edtechdev

Or get an AMD 395 laptop or mini PC for half the price of an equivalent mac device

which explains why this tool requires a NEAR AI account to use

I tried this out on huggingface, and it has the same issue as every other multimodal AI OCR option (including MinerU, olmOCR, Gemini, ChatGPT, ...). It ignores pictures, charts, and other visual elements in a document, even though the models are pretty good at describing images and charts by themselves. What this means is that you can't use these tools yet to create fully accessible alternatives to PDFs.

Cognitive load isn't a valid or useful concept: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-th... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2024.2...

There are separate contexts involved here: the coder, the compiler, the runtime, a person trying to understand the code (context of this article), etc. What's better for one context may not be better for another, and programming languages favor certain contexts over others.

In this case, since programming languages primarily favor making things easier for the compiler and have barely improved their design and usability in 50 years, both coders and readers should employ third party tools to assist them. AI can help the reader understand the code and the coder generate clearer documentation and labels, on top of using linters, test driven development, literate documentation practices, etc.

Some research:

Students learn and understand college math more when the classes are contextualized (usually engineering, biology, but you can also use everyday examples). See decades of research on situated learning and related approaches. https://careerladdersproject.org/docs/Contextual%20Approache...

Developmental courses can also be compressed https://blog.careertech.org/research-review-promising-practi...

Dual enrollment saves time and money and improves success. Let high school students take college math courses.

Corequisite remediation is the current best practice. Let students take regular (not remedial) math courses, and improve advising and support. https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/easyblog/future-of-corequisite-... https://strongstart.org/resource/corequisite-mathematics-too...

Good to see further development in this space. Would be interesting to see how it compares to Decap CMS https://decapcms.org/ and Static CMS https://www.staticcms.org/

Me personally I'd like to see something that supports easily creating and using different types of objects besides pages (such as: events, books, recipes, etc.), like content types and fields and views in wordpress or drupal, ideally aligned with schema.org like https://www.drupal.org/project/schemadotorg I think Hugo might support content types in YAML or something.

It struggles with basic math: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-is-tutoring-students-but-stil...

There are some activitypub apps that support nomadic identity like HubZilla and Streams: https://codeberg.org/streams/streams

Another non-activitypub alternative is nostr, where your identity is a public/private key pair: https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr

MAA has a free, evidence-based instructional practices guide https://www.maa.org/programs-and-communities/curriculum%20re...

I'm not sure, but maybe GPT4All will eventually add support for it: https://gpt4all.io/

Educational researcher here. There's no such thing as a "science of reading." It's part of the highly politicized "reading wars" (see also the "math wars" which has been going on for decades). It's no coincidence that Republicans are pushing phonics as the end all be all solution to teaching reading, and you can cherry pick educational research studies that support or disconfirm various teaching strategies. Phonics has its place, contexts where it is appropriate and beneficial, but it is not the sole strategy that works or should be used in every context.

A recent meta-analysis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338494581_Meta-Anal... and the What Works Clearinghouse have summaries of the evidence for different strategies for improving early reading skills: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/practiceguide/14 Direct Instruction (also championed by one political side) is not an effective strategy: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/EvidenceSnapshot/139

Here's just one post with a little more info on the political context: https://radicalscholarship.com/2023/01/14/does-the-science-o...

A bigger scandal is how states like Florida game the system to make their reading score rankings look higher: https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2023/01/05/floridas-educati...

The good news is there are a lot of strategies that help with reading in various contexts. There's even research on how reading to dogs (or even robots) helps students with reading :)

Wikipedia is unfortunately biased in many areas that have any kind of controversy/disagreement. Education is one other topic where Wikipedia has a lot of bias. Wikipedia's "neutral point of view" idea is not only false but unobtainable. Persistence wins over logic or evidence.

Would be interesting to see this connected to YouTube, to improve upon their auto generated transcripts. There is this command line version using YouTube-dl and OpenAI's API https://simonwillison.net/2022/Sep/30/action-transcription/

You could do a similar 4GB RAM server setup for around $7/month using the Yunohost server app manager (free) + a VPS server host like Hetzner (or see lowendbox for others).

See the instructions on the bottom of this page, for example: https://joinfediverse.wiki/How_to_host_your_own_Fediverse_in...

Here's a list of all the server apps Yunohost supports: https://yunohost.org/en/apps?q=%2Fapps

I was curious if there are plugins for [[wiki links]] and backlinks. Best I can tell, you'd need to use this wiki link plugin for the remark markdown processor: https://github.com/landakram/remark-wiki-link And then this github action to add backlinks to the markdown files: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/maintain-backlinks-in...

Chemicals from tires are killing off fish, too: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2022/...

There have already been responses to this criticism before, such as: https://drbenvincent.medium.com/the-dunning-kruger-effect-pr...

including from David Dunning himself https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-35/april-2022/dunn...

Logseq is free and open source https://logseq.com/ You have to sync yourself though (for now). You can also publish to github pages.

My only issues are: they are focusing more on the desktop and (now) mobile apps, instead of the web app. You can't quickly share items to the app or web version to quickly save links, etc. They did have github integration built into the web version but are abandoning that to work on their own paid sync solution that isn't out yet. But you can manually sync the files as I mentioned.

For now I'm mainly sticking with a wiki but keeping an eye on developments to logseq and similar open source apps like Athens Research, Bangle, etc. See this twitter list of different knowledge management tools: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1396562498002825240

This Falstad animated circuit simulation has been the best at conceptually understanding what's going on in circuits: https://falstad.com/circuit

Click on the 'Circuits' menu to see dozens of example circuits.

One issue with the hydraulic/fluid analogy is the "empty pipe" misconception - we forget or don't know that in electrical circuits, the circuit is a closed loop. An example of this misconception is that beginners sometimes think the current "wears out" as it goes along the wire. The Falstad simulation shows a line of moving dots that move faster or slower depending on the current - a little more like a train moving in a pipe - which helps counter this misconception, although it, too, isn't perfect. As a next level, I like showing animations/simulations that show the role of charge on the 'outside' of the wire in steering current flow, as well as magnetic fields surrounding the wire.

Cognitive load theory is unfalsifiable and wrong about many things https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-th...

Of course we have limits to how much we can do at once, but learning isn't like filling a bucket. Learning takes active work, effort. An analogy would be like saying 'weight lifting is easier with tiny weights' or 'don't lift too much weight.' Yes, but that's obvious, useless, and forgets the presumed goal of weight lifting, which requires putting in some effort. Similarly, you wouldn't force kids to listen to lectures about baseball or other sports and memorizing all the rules before letting them play.

Some of the other things mentioned on the poster article are false or only apply to rote, trivial learning. Remember most of this type of traditional psych research “includes participants who have no specific interest in learning the domain involved and who are also given a very short study time.”

Worked examples, like other passive learning situations, can cause an 'illusion of knowledge' - feeling like you know and understand, but not really.

Look at pre-worked answers, build rote knowledge, etc, before trying to solve problems? We learn more doing the exact opposite - see research on 'productive failure'. We learn best in context, when we have a need to learn.

Our intuitions about learning, teaching, etc, are often the exact opposite of reality. Here are just a couple of examples:

Khan Academy and the effectiveness of science videos https://youtu.be/eVtCO84MDj8

Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom https://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19251?cid=nwsltrtn&sourc...

TerminusDB is a graph database that supports versioning https://terminusdb.com/

For me, an issue is that the most popular frameworks are created by huge companies who primarily rely on ads and tracking data, so everything requires massive/complex server-side resources, which are too expensive for someone like me who just wants to make free and open source web apps. I was hopeful about the 'unhosted' movement 10 years ago, but it kind of fizzled, as seemingly have related projects like pouchdb and solid. I'm hopeful about recent posts using sqlite in the browser and w3's storage foundation, but they are still in development, not really ready for prime time anytime soon. pwa's and the like seem to not be in much favor anymore, either.

Browser vendors (controlled by the same huge companies) blocking websql and poorly supporting things like pwa are other examples of this issue.

Has anyone made a note-taking tool (like notion/obsidian/logseq) that builds off of a computational notebook tool (like jupyter/observable/starboard)?

Mainly just needs wiki style links and backlinks and a search function.

This is how Western Governors University works - they have separate instructors and evaluators. Not sure how well it works in practice, however. I have read a few complaints.

Been looking into terminusdb, an open source graph database implemented in prolog and rust. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867767

One example today relates to teaching (in college). Most instructors (~75%) predominantly lecture, even though hundreds of studies have shown that increases the failure rate of students by 55% on average compared to teaching with some active learning. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111 We're losing hundreds of thousands of STEM major students because of that alone, disproportionately students from underrepresented groups. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/12/6476

Drupal has become more targeted to enterprise. For sites you're developing yourself, wordpress can do the same stuff as drupal now, especially with advanced custom fields (ACF). Another alternative is Statamic.

Yeah, Wikipedia also has a more in-depth list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

Yeah the lack of open source prevented me from committing to observable, too, so I look forward to trying dataflow out.

Just in case this is of interest to others, some other open source browser-based computational notebook tools include:

* Starboard https://starboard.gg/ * And of course there's always Jupyter, but it requires a server component

And this isn't the same thing, more of a javascript playground (open source alternative to codepen and the like), but see also Slingcode: https://slingcode.net/

This is a junk article written by a right winger who writes for the "American Council on Science and Health" which you can read more about here:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/american-counci...

This article was written just to troll up attention for his book that came out the same year (2012) with a title that makes the bias more obvious: "Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left."

I've never heard of the guy before, but it only took a minute of googling to find that out.

I recommend people try the "lateral reading" technique when you come across articles like this. Essentially, Google the source to see if it's biased and unreliable like this is. More on lateral reading and the SIFT technique (stop, investigate, find, trace) https://library.nwacc.edu/lateralreading/sift