Tommaths (he/him) 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

Without the ability to discern – to sift info and reject or choose it based on background knowledge and asking people actually doing the job of teaching – AI models are giving us a reductionist, datafied & careless view of the world, the very opposite of what education is supposed to do.

E: It is important to keep up with new technologies in general; we don’t want to ‘miss the boat’. ❌ very poor argument where children and/or large scale effects are involved, and education is both. Instead we need better regulation and much greater time-to-use with proper research.

D: ‘AI tools will be able to do administrative, boring, repetitive work or automate decision-making, freeing teachers for more creative or ‘human’ work’ ❌ This claim is not well supported by the evidence.

C: ‘ AI tools mean that teachers will be able to offer learners educational experiences that are more personalised, flexible, inclusive and engaging’ 🕳️ The evidence here is mixed & opaque, with large claims without substantial evidence, a low standard that we would not and do not accept elsewhere.

B: ‘It produces better-quality resources, explanations, tasks and assessments than we currently have’ ❌ Not currently supported by the evidence.

4. I pose the question- is it still worth it? and investigate the evidence behind the main claims as to why it might be.
A: It saves teachers time by doing tasks for them. ❌ Not currently supported by the evidence.

2. Large language models are not (and never will be) accurate. ‘The so-called ‘hallucinations’ (i.e. making statements that are lies) that happen are really the model working as intended, which is to produce something that looks and sounds plausible, rather than pursue ‘truth’ (McQuillan, 2022).’

An image of the front page of the article with a weird distorted phot of some flowers.

I have a new article out in the Chartered College of Teaching journal Impact, called ‘Embedding AI in education: A critique’. Here I make five main points, which I will helpfully plop in this thread for those without access or time to read it.

The prompt for this month's #MathsAnimationTMiP is "create an animation showing a Hilbert Curve filling a square". Can you do it? What software would you use? It can be as high- or low-tech as you like! Join in and submit at tmip.uk/animation

Mathematical intelligence is not about calculus or topology any more than musical intelligence is limited to a particular genre or instrument. It is a system for making us better thinkers and problem solvers, using the proven tools of mathematics. J. Mubeen, Mathematical Intelligence, 2022, p. 5.

Creating inclusive career pathways for young people: Afternoon Cuppa Session by Kids in Museums on cademy.io Creating inclusive career pathways for young people: Afternoon Cuppa Session Tuesday 30 September, 2pm - 3.30pm In partnership with GEM Join Kids in Museums and Group for Education in Museums (GEM)…

FREE WEBINAR 📢

Want to learn more about how your museum could support young people on their career journeys? Booking is now open for our new September webinar in partner with @gem.org.uk 🤝

Free to attend, booking essential 👉

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Did you know you can attend the GEM Conference remotely?

Book your online ticket and join in via our bespoke virtual learning platform and app!

Book here: gem.org.uk/training-and...

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#MathsToday 🏛️🎓

Mathematics of life A creative curve What have holey cards and a ball of string got to do with geometry? Let's make "string art" and find out, says Peter Rowlett When she was young, Mary Everest Boole found some cards with evenly spaced holes around the edges. She laced a thread from each hole to the one opposite, covering the card with lines that crossed in the middle. When she tried connecting each hole to one not exactly opposite, she was delighted to find the threads left a symmetric curve in the middle of the card. She felt this activity gave her an intuition that helped her learn formal geometry. Years later, in 1864, she was widowed with five children.Even though the academic system didn't value the contributions of women, she worked as a librarian and maths tutor in London.

I wrote about Mary Everest Boole’s curve stitching, string art, and Bézier curves in this weekend’s New Scientist.

Thanks!

Thanks, but I can't see anything at that link that is aimed at anyone other than people affiliated with the OU or a student. For example, can a member of the public access WiFi there? The only mention is of signing in with OU credentials.

Red-green alternating pattern of Duplo. Apologies for RG colourblind choice

If I say:
Any square (4*4 or 8*8) may be rotated by 90 degrees, if the pieces are fully enclosed in the square.

Is it possible to sort all the greens to the left and reds to the right?

#playmaths
#mathschat
#mathsky

Is the library available for use by local residents, or is it students only?

In other news, I realised that since I moved out of Northampton not one person has told me that I'm fat from the window of a passing car. I'm not sure how the residents of Milton Keynes think I'm supposed to know if they don't yell it at me on a regular basis.

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And I'm less convinced by the day that such a takeover would even need a war. Whining about desperate people in small boats and getting angry about people's genitals seems to be doing the trick all on its own.

Yeah, I kind of mean that the idea that it could happen in the 'modern' world is highly believable. Like, most fiction with these themes has an apocalypse in its recent history, but The Handmaid's Tale is just a takeover by the extreme right.

Oh! I had no idea Allan Ahlberg had still been alive -- the Ahlbergs are authors who seem to exist parallel to time. Their books were an absolute mainstay of the kids' bedtimes when they were younger; I'd change the words to Each Peach Pear Plum, but young Bill wouldn't let me get away with that […]

Photograph of a hand holding a small cereal packet, which has a shape counting activity on the back of it. The packet says Count the Shapes and shows an illustration of a bowl filled with cereal shapes such as stars, fish and trees.

Spotting maths all around us 👀 - Shape counting on our holiday breakfast cereal packet!

#MathsToday #UKMathsChat #tmwyk

Have started watching The Handmaid's Tale (no, I'm not exactly an early adopter when it comes to popular media).

It's not exactly a happy tale, but the most depressing thing about it is how horrifically believable it is.

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📣 Exciting GEM News!

£30k Awarded to Action Research Exploring Inclusive Career Pathways in Museums.

To find out the seven museums that have been selected to participate in their new Inclusive Pathways Action Research Programme, click below!

🔗 gem.org.uk/our-work/gem...

#GEM #inclusivepathways

It worked! Woooo!

Excellent! It is certainly fascinating!

Ohhhh! I'll give it a try, thank you!

How do I use that to change global link colour settings?