The direction I’m moving, and other teachers as well is to only consider in class work for assessment. Specifically pencil and paper work.
If you had asked me to predict what a high-quality education would look like post-Covid I would have said high quality videos made with great production value with rock star teachers and domain experts involved. Combined with local teachers offering a more personal tutoring like experience to clarify the videos.
If you asked me now what a high-quality education would look like in the post-AI future. I would say boarding schools that don’t allow phones, with almost all assessments being done in person with pencil and paper.
There’s no denying that technologies can make certain topics unnecessary to learn. Calculators can do basic calculus with ease these days and AI can summarize a text or write a bland essay or implement a simple intro to HTML assignment. But if the goal for education is to learn we have to limit the use of technologies that limit learning.
I suppose there’s another debate to be had about vocational learning and taking advantage of modern tools. That’s usually why I say “high-quality” education when discussing these things. For the average family AI is here to stay in education. For the schools for the elite, AI is an experiment which is slowly being kicked out.
It’s on the agenda to get a dedicated audio device this summer. I’ve been building up a collection of FLAC music to prepare. There’s 3 reasons for this.
I bought a Remarkable device a few years ago. Yes, they’re over priced compared to a Kindle, but I wanted to avoid Amazon lock-in. As an aside, they’re fairly Linux friendly, you can even ssh into them. Anyway, before that I would read physical books or use a cheap tablet, but the tablet fell out of favor because it was too distracting. Constant notifications, request for updates, etc. I’m so happy with my current ereader. I use it all the time, and when I read, I don’t have any apps trying to grab my attention. I’m hoping an audio player can give me that same experience back for music. I hate mowing the yard and having Siri interrupt my music to tell me about some message.
My AirPod pros were nice for the two years they worked. I’d probably grab another pair if I was still in so many Zoom meetings. Eventually though they started making a nasty buzzing noise and are now useless. I want to use my nice pair of headphones I’ve owned for a decade to listen to music.
I’m sick of paying a monthly fee to listen to the same 500 songs (if that) over and over. I’m old. I don’t listen to a lot of new music. The new music I do listen to usually comes from an article I read on NPR, not from the algorithms. I want to depend less on streaming services and have more control over what I consume, and how I consume it.
Yeah, I could probably find workarounds to all these problems on my phone by fiddling with notification settings and buying a cheap headphone adapter, but why should I have to? Why do I have to go out of my way to make something as expensive as my phone less distracting and more capable? I’m just choosing to slowly opt-out of that battle.