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Comment Re:Humanities professor here (Score 1) 59

My point about coding - which I have been doing for fun since the 1980s (I am on /. after all) - is that it was taken as obvious that it was the future-proof skill. Not many people would argue this now.

As for tools - a tool is task specific. A carpenter without a hammer or saw is clearly at a disadvantage. And carpenters have always had these tools. But Homer, for instance, did not even have a pen or ink. He composed orally. The tools of thinking are experience, memory, and logic. My point is that thinking per se requires no external tools. It is the ultimate in freedom.

Comment Re:Just do all exams in person (Score 1) 59

I do have them type them up at home so that they are legible, but I have them work from pictures of their essays that they take before they leave class, and I keep the hand-written originals. So I guess I am not completely tech free, but that is a tiny compromise.

Comment Re:Humanities professor here (Score 5, Insightful) 59

What do you think of the argument that great men (people) stand on the shoulders of others, and that AI is a shoulder?

The great men in question have all worked through the thoughts of those upon whose shoulders they stood. Even if you could make a case that LLMs understand the words they use (they don't: we all know they simply predict the likelihood that certain words will appear in a certain order in a certain context based on massive training), you certainly could not argue that those depending on LLMs (and in this case, we're talking about university students) have exercised the same care as, say, Newton did in in working through Kepler.

Comment Humanities professor here (Score 5, Insightful) 59

I banned all tech from my classroom before the pandemic, but had to bring it back for obvious reasons. Now it's banned again. This is the only answer to the issue. Don't give me that shit that I am not preparing my students for the future. First, none of us know the future. Second, coding was to prepare students for the future. If I can get my students to think autonomously, and learn how to articulate their thoughts persuasively, and not simply copy the educated guesses of LLMs, my students come out ahead.

Comment Re: They didn't learn (Score 1) 61

I have a Canon 6D, which I love. Connecting to Wi-Fi is cumbersome and completely non-intuitive. It's hard to image that this was developed by and for humans. But once you figure it out, Canon Connect allows you to control the camera completely by phone or laptop. This is great, as it permits all sorts of functions, none of which you could control via a Wi-Fi SD card.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 63

Nice failure to understand you have there. As it is about building or not building understanding, that is pretty ironic. You nicely demonstrated why _you_ are getting dumber using AI. And here is a hint (although I expect this will be flying right over your head): Information, like tables, you can carry around with you, learning them by heart is pretty worthless. Insight you cannot substitute with a book or a somewhat better search mechanism like an LLM. Insight you either have or you do not.

Learning tables is learning patterns. Are you really saying that learning patterns does not extend your knowledge?

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