This would be perhaps the most ambitious project we could take on, though one that is now perhaps more readily achievable given the advent of GenAI (generative artificial intelligence) and the LLMs (large language models). As I progressed through my education and in particular as my education became more specialized, it became more difficult to find others to whom I could pose questions and gain better understanding of a subject. Even today, being a curious character, I still find that topics arise that many talk about but few understand.
Combine this desire to learn complex subjects with my firm belief that learning can only happen when knowledge is created by committing new information to memory and relationships created in our brains between this information and prior acquired knowledge. That's just a long winded way to saying, you cannot learn anything without already knowing something to which you can relate this new information. We're born with some fundamental scaffolding, and we begin building from there.
The best way to teach, in my opinion, is to start by asking questions. Explore what the student may already know and use that to anchor the new idea, concept, and information in a way that is contextually relevant to that student. It has become "normal" for many people to conduct web searches to locate possible sources of information. Increasingly, it is becoming common for a growing number of folks to convert those "search queries" into natural language questions and pose them to LLMs that swiftly respond with answers. That's a step in the right direction, but some are worried, rightly, I believe, that humans have been degrading our ability reason. That is, to judge the quality and logic of assertions.
The socratic method has long been known to combat this. By challenging ourselves to take what we already know, generate hypotheses, apply logic, and reason our way to answers, we both identify information we are missing but also better equipping our brains to analyze and synthesize information.
Combine this desire to learn complex subjects with my firm belief that learning can only happen when knowledge is created by committing new information to memory and relationships created in our brains between this information and prior acquired knowledge. That's just a long winded way to saying, you cannot learn anything without already knowing something to which you can relate this new information. We're born with some fundamental scaffolding, and we begin building from there.
The best way to teach, in my opinion, is to start by asking questions. Explore what the student may already know and use that to anchor the new idea, concept, and information in a way that is contextually relevant to that student. It has become "normal" for many people to conduct web searches to locate possible sources of information. Increasingly, it is becoming common for a growing number of folks to convert those "search queries" into natural language questions and pose them to LLMs that swiftly respond with answers. That's a step in the right direction, but some are worried, rightly, I believe, that humans have been degrading our ability reason. That is, to judge the quality and logic of assertions.
The socratic method has long been known to combat this. By challenging ourselves to take what we already know, generate hypotheses, apply logic, and reason our way to answers, we both identify information we are missing but also better equipping our brains to analyze and synthesize information.