Reasonable accommodations have been made for students with disabilities for decades now. While there might be some cases where AI might be helpful for accommodating students, it is not, nor should it be, a universal application because different disabilities (and different students) require different treatment and support. There‘s tons of research on disability accommodations and tons of specialists who work on this. Most universities have an entire office dedicated to supporting students with disabilities, and primary and secondary schools usually have at least one person who takes on that role.
So how do you handle kids who can‘t write well? The same way we‘ve been handling them all along — have them get an assessment and determine exactly where they need support and what kind of support will be most helpful to that particular kid. AI might or might not be a part of that, but it‘s a huge mistake to assume that it has to be a part of that. People who assume that AI can just be thrown at disability support betray how little they actually know about disability support.
We have a testing center at Montana State for situations like this. I deliver my tests in the form of a PDF and the testing center administers it in a manner appropriate for the student.
It's a question that's too vague to be usefully answered especially on a forum like this.
There's not such thing as "disabled people who can't write well", there's individuals with specific problems and needs.
Maybe there's jessica who lost her right hand and is learning to write with the left who gets extra time. Maybe there's joe who has some form of nerve issue and uses a specialized pen that helps cancel out tremors. Maybe sarah is blind and has an aide who writes it or is allowed to use a keyboard or or or...
In the context of the immediate problems of AI in education, it's not a relevant thing to bring up. Finding ways for students with disabilities to succeed in higher education has been something that institutions have been handling for many decades now. The one I attended had well defined policies for faculty and specialist full time staff plus facilities whose sole purpose was to provide appropriate accommodations to such students and that was long, long ago. There will undoubtedly be some kind of role in the future for AI as well but current students with disabilities are not being left high and dry without it.
Because it’s another nonsensical “think of the children” argument for why nothing should ever change. Your comment really deserves nothing more than an eye roll emoji, but HN doesn’t support them.
Reasonable accommodations absolutely should be made for children that need them.
But also just because you’re a bad parent and think the rules don’t apply to you doesn’t mean your crappy kid gets to cheat.
An open source campaign management app for TTRPGs. There are a ton out there, that are basically just fancy wikis. I'm working on one in Django for running my old school D&D game i'm starting back up this fall.
In my last week of funemployment before going back to work. I’m working on fun stuff like gardening, designing battle tech terrain in cad and building a web tool for solo roleplaying.
Interesting! Explains that even though I've used a laptop since 1992 to do school work because of my learning disabilities(Dysgraphia, mid-line problems, poor fine motor control) I still prefer to hand write my notes. Even if I never read them I noticed that just the act of doing them helps me remember things. I might not remember the source but I can remember the act of note taking. I've noticed the same thing with reading as well.
This is why I think AI chatbots have so much potential for education. Every student can have extended dialogue about the topic and really exercise those neurons.
I think the widespread use of that for education would have precisely the opposite outcome that you'd want.
Nothing sinks in to anyones brain because they're not actually talking about it and they don't need to actually learn it for any reason in school because they can just ask the chatbot again at any moment.
I wonder if having offloaded arithmetic to calculators has led to a society that can't do math in their head well enough to make good choices at the supermarket or in other daily situations where simple math would be useful but the situation is too casual to pull out your calculator.
But the impact of that is tiny compared to the prospect of future generations offloading their general ideation and critical thinking to machines instead of just number crunching.
People internalize conversations and the thought processes that went into them. If I have a conversation with somebody, I often walk away remembering and understanding what somebody else said and why they said it. And these memories get used in future interactions. So just like the offloading of arithmetic likely resulted in people not being able to perform mental math, what would be the result of conversing with an AI that has hallucination/logical issues (a lesser intelligence)? Isn't it reasonable to guess that this will result in diminished reasoning?
I hadn't considered that. If that's the case then we should hope people simply copy and paste the output rather than try to engage with it or take it seriously.
Though in more practical economic terms, perhaps what we're being trained for is a future in which the typical worker has a low paying job sanity checking AI output rather than a higher paying job doing the work themself.
i remember when maths teachers would scold me for not knowing my multiplication tables “are you going to carry a calculator around with you every day?” they would say when seeing me use one. Turns out i do.
That is such a tired, boring, selective memory meme. Did you not use a calculator later on in your education, say high school, for stuff like graphing and helping with equations? Do you not think educators in primary school teaching basic arithmetic knew about that?
All our maths education is based on lies which are progressively disclosed. You’re told we can’t go below zero, that numbers are integers, that you can’t take the square root of a negative number… And slowly are introduced to all those concepts building on what you learned before.
And yet this meme of “hur dur, mah teachers saids I’d haves no calculators on me but I use a phone all the time, epic fail” prevails instead of pondering for two seconds that maybe your teacher was giving a cookie-cutter argument that a literal child could comprehend but be unable to refute so they could continue with the damn lesson.
And as if people use calculators that often. They don’t. Yet being able to do some basic arithmetic is useful in such simple areas as shopping, to make more informed decisions in a world that is constantly trying to trick you.
Technological progress requires that we adapt education at the same time. We can still teach the ability to reason through problems when necessary, but still utilize technology when useful
I think AI chatbots could help but only if that is an additional modality to learn and doesn’t trump all the classical ones becoming the main mode. That would be disastrous to learning IMO, nothing will stick because users will internalize they could ask the bot to reason it for them, something like “why remember all that trivia when you could just google it”.
I remember going in for a physical Jan 2020 and my doctor talking about lot about the flu. He gave me the pneumonia vaccine and then was like oh there is this other thing but probably nothing to worry about…
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