Ben continuing to try to stop edu innovation?
I’ve just published another report on Alpha School’s Survival Challenge.
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Can you guess which educational psychologist said this? "Common observation should teach that mental capacities are highly specialized. A man may be a tip-top musician but in other respects an imbecile: he may be a gifted poet, but an ignoramus in music: [cont.]
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he may have a wonderful memory for figures and only a mediocre memory for localities, poetry or human faces: school children may reason admirably in science and be below the average in grammar: those very good in drawing may be very poor in dancing."
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Wow, unexpected career milestone reached! Piotr Wozniak (@SuperMemoWoz) quote tweeted me—to quote Seymour Papert's view on something at that! (I'd actually completely forgotten about this quote. Nice reminder.)
Replying to @THSchoolFactory
just by chance I see Papert agreed with you, however, I think it only applies to directed learning, as kids naturally balance frustration: xitter.cf/EdTechMuser/status/180…
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Since there's a lot of excitement around accelerated learning with ed tech, check out The Program. In a LARGE experiment (900 students, 32 classes, alg 1, 2, and geom, 3 conditions), most students using The Program without teacher help finished the curriculum in half the year!
MathAcademy, Alpha School, Mentava, Recess, and yes I'm throwing PhysicsGraph in there are lighting the world of education on fire and I couldn't be more excited.
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@bferster has a nice writeup on this. There's also an article called The Shame of American Education that talks about it. But I don't see much discussion on social media. (The founders aren't on X.)
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Shayan Doroudi retweeted
I'm excited to announce the most ambitious recreation of Bloom's 2Sigma study of the last 40 years. It's funded by @reedhastings and staffed by a team of 20 of the best educators in this country. Our education team's goal is to show the largest academic gains in one year ever recorded, and we'll publish our results even if we fail. Recently, @jwdanner introduced me to @reedhastings. Most people know Reed co-founded Netflix. Fewer know he has been one of the driving forces behind improving education for the last twenty years. When Reed pitched me on recreating Bloom's famous 2-sigma problem, I felt an overwhelming sense of hope for education. Over the last few months we have moved at breakneck speed to assemble an exceptional team. Someone recently described it to me as the "Avengers of education." We are testing one question with the rigor it deserves: can elite one-on-one tutoring reproduce the largest learning gains ever measured in a controlled study? We will work with researchers from Stanford, Brown, Cornell, and other leading institutions, and we intend to be the most transparent research group in the field. That means publishing our methods, our benchmarks, and our results, whatever they show. We will invest up to $100,000 per year per student to give them the best education on the planet. If it works, the data and methods can help educators and technologists recreate these outcomes for every child. We are actively hiring tutors, engineers, and operations people to help us climb this mountain.
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The implication here seems to be the technology is good , but the training data and learning sciences/academia are to blame. @OpenAI, @Alphaschool, Knewton etc. are here to save the day, but when they mess up, they can blame us academics for making their work harder.
Something shocking I've learned at @Alphaschool: AI is horrible at designing edtech & educational material. Learning science is so poorly implemented in academia that it's embedded in the training data for every model, and they'll naturally make the same mistakes without realizing it. Our engineers & learning scientists have to do an incredible amount of manual work around designing good questions & grading rubrics & skill trees.
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We are to blame for the failure to disrupt. @bjfr
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Shayan Doroudi retweeted
The "does creativity decline with age?" debate has been muddled by a category error. There isn't one kind of creativity. There are two...and they move in opposite directions across a career.
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Just a few days ago, I started going through “The Concept of Education in Islam” by al-Attas with great interest. His ideas have had profound influence on scholarship in Islamic education, though I question the extent to which they’ve been actualized in practice (so far).
God bless the departed soul of Professor Naquib Al-Attas. We are deeply in loss for his passing. His contribution to the Islamization of knowledge was unparalleled. It was Prof. Naquib's inspiration which laid the ground upon which I established the Islamia school in 1983. Prof. Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas was deeply involved in the 1977 First World Conference on Muslim Education in Makkah, the papers of which became the foundation for our curriculum research. May he join the great company of the prophets and learned as one of the shining exponents of God's Holy Book. #Peace
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It was an honor to be able to give a talk for this symposium on Justice-Oriented Visions of AI and Education at the Northwestern Symposium on Education, AI, and the Learning Sciences. Talk linked here: youtube.com/watch?feature=sh… 1/4
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I do so by turning to historical approaches to AI (broadly conceived), education, and social justice that are largely forgotten. Namely, I briefly touch upon the work of Seymour Papert, Heinz von Foerster, and (even more briefly) Ivan Illich. 3/4
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I end by discussing a common inspiration in Papert and von Foerster's work: Warren McCulloch's notion of heterarchy. McCulloch described how a six-node neural network could give rise to a heterarchy of values. 4/4
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Shayan Doroudi retweeted
where have you seen ai / tech used to support this kind of shift? "The alternative to... schools is not the use of public resources for some new device which "makes" people learn; rather it is the creation of a new... relationship between man and his environment."
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