"Guiding principles: Be bold. Be humble. Put humanity front and center. Lean into learning. Teach with intentionality. No one size fits all."
"Recommendations: Adapt educational processes for an AI-aware world. Center people, community, and the residential experience. Build processes, teams and tools for continuous reflection, iteration, and improvement"
Yes, it's 95% fluff, but there is a real admission here that the guidance really ought to accept that there will be a whole host of tasks/assignments that kids engage in where the assumption SHOULD be that they basically will leverage AI, and that for their own benefit, resources should be set aside to promote experiences -- both in the context of assessments but also even in the social sphere -- there the influence of AI will be very purposefully prevented.
That is an actual stake in the ground, I think (as far as it goes in context like this). I think I would have been hard-pressed to have predicted that there would be such a revolutionary technology where the explicit ask of MIT faculty would be to prevent its influence in the school.
That fact, multiplied over 1000 different disciplines, is one of the ways that AI is going to bring amazing progress to our world.
https://www.philanthropy.com/news/can-a-350-million-gift-cha...
All concerns, while the real goal is stated right in the article:
"With this new approach, he says, experts in many fields can gain a deeper understanding of AI so they can better harness it. Meanwhile, computing experts are gaining greater exposure to the work of their counterparts in other fields. That exposure is giving the technologists a better understanding of how to create and train AI tools to better serve others."
I'm sure they will have many meetings about future meetings.
MIT is so very, very overcapitalized.
These things don't lead to anything other than a rich guy getting his name on a building, and more corruption in academia. By far the best thing which could happen to MIT would be for 95% of the endowment to go up in a poof of smoke, bringing it back to nineties levels. That's the end of the period when the Institute did high-integrity research.
I want to get back to the era before people went to MIT as a center of wealth, power, and prestige, and would lie and cheat to get tenured positions there, to where it was a place where nerds went to nerd together.
And to a place where every !@#$% done didn't lead to a self-hyping press release, but where statements were precise, measured, calibrated, and most importantly, scientifically-accurate.
"My leg already had a cut on it. No need to worry about the new stab wound in my chest!"
Anyone put it into pangram yet?
No, I can't provide a cite. Insider information. But whistleblowers have been threatened with being "Shwartzed" since (e.g. have frivolous criminal charges filed, to make their lives hell). In every case I've seen, whistleblowers signed an NDA, a non-disparage, and backed down.
That's why I don't trust a !@#$% thing from MIT anymore. Lies and fraud get covered up. Once that starts happening, you can't trust anything.
In this particular case that makes the message more trustworthy for me ;-)
Tell us more about how MIT giving AI some thought compares superiorly to 'many German universities', and please tell us more about which German universities and in which circumstances.
I'm just ignorant to German universities. Honestly, the only thing I know of is not even University level German education, but just the concept of the German gymnasium system, and that was from when a exchange student visited my high school, in the 1990s!
Thanks for the response. Cheers.
To explain briefly:
Broadly speaking, there are these types of schools:
- Hauptschule (lower secondary school) - Realschule (intermediate secondary school) - Gymnasium (grammar school)
in various organizational forms. At a Gymnasium, you can obtain a full Abitur (university entrance qualification), which qualifies you to study at - Universities - Universities of Applied Sciences
For studies at Universities of Applied Sciences, a Fachabitur (subject-specific university entrance qualification) is necessary, which can be obtained in various ways. Previously, diplomas were usually awarded there, an academic degree between a B.A. and M.A. Since the Bologna reforms, the system has been changed to B.A./M.A.
At Universities of Applied Sciences, studies are more practically oriented (with practical phases); however, the biggest difference is that you cannot pursue a doctorate there, which is only possible at a "proper" university.
Besides social informatics, I also teach academic writing, which is why the topic of AI is important to me, because it's not easy for teachers to deal with. But I also don't think the strategy of simply looking away is effective.
And there aren't enough hobbyist learners to sustain education at its current level.
AI is an opportunity to improve true education and learning on an individual and community level based on free association without the authoritarian and violent hand of government imposing lowest common denominator uniformity on everyone to produce uniform and manageable, profitable pseudo-citizen cogs.