[ExI] virtual education, was: RE: virtual travel

[William Flynn Wallace]

'vastly superior'   - research studies, please.   I will never be convinced
that for some topics, some students, a live person is not essential.  I
answer thousands of questions on Quora and if the person who wrote the
question could be questioned there are many times I would do so, as the
question doesn't make sense, is vague, etc.  If we could talk we could
straighten it out.  I cannot imagine what an AI would do with these
questions.  Crash, I think.

I will refer again to the TV-taught psych 101 course I monitored.  The
students hated it.  OK, so the teacher was boring and a better personality
would have had better ratings, I suppose.

 the academically rich are getting dramatically richer, the academically
otherwise are getting little or nothing.   Did you just contradict your
'vastly superior' statement?

For psych 101 and some others, most of the A students and some of the B
students just don't need to come to class if all you want from them is good
test scores.  Is that all we want from students?  What about developing the
ability to interact with a superior?  How to ask questions is far more
important than a bunch of rote-memorized answers.  What about collaborative
learning?  Putting people in groups to solve problems and learn to interact
with peers?  (could add, perhaps, pages of stuff to this)

Virtual learning has a big place, but it's not the only one for sure.

bill w

On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 10:00 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *Dave Sill via extropy-chat
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] virtual travel
>
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> On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 9:58 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>  OK so now we can see that it isn’t a good idea to join a tourist stampede
> and won’t be again in the easily foreseeable.  So how can we compensate for
> that?  I can imagine a form of virtual tourism which not only mimics the
> experience, in some ways it exceeds it…  A virtual tour could answer that.
> Being there would merely give you practice mooing.
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>  https://duckduckgo.com/?q=virtual+museum+tours
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> -Dave
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> OK cool thanks for that Dave.
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> This suggests the next question.  As we temporarily suspend our
> civilization, of course the economy takes a lightning-bolt hit, even as we
> discover far more efficient new ways to take care of our necessities.
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> How much of our economy is completely dependent on inefficiencies?  I am
> already seeing the answer to that in our education system: most of it.
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> Do let us focus on education as a sub-economy.  We can already see that
> most of the time spent in physical school is mostly a waste, if we consider
> education as the primary desired end-state.  Is it?  If so, virtual
> education is available, has been for a long time and is vastly superior to
> anything the students can get in school, along with being far cheaper and
> safer.  Socialization is more difficult if done virtually of course.
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> The teachers union is not liking this one bit, for perfectly
> understandable reasons.
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> I am doing a project for our local superintendent: collecting parent-eye
> view feedback on virtual learning.  The one overwhelming message coming
> thru loud and clear: the academically rich are getting dramatically richer,
> the academically otherwise are getting little or nothing.
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> Sal Kahn started his online Academy as a humanitarian effort to close the
> global academic achievement gap.  The gap he hoped to narrow and bridge
> with the virtual classroom opens to a yawning chasm.
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> spike
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