The future of education looks a lot like TikTok and Twitter | Hacker News Reader

The future of education looks a lot like TikTok and Twitter

superduperserious.substack.com

23 pointsrjkeck222 comments

They discuss the importance of engagement, something CS50 gets right - so how does that have anything to do with short-form content? I think the beauty of things like CS50 is the engagement, but also the longer format of it. A lot of shit just can’t be broken down into a tweet or a 10-second video. I wouldn’t call anything that I’ve seen from TikTok “engaging” - the videos are over before my attention span has time to decide whether to focus on it or not

There’s one example of short-form in this entire article. In fact, right after mentioning CS50, I started discussing cohort-based, long-form content (Maven, Skillshare, and Superpeer). There’s no binary “short-form is the only way” here.

It doesn't. In fact, to the contrary, these forms of communication don't lend themselves to certain types of topics and deeper thinking critical for education (read Neil Postman's Amusing ourselves to death for a great exposition). True, they have an important place in education and I'm excited for the changes they can bring, but they are only a small piece of what the future of education will look like.

I feel like in 50 years we'll look back and realize that the loss of frequent, face-to-face, in-person human contact has caused immeasurable damage, along the lines of how we've realized highly processed foods and have caused a health and obesity epidemic. But I suppose it will get worse before it gets better.

I think most people have the same feeling. People are doing a lot of social calculus right now.

> I feel like in 50 years we'll look back and realize that the loss of frequent, face-to-face, in-person human contact has caused immeasurable damage, along the lines of how we've realized highly processed foods and have caused a health and obesity epidemic. But I suppose it will get worse before it gets better.

Or it could just stay worse, even after the realization. There are all kinds of people who realize something they do is hurting or even killing them, and keep doing it anyway.

The year is 3000. Your lawyer, trained by entertainers and TikTok clips, fails to stay focused because the courtroom isn't gamified. You're suing your bootcamp accredited doctor for malpractice. Too bad exams were eliminated.

OK, that's a take on one end of a spectrum. The article does have some valuable examples. I'm excited that things are evolving. But, sometimes, learning is tough, requires perseverance and offers no quick reward... perhaps similar to the challenges it may be applied against.

3000 seems very generous. Look how fast the dumbing down pointed out by the movie Idiocracy is progressing. It was supposed to be 500 years...

The breathless fanboyism in this piece really hurts it, and made me unable to read through to the end.

If this were written 10 years ago, when MOOCs were the poster child for "technology will solve everything including thoroughly non-technology-centric human problems", it might be forgivable. Right now, this is kinda like evangelizing Zuckerberg's "Metaverse", in a 100% serious vein. If it were written a different way, I might have mistaken it for satire.

With no discussion of prior failures in Education Technology, with not even a nod to the challenges that permeate any meaningful progress in this space, the writing came across like it was a "39 minute write", not a "39 minute read".

For those interested in a more balanced and nuanced take, I urge you to skim some posts from Kentaro Toyama's blog:

https://ict4djester.org/

With regards to the MOOCs prediction, it is true that most education has switched online

You might technically be correct, but that doesn't change the fact that "the Godfather of MOOCs" called it "a lousy product":

> “We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don’t educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product,” Thrun tells me. “It was a painful moment.” Turns out he doesn’t even like the term MOOC.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-...

> With regards to the MOOCs prediction, it is true that most education has switched online

That's just half of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) equation. Also, from what I read, almost everyone hates even that.

Who am I fanboying?

You deserve an answer, and I apologize if my tone was overly harsh. There is always a human at the other end of everything...

So, your article reads like an "X is great" piece that fails to mention all of the previous times the same sentiment was spouted and shown to not be true, because something human-centric was missing from the techno-centric solution X.

This same sentiment "the future of education is X" has been espoused with X ∈ {radio, television, internet, MOOCs, AR/VR/metaverse, ...} yet it keeps eluding us, and I don't think I can articulate it better than the former director of Microsoft Research Asia:

http://edutechdebate.org/ict-in-schools/there-are-no-technol...

Here is your unsexy QotD:

"Quality primary and secondary education is a multi-year commitment whose single bottleneck is the sustained motivation of the student to climb an intellectual Everest. Though children are naturally curious, they nevertheless require ongoing guidance and encouragement to persevere in the ascent. Caring supervision from human teachers, parents, and mentors is the only known way of generating motivation for the hours of a school day, to say nothing of eight to twelve school years."

The one-sided way you wrote your post fails to mention anything of the other dimensions that would have to be tackled by modern media in order to succeed where others have failed (another comment here mentioned Postman's "Amused to Death", and I recommend it to you as well). You omit discussion of any weaknesses inherent in these media (and how to possibly tackle them). If you even outlined these aspects, it would really strengthen your essay as something valuable to read and learn from.

I hope the above was somewhat more constructive and actionable feedback than my initial (admittedly harsh) comment.

This is super helpful context and great feedback on my writing in general. I tend to paint almost all of my articles in a fully positive light (mainly due to that being my personality) but I absolutely understand how that could lead to a one-sided piece that doesn’t capture the full picture. The title on here definitely didn’t do me any favors either. In the actual article, it reads “virtual learning != zoom lectures” but HN doesn’t allow special characters in titles so here we are…

But truly, I appreciate the follow-up and will work on adding some counterpoints / historical context to future posts.

This is what I get for trying out a clickbaity headline for once…the majority of the article is about cohort-based platforms like Maven and immersive tools like Replit. I give one short-form example because I do think it has a place in education going forward but if you read the whole article you’d see there’s more than that there.

No. It doesn't.

people learn differently and some topics are better suited to certain mediums, but personally I learn best by very concise lesson with interactions (Q/A) sprinkled everywhere, (think of regular conversation), then do concentrated reading/analysis own my own but be able to reach out to an expert with questions at anytime and asking highly articulated questions and get very in depth and unambiguous answers

Have you tried something like Superpeer before? I think 1:1 instruction is going to continue to grow as a space as there are quite a few people who feel the same as you!

that sounds terrifying

Tell me about it.

Ibn Khaldun predicted this.

if that were true, education systems have deteriorated significantly, and the only people left to correct the insanity dont understand technology, or how to rebuild education systems.

tik, and twit are emnarassing platforms, worse to mimic

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