This is a bunch of fluff. I hope at least the snacks and lunches during the discussions were good.
"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"
It's going to be difficult not to be "fluffy" as no one really knows the true impact and what's going to happen. And it's especially challenging for universities as voices questioning the value of higher education will only grow louder.
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.
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 do like that they're open to reconsidering the grading paradigm wholesale. I taught at a boot camp for a while and our highest-placed cohorts were the ones to whom we gave neither grades nor certificates. They plainly understood the game was between them and an eventual interviewer, not them and the school or instructor.
I think this has been going on well before AI or LLMs: "A fundamental danger, as we’ve discussed, is that AI can allow students to bypass learning. Equally concerning is that students may internalize a transactional model in which assignments are outputs, teachers are evaluators, peers are optional, and knowledge (or an MIT degree) is an optimizable commodity to be acquired or produced as efficiently as possible."
Absolutely; it's a real problem. But institutions like MIT have also been participating in, and benefiting from, this transactional relationship from their side in offering degrees that they know carry so much value.
It's actually not em-dashes, they are en-dashes, which is either intentionally to deceive (e.g., swapped) or used incorrectly. Both of which are bad, it's up to everyone to decide on which is worse coming from MITality.
To be fair, the US education system has long been "cooked" due to policies implemented many decades ago now to sacrifice excellence, exceptionalism, and true merit for engineered social stability and ruling class profiteering and plunder.
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.
You can think what you like about MIT, but at least they're giving it some thought, however perfunctory it may seem. Many German universities prefer to try and ignore the issue and hope for the best.
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.
"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"
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.
Accurate description.
"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?
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.
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.