Adrian Cotterell

@paulg There are plenty of teachers who are early adopters. If you make a good enough product, they will sell your product to their school.

The problem with starting a startup to make something for schools is that startups have to begin by selling to early adopters, and schools aren't early adopters of anything.

This is a great reminder that teaching nonsense words (or including reading them in daily reviews which is happening in SYSTEM WIDE initiatives in Oz) is, well, nonsense. Don’t do it. There is a very good rationale for assessing nonwords, but that doesn’t extend to teaching them.

@dylanwiliam @emollick How was the AI’s interpretation of their work? I gave Notebook LM my blog posts focused on AI education to create a podcast. The ‘lens’ in which the AI interpreted my work was definitely from a “silicon valley worldview” of Edu. In short, it added hype to my original content

Just fed the text of a book—Student Assessment, co-authored with Nancy Frey and Doug Fisher—into Google's Notebook LM (HT @emollick) and it produced a ten-minute podcast as well as a list of FAQs and a study guide. As Ethan says, "Seriously, just listen": bit.ly/47EtlYf

We use @aj_cott's fantastic Red-Yellow-Green AI-Assessment scale in our writing workshops. He's just posted an update in defense of the system that is worth your time: adriancotterell.com/2024/09/04/a-d…

Also check out the amazing work of @AnnaRMills @lfurze @aj_cott @SonjaBjelobaba and others that are discussed within. Their collective work offers great alternatives to AI-detection software.

@Shawnryan96 @tsarnick Can you point to some? I’m interested,

@tsarnick Continuous learning, persistent memory, ability to make many predictions, ability to build and update mental maps on the fly and planning. It sounds like a lot but we will get there pretty quick. Many good papers have come out lately.

Bill Gates says scaling AI systems will work for two more iterations and after that the next big frontier is meta-cognition where AI can reason about its tasks

@KrisWestcott1 The basic finding is that working memory capacity can't be increased by much, if at all. We make our students smarter by enriching what is in long-term memory, so they can do more sophisticated things in their limited working memory.

@greg_ashman @JohnYoung18 This is where we need to defer to the domain experts Greg. I’m happy to suggest I don’t have the necessary experience to adequately answer that one. But I know people who make an excellent case.

@aj_cott @JohnYoung18 Nothing casual about it. The idea that the oppressed do not realise they are the subject of their own lives and it requires the enlightened to show them the way is deeply damaging.

People defend Freire by noting he was writing about teaching literacy to adult peasants in 1960s Brazil. Even if we set aside the questionable teaching methods, the revolutionary Marxism and the quoting of Mao, this is an argument for the irrelevance of Freire to education today.

@JohnYoung18 @greg_ashman Amazing. Thank you for that insight. I think there would be many in education that might have similar perspectives. It’s that specific attitude that is valuable. If you didn’t have the former, then any attempt of the latter would become less effective.

@aj_cott @greg_ashman Put most succinctly Freire inspired me where and who to teach but not how to teach.

@JohnYoung18 @greg_ashman Not that you would find personal utility based on your experience, however, I think you would still resonate with this book. amazon.com.au/Education-Crit…

@aj_cott @greg_ashman read Freire in the 80s. inspired me in his commitment to left wing Christianity " a preferential option for the poor" but never led me to get him down off the shelf in my 30 years of leading compulsory education including 10 years in a remote community.

@greg_ashman ajie.atsis.uq.edu.au/ajie/article/v… The authors here (who have spent decades living with the ppl in some of the communities in question) show that systematic DI programs are often unhelpful and can undermine the aims of education.

@greg_ashman Because the West is still so bad at listening. Even today, we have people advocating for ‘solutions’ for these communities who have never spent time to truely listen.

@greg_ashman And the process is not finished. Even today we have teachers/principals working in some of these communities who can’t speak the local languages. How can this dialogical process happen when English is the default.

@greg_ashman Historically the West needed to be dragged into these practices though. It was people like Freire that helped make the noise for this process to start.

@JohnYoung18 @greg_ashman John, I’m pretty sure you mean that both of those aims are in fact empowering for these communities. Freire is likely why that approach is now happening in modern remote community schools. Hence, let’s not casually chuck him out like @greg_ashman is promoting.

@aj_cott @greg_ashman Adrian the core of two-way learning is teach local culture and traditions as guided by local elders AND also teach an empowering explicitly taught knowledge rich Western curriculum. Ten years at Wadeye

@greg_ashman 2/2 Sitting and listening to the wants and needs of these communities for the sake of their own flourishing (based on their criteria) is likely the other side of the spectrum. This is how I read Freire and this is the context I think his work is still relevant today.

@greg_ashman 1/2 Maybe. If there’s a spectrum though, the historical approach to educating some of these communities was an extension of colonialism. “Just become like us. Think, and do like us.” This approach is one side of the spectrum of paternalism.

@greg_ashman 3/3 Subjectification in this context is using pedagogies of dialogue. It is listening to the people to see what they want for their own children. To see what aspects of their language/culture they want passed on. Rather than a colonial power coming in thinking they know better.

@greg_ashman 2/3 Eg. this framework is important for communities in the APY lands in central Oz. By arguing that these kids just need an explicitly taught, knowledge rich curriculum like everyone else is simplistic. That is the short path to assimilation and the death of their culture.