What's in “A1”?
📰 AI IN THE NEWS
Why yes, I will have some A1 technology sauce with my education protein—or why our new Secretary of Education has no idea what she's talking about.
🎨 ON MY PAINT DESK
I took a class on textures last weekend. We worked on a dwarf with a hammer!
Until next week!
Stephen J. Aguilar
📰 AI IN THE NEWS
A1 Steak Sauce
In case you missed it, our new Secretary of Education, Lina McMahon, called AI "A1" in her remarks during the ASU+GSV summit. I won't bother to make fun of her comments too much, but I couldn't resist making this fabled AI+A1 sauce with generative AI.
Look at all those AI nutrients going into the brain! A1 should be in ALL school lunches.
Jokes aside, it was her later remarks that drew my attention:
"I mean, how can we educate at the speed of light if we don't have the best technology around to do that?"
"Educating at the speed of light," is nonsense and presupposes the notion that education and/or learning needs to happen fast. It doesn't. In fact, sometimes "slow" learning that's deep is better than fast, superficial learning. For example, it's fine and necessary to memorize multiplication tables, however, it's far more important to understand multiplication's relationship to addition. The former is generally faster to do than the latter. Yet, the latter is what allows for a deeper understanding of mathematics.
Speed and efficiency have their place in education, but so do meditation and rumination. Human beings aren't machines to be filled with facts that make us more capable workers. That isn't the purpose of education, at least not in a world where education is intended to lead to human flourishing.
At its core, anything that's learned should have a place or context where it is enacted, and I don't know about you, but I'd rather live in a world where we rewarded deep understanding of concepts instead of faster superficial regurgitation of them. I suspect that AI can help do both, but starting from a place of "everything must happen faster and more efficiently" will lead us in the wrong direction.
🎨 ON MY PAINT DESK
Workshop Dwarf
I took a weekend course on textures last weekend. It was the final class of what turned out to be a month of deep (and slow!) learning. This class focused on textures, from skin, to hair, to metals, to cloth. Every surface got some paint, but nothing was finished. I often treat workshop projects as moments in time where I tried something new, and I generally leave them unfinished for that reason. I like to have a running record of what I've learned, and they serve that purpose pretty well!
