• 3 Posts
  • 263 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

help-circle


  • I have a slightly different perspective as someone just starting Rise as my first ever experience with this series.

    Holy shit, the tutorials are terrible. Massive info dump walls of text explaining too many systems at once, cryptic warning messages to confirm you want to dismiss the tutorials are extra confusing… And despite the massive info dumping, they don’t even tell you everything you need to know to complete the tutorial missions as you complete them. When you go to trap your first monster, there’s no tooltip to teach you how to use items in the “how to trap” explanation or NPC dialogue. I needed to google it.

    And no ability to pause in a singleplayer game? I googled some explanation about pause being on one of the menus, but I couldn’t find it. Thankfully, suspending the game on a Steam Deck pauses it, so it’s playable.

    Also, why was I given massively OP equipment and piles of loot just for logging in? The entire early game is now so easy that it’s not fun. I’m only 3 tutorials + 1 “real” mission into the game, so I’m going to try starting over without the EZ-mode loot and give it a second chance, but so far, I’m not impressed.

    If I’d bought this through Steam, I’d have refunded it already before the 2-hour playtime window closed.

    TL;DR: Terrible new-player onboarding has me questioning if I should push through.










  • Teacher:

    Myth: The job is mostly about delivering lessons and grading tests and assignments, so once you’ve done a course once, you can coast forever.

    Reality: designing and delivering a lecture is just about the easiest thing in teaching. And also very ineffective teaching, so it’s not done very often.

    Myth: School is the same as it was a generation ago, when parents were in school.

    Reality: There have been huge shifts in education, with research-supported practices replacing a lot of old, ineffective strategies. The teachers who are “old school” are usually ignoring educational research out of arrogance and/or laziness.







  • Smart phones in pockets being a problem is supported by robust psychology research. People do the worst at tasks when phones are on the desk in front of them, worse when phones are in their pockets, and best when phones are left in another room even if the devices are turned off, in all cases. It’s even worse if phones are on even without any sort of notification, like vibration. (And, obviously, notifications make things increasingly terrible.)

    The research is not at all unclear or anecdotal; it is very strong. Phones are damaging to attention, task completion, and learning. This is established; the only disagreement is to the degree of the effect.

    Re: phones in “class”, I think we’re misunderstanding each other due to terminology. Here, “a class” means a single instruction period. I thought you were for banning use during instruction time, but against phones being fully banned at school, but if you mean “class” to be the entire time from first bell to last bell, then we’re in agreement. No smart phones at all during school hours would be a good step.

    Hopefully, that might also make parents more aware of the damage smart phones are causing and support a societal move away from giving youth addiction machines.


  • You’re only considering one narrow use of LLMs (which they’re bad at). They’re great for things like idea generation, formatting, restructuring text, and other uses.

    For example, I tend to write at too high a writing level. I know this about myself, but it’s still hard (with my ADHD) to remain mindful of that while also focusing on everything else that crowds my working memory when doing difficult work. I also know that I tend to focus more on what students can improve instead of what they did well.

    So ChatGPT is a great tool for me to get a first pass of feedback for students. I can then copy/paste the parts I agree with for praise, then “turd sandwich” my suggestions for improvement in the middle. Or I can use ChatGPT to lower the writing level for me.

    For tests, it’s great to get it to generate a list of essay questions. You can feed GPT 4 up to 50 pages of text, too, so the content is usually really accurate if you actually know how to write good prompts.

    I could go on. LLMs are a great tool, and teachers are professionals who (I hope) are using it appropriately. (Not just blindly copying/pasting like our students are… But that’s a whole other topic.)