Thankfully people have realised that wasn’t enough and actual programming is part of the curriculum again. Would be great if we could not make the same mistakes again when it comes to AI!

There was a similar push in the 2000s where computing lessons in schools shifted from teaching basic programming to teaching MS Office as that was deemed to be more important. And instead of teaching something fundamental about how computers work it became about prepping kids for office jobs

Co-opting the term literacy for corporate AI lessons is particularly devious because it’s hard to argue against. Everyone thinks literacy is important! But in the chaos of schools trying to adapt it’s easy for the actual meanings of these words to get confused

If literacy is the ability to effectively understand and interpret text, to me, AI literacy is understanding the limits of AI output, knowing why LLMs can hallucinate, being aware of the risks of model biases, etc etc. Not “how to use AI to offload your thinking”

Okay enough ranting for tonight. What? You thought I was about to offer that solution? Haha very funny vier april kikker in je bil

Look this is hardly the biggest problem in the world but every day I see so many people write about the dangers of genAI in education and like I hear you and probably agree with you 100% but at a certain point you gotta offer an actual alternative solution

For example, CodeCademy makes it super difficult nowadays to get to their free courses. And on the other side the new RPF code editor doesn’t let you add external links (anchor tags) to HTML files because “safety”

They are genuinely brilliant, got everything they could out of Scratch and are hungry to learn more complex stuff. But intro to coding resources are either aimed at kids and super restrictive/linear or aimed at adult learners and, well, also restrictive plus you need a credit card

A really fun reflection, I thought, not just on AI but on the purpose and origins of language in general

There are *good*, positive use of GenAI. But forcing it on people -- particularly as a massive technology corporation with its fingers in many aspects of billions of peoples' lives -- creates more risk than potential benefit. Let people opt-in as they see fit, don't force it down their throat.