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Comment by chaosprint | Hacker News Reader

My opinion: irresponsible for children; it's just that some civil servants want to show that they understand the trend. They love to do this kind of movement in order to "show off". But the fact is that they only have a partial understanding of this technology and follow what others say.

There is no information that they compared open source models and considered whether to build their own data servers.

You should at least do some experiments to show that gpt can improve quality in education, right? Although I know that data manipulation is common in scientific research nowadays by picking the data that better serve the wanted assumption, but this time they even skip this step.

Disclaimer: I live in Oslo; I'm an educator; I usually see similar poor decisions in education due to ignorance.

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I agree. I have a daughter attending primary school in Oslo(barneskole); they use iPad for almost everything because some years ago Norwegian government decided that using a tablet is important for they digital skills. As result, we have to spend half hour after dinner everyday to help her practicing reading and writing because they spend so much time in front of a screen. I don't argue that using digital tools can be helpful but replacing almost all handwriting with digital devices, in my opinion, is harmful for children development.

Reminds me of when school districts would buy iPads or laptops or computer labs without any idea of how those machines would support their mission.

Exactly. I‘ve seen it sold that anyone has less books to carry and they could do more digital stuff - but nobody had any real plans. In the end one of ten text books was a PDF and you didn‘t gain anything. Its worse, now your textbook can have no battery and there are no electricity plugs near you…

Not having a computer lab, even in the 90s, seems irresponsible to me.

Yes, figuring out how to teach and what to teach using computers was difficult, but students needs familiarity with computers and how to use them.

Saying that "they'll learn on their own in their spare time" is ridiculous and tantamount to saying schools shouldn't be teaching reading, because students will want to read on their own outside school and they already have access to books at home.

Putting iPad's and Computer labs in the same category is weird actually. One is a consumption good except for certain use cases and the other is a treasure trove for teaching.

BTW a lot of corporations that have yearly IT budgets replace large portions of PC's and server goods and sell them to schools for a dollar (or Euro). I wish that my school growing up knew about this.

> Yes, figuring out how to teach and what to teach using computers was difficult, but students needs familiarity with computers and how to use them.

Someone coming in here and %s/computers/ChatGPT/g is going to make an argument that sounds equally reasonable—so if ChatGPT is truly, materially different and worse, then the argument against it is a different argument.

My complaint here is that schools are making educational decisions based on technological fads, without good plans for how to use these technologies in education. Yes, a stopped clock is right twice a day—sometimes, it will be the right decision. Sometimes it will be the wrong decision. The trick is knowing the difference.

If it is an iPad, it stands to reason that people from the education and medical departments should first evaluate whether there is any damage to the children's brains and eyes.

But the logic in Oslo is that our municipal government has a budget, and buying it at least shows what I have done as a civil servant.

I don’t know if you can get their “must do something” mentality.

> But the logic in Oslo is that our municipal government has a budget, and buying it at least shows what I have done as a civil servant.

That sounds reasonably similar to me. People keep buying iPads for classrooms because “it puts technology in the classroom” or something like that. Then they break and get sold for scrap.

Lo! As the abacus once heralded the doom of mental arithmetic, so doth ChatGPT foretell the end of cogitation itself.

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