🧠🇸🇪 Swedish #education officials are scaling back digital device usage in schools after reports indicated a decline in basic #literacy skills.

The new strategy prioritizes printed #books and handwriting to support cognitive focus and deep #reading. #Research suggests that physical materials enhance memory retention and reading comprehension compared to digital screens.

👉 https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/sweden-goes-back-to-basics-swapping-screens-for-books-in-the-classroom/

#sweden #neuroscience #technology #tech #learning #teaching #psychology

65 midterms on paper, 5 minutes each to grade ... you better have a lot of podcasts you enjoy. #teaching

Grading student work. Students occasionally throw extra bits of information in their submissions, like

• "Our variable is guilt, manipulated via random assignment (nominal and ordinal)" [No, it's not both measurement levels; it's one or the other]
• "Hypothesis 1: AI use predicts student academic anxiety (students with higher academic success will be more aware of the dangers of AI)" [What's in the parentheses is supposed to inform or restate what came before it...]

Students occasionally get huffy about losing points when one part of their answer is solid but they add other information that's not. I explain to them that the "extra information" thrown in as if it were helping when it is, in fact, irrelevant or even deeply wrong, tells me they have a lower level of understanding of the material. The fact that they thought this was relevant suggests that they could use some more studying or practice.

What I want to say is what that famous internet video by criminal lawyers from New Jersey say: Sometimes you gotta Shut the Fuck Up.

#professor #teaching #students #ShutTheFuckUp #MoreIsNotAlwaysBetter

Φ In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the invention of writing would destroy our memory and replace true wisdom with a mere shadow of it. He believed that when we stop internalizing knowledge and start relying on external tools, we lose the ability to actually think. Thousands of years later, we are having the exact same conversation about Large Language Models and ChatGPT.

The danger of AI is not that it will become too smart, but that it will make us too lazy to be wise. True education is what Plato called a turning of the soul, a difficult process that requires active engagement. If you let a machine summarize the world for you, you are only holding onto dead speech. We must treat writing and thinking as a practice of the mind rather than a task to be automated.

🧠 Plato feared that external tools create the illusion of knowledge.
⚡ Large Language Models offer quick results while bypassing understanding.
🎓 Genuine insight comes from human dialectic and struggle.
🔍 We must focus on literacy that teaches how these algorithms function.

https://www.templeton.org/news/plato-warned-us-about-chatgpt-and-told-us-what-to-do-about-it
#ArtificialIntelligence #Philosophy #Learning #ChatGPT #Education #Teaching #AI #Technology

That weird feeling when grading a #statistics exam: Yes, I guess, but...

Problem: three events that might happen, with probabilities:
- p(A) = .05
- p(B) = .02
- p(C) = .70

Question: what's the probability of at least one happening? (assume all events are non-disjoint and independent of each other)

Easy answer (according to what we've learned so far): .05 + .02 + .70 = .77

Student's answer...

Step 1:

- (1-.05) = .95
- (1-.02) = .98
- (1-.70) = .30

Step 2: (.95)(.98)(.30) = .279

Step 3: 1-.2793 = .721 <-- Student's answer

I stared at that for a bit figuring out what she'd done. I think the logic tracks, at least for how I phrased things. I'm not an expert by any means in probability theory but I think she did this:

1. find probability of each event not happening
2. find the probability of all of the events not happening (i.e., none of the events)
3. find the probability of None of the events not happening

There's some kind of pedagogical lesson here. I suspect it's "Maybe the student should study the provided materials more; however, if you're quick enough to do it, it's also OK to freak out during the open-book/open-notes exam, find a website with a strange process on it, and work out how to apply it to this process."

#teaching #wtf #professor

A brief intro.

If you want to follow this account, please have a chat with me so I know you are not a bot or harmful. Thank you.

I am a #Maker. My background was in #Mechanical, #Electrical, #Engineering, #SocialHousing, #FurnitureMaking, and #Teaching.
I do #Volunteering, #RepairCafe, #MakersHour, and #Carer for an elderly Mum.

Semi retired maker of things from garden planters to #Museum installations.
I am currently part time employed as a caretaker, cleaner, and maintenance person.

Currently building a #Community #Workshop in Salford.
I also run the @MakersHour account.

I am #Writing and #Miniaturing about @HarrietMaker and Daisy in the fictional market town of Theraton.
#HarrietAndDaisy

Alt...

The scene inside a 1:12 scale workshop. In the background are two blue doors, a Health and Safety at work act poster, a folded Brompton bicycle, a red dog lead hanging up, and an openroller shutter showing an enclosed yard outside the workshop. There is also narrow gauge tram tracks set into the workshop floor. The view outside is a work in progress. Inside the workshop there are two Caucasian women doll figures. Harriet has dark hair, glasses, and is wearing a red tee shirt and blue jeans, Daisy has fair air and is wearing a grubby high viz coat. They are shaking hands. In front of them is a large Wadkin AGS10 table saw painted green. It is on a wooden pallet and tied down with rope. The pallet is on an orange pallet truck having just been brought into the workshop through the roller shutter. Outside in the yard is a grey and black needle felted mongrel dog called Monty Dog, and he is trying to pick up a black recycling collection box. In the bottom right hand corner of the image is a watermark showing the Maker of Things logo consisting of an outline of a circular saw blade surrounded by a spanner, a hand saw, a ruler, a screwdriver, a cable and plug, and a pencil forming a hexagon. Inside the tools are the words Maker of Things.

A bunch of students are learning about FPCLASSIFY(3) this weekend as they wrap up their first coding assignment. #teaching

#NowPlaying
Don't Stay In School
Boyinaband

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0

#music #mukke #mood #politics #society #education #teaching #criticism #technology #tech

Last week, I gave my crash course

"Science as Process and Perspective — Become a Better Researcher through Philosophy"

for the PhD students at the Learning Planet Institute in Paris (where I first developed this course in 2018).

As always, the students were truly excellent, I received extremely positive feedback, and I've learnt so much from the discussions!

**You can bring this course to your local institution!**

More info here: https://www.johannesjaeger.eu/philosophy.html

#philosophy #science #teaching

This is a profound read by @pluralistic on writing. As much as I agree I fear nothing much will change. I do think there are creative ways to teach these skills "en masse" but they still are more expensive than your simple term paper. Yet, departments are at odds with college admins. Sadly, the latter mostly prevail.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/07/delicious-pizza/

#writing #AI #LLM #teaching

Grading a great student project is easy. Grading a truly awful one is also easy. The problems come with the projects with a mix of good and terrible and maybe-terrible-or-maybe-typo that is hard to gauge. Is this mess over here because they didn't understand the concepts or because they just made a minor goof? I spent 10x longer on those than other projects.

I need a term. Maybe "shitshow-liminal" or something.

#professor #grading #teaching #HigherEd

This semester I feel like Jekyll & Hyde:

"This is amazing. I'm really impressed with the extra work and creativity here!"

"Unfortunately, you didn't actually do most of the assignment..."

"Wow, that's an insight I've never had. Great work."

"At some point, didn't you think that having no data and no results might lead to a less-than-optimal project?"

etc.

#professor #teaching #quotidian

Poster and live demo. Engaging online course lectures using a green screen.

https://jamesendreshowell.com/green-screen/

#obs #obsstudio #teaching #onlineteaching

Alt...

A poster I presented today with a demo of my green screen setup. Follow link for full text.

I am realizing something about #LLM use and teaching: it means, if I want to make sure I'm assessing student learning and not student saying-stuff-to-chatgpt, I can't trust students as much or give them the benefit of the doubt. Tonight a student produced some graphs for her results on a stats project that had an extra variable thrown in that wasn't part of her original hypotheses. It was in her dataset, so it wasn't bizarre, and it made some sense, but there were a few things that in the past I would have said were just students being students: no error bars, odd wording of axis labels, and like that. Historically, these (for me) have been within the bounds of "students kind of missing the boat a bit."

Now I think it could be that or it could be that chatGPT or grok or some other LLM cranked these graphs out, or possibly spit out the instructions for making them in #JASP.

I can't trust the student anymore. I can't give her the benefit of the doubt. There is an ever-present alternative explanation for all faults in student work, and it's a very strong explanation.

#teaching #professor #statistics

There's a specific situation that happens sometimes in #teaching:
Teams of 3-6 students working for weeks on a project. There's a document I created that breaks down the tasks for the project by difficulty and assigns each task to a team member. Later, I grade the project and those tasks are the criteria, weighted by the difficulty rating. The teams have been looking at this for quite a while, and in some cases have modified it to fit their specific working style (I usually encourage this).

Then, during finals week or right before, two things happen:

1. One or two team members (a minority) begin to tell me things aren't going well, they're doing too much work, the others are flaking out, conveniently not being there, doing shitty work, etc. Generally, this minority has the receipts: they show me the tasks they're working on and it's clear they have spent significant time on them.

2. When the minority above is not present (e.g. not in the office, or maybe just across a big room presenting the team project to others) the rest of the team comes to me and casually-yet-sincerely tells me "the entire team" agrees that everyone did all tasks equally and they worked together at every step, so they would prefer to not use that complicated document assigning tasks, and "the entire team" wants to share all grades for all tasks equally.

Yeah.

#shenanigans #bullshit #SocialLoafing #professor

I made the last exam for my introductory #statistics course optional. How many of 25 students (current exam averages ranging from 20% to 95%) do you think opted to take the optional exam?

#professor #teaching #HigherEd

Several years ago I saw a photo from (I think) a university professor at finals grading time. It was a side table next to a comfy chair. The table had a stack of papers on it. I think a person's hand (the chair sitter)was visible, holding a glad with alcohol.

The photo was tagged something like "I'm going to drink this scotch and grade these papers. Believe me, you want to be on the bottom of this stack."

I might have to recreate this beautiful thing.

#professor #teaching #humor

Grading papers. Observations:

1. If your teacher writes "Yes! Yes!!!" next to a pretty normal question you got right, like a 35-year-old virgin discovering orgasms, you can bet 10 people missed it right before you and the teacher's desk has face-shaped dents in it.

2. Oh my god read the very, very basic directions. The super basic ones. The ones that say things like "here are ten questions. Please answer them."

3. If your paper has a grade crossed out and rewritten a few times, you know you managed to be just barely, ambiguously wrong in new and frustrating ways, and the teacher is cursing your name for making them spend ten minutes instead of thirty seconds on your grade.

#professor #teaching #highered #NotImportant

I have an opportunity to teach some teens a six-session course on "Getting Along with AI". Given that subject, what would you include as topics to cover?

This isn't the thread to praise all things AI or to bemoan its world ending abuses. These are kids for whom their entire work life will include having to use AI or at least interact with others who do, whatever their feelings about it are.

So how can I help prep them?

#ai #teaching #teens #youth

Kind of love this professor’s introduction to quantum mechanics:

https://youtube.com/shorts/jGHk6FBAqMA

#teaching #quantum #QuantumMechanics

Microsoft #Onenote seems like a very good electronic whiteboard tool for teaching until you want to save the course notes locally. As a student you have to print each presentation individually to PDF and can’t export the thing as one document. So each class across a 16 week semester is a separate pdf doc without context. What a stupid oversight.

I had considered using it for teaching but the student experience is garbage. What’s a good electronic whiteboard board for #Teaching that are able to be used I. A more thoughtful manner.

One thing I like about this book is its approach to eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Most linear algebra books present eigenvalues as roots of the "characteristic polynomial", which is built from the "determinant", which in turn has some formula defining it. These objects are rarely motivated geometrically, and so you're left with limited understanding of just what an eigenvalue is or why linear transformations on finite-dimensional vector spaces must have them. Axler avoids determinants till Chapter 9 of the book, focusing instead on linear operators. The fact that operators must have eigenvalues pops out of the observation that iterating an operator on a given non-zero starting vector results in a set of vectors that must eventually become linearly dependent. This fact also leads to the development of the characteristic polynomial; you can then come at the determinant from this, more geometric, perspective.

#math #teaching #LinearAlgebra

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #Teaching