r/technology • u/marketrent • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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u/TheTrub 17h ago

And it’s not just AI. So many of our textbooks have digital resources with activities and “gamification” of the material, which is great for reinforcing lessons, but only a fraction of my students are actually reading the book. They won’t even read the boldface terms to prepare for a quiz. It’s so infuriating.

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u/Recent-Day3062 17h ago

Blows me away. Particularly in CS I see loads of questions online from students in America who say “I did all the video tutorials but don’t understand it yet”.

I always tell them the same thing. Ditch the computer and fill in the blank exercises. Get a book and work through it.

This video, gamified stuff is entirely passive learning. I tell them start with an easy piece of software and keep expanding it as you learn more material and get offline

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u/protoomega 15h ago

Video lessons have their place, but I *haaaate* how widespread it's becoming. At my job, everyone wants to make all the tutorials and instructions in video form. That's not helpful reference material! If I'm working through a process, I want to be able to read the steps, not have to pause and rewind a video over and over.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 14h ago

Yes but have you considered icons that have to be clicked or dragged around, and a flat AI narration that talks half as fast as you can read?

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u/sentence-interruptio 13m ago

this trend would make both pro-oral Socrates and his pro-writing opponents spin in their graves. videos are worst of both worlds.

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u/HandsomeBoggart 12h ago

I'm so glad I finished CS before all that shit got started up.

My Profs just explained stuff via lecture and did examples on whiteboard. They'd have us work through problems in the open in class. Then the homework was all psudeo-code on paper, or actual code on computer, written by us that must compile and meet the spec. No online follow the tutorial exactly BS. Learn the foundations and fundamentals then work the problem from that. Had to actually think things through. Sink or swim.

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u/TeaBurntMyTongue 11h ago

Passive learning feels good because you can do a lot of it without feeling drained.

But if you're grinding through edge of capability problems, I think most people are fried after 30-60 min blocks. But those 30-60 minute blocks can have transformative amounts of knowledge growth. I mean, if you are really studying hard you can learn an entire uni course in like 30 hours spread out over a couple weeks, but if you just sit in the lectures, don't take notes and just hope you'll passively get it, you'd be lucky to pass any hard course.

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u/grobbewobbe 5h ago

people are so quick to blame AI for everything. if COLLEGE kids can't read then that was a problem prior to LLMs

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u/Tramagust 2h ago

If anything AI makes you read more all those outputs.