Times have changed. Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and ChatGPT to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated than those who have spent years mastering the skill of extracting information from dense books.I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology. Their way of finding and extracting information is different—not better, just different.

Disclosure: I worked on developing smartboard technology for students in my country.

Unfortunately research doesn't agree with you on this part: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-faile...

On top of that research, my personal experience mirrors these findings. Not having hands-on labs, not reading/writing but just listening prevents things from being committed to longer term memory. How many podcasts they remember? How many interesting things they have watched made a change in their lives?

There's also mounting research that writing is different than typing, and using a real pen and paper changes how brain fundamentally works.

I also experience this daily. I take notes and make lists on notebooks all day, and it allows me to concentrate and build a better picture of my day ahead. My longer term plans are stored in "personal project planning" software, but it failed to replace paper for the last 4-5 years consistently. So, now they work in tandem. Not against each other.

From my personal experience, designing code on paper results in compacter, more performant and less buggy code in my endeavors. Writing/designing on the spot doesn't scale much longer term, and always increases the "tidying rounds" in my software.

We still romanticize SciFi movies and technological acceleration via external devices. Nature has different priorities and doesn't work as we assume. We're going to learn this the hard way.

If you can't internalize some basic and advanced knowledge, your daily and work life will be much harder, period. Humans increase their cognitive and intellectual depth by building on top of this persistent building blocks by experience. When you externalize these essential building blocks, building on top of them becomes almost impossible.

The only thing I found which works brilliantly is eBook readers. Being able to carry a library in a distraction-free device with a screen tailored for long reading sessions is a superpower. Yes, it kills the sense of "progress" due to being constant thickness and lacking pages, but it works, and beats carrying a 2000+ page tome in every aspect.

The question is if they actually are just as capable, or if they are gaming the metric used by educators. My money is on the latter, but then again I do tend to have a negative outlook.

I am not sure this is the case. I work with a mix of younger and mature students and there is a distinct inability for the younger students to compose complex abstract processes.

When people do well as a cohort they are usually normalised against their peers. It requires a little more academic comparison across age groups.

YouTube and podcasts are fine as an introduction to a topic, but they are and do encourage passive consumption. It's fine for reciting shallow factoids in class and getting grades, but won't make you an expert in a field. If you can't maintain enough attention to read, you'll always have to rely on processed, second hand information. That's why reading needs to be taught as a skill, and heavily encouraged.

I find three challenges with YouTube and podcasts:

1. In my experience, there is a lot of introductory material to be found, but I find there are distinctly fewer people discussing more advanced topics, or they are much harder to discover.

2. Audio/Video just isn't as information-dense as a book can be.

3. YouTube and podcasts tend to be much more "infotainment" than "education". And sure, we can find lectures on there, but students get lectures in school too.

> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life

That’s sad. There are many times in life one will need to do what is essentially the equivalent of reading a boring book and these kids are being set up for failure.

> Students who use ChatGPT ... to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated ...

Is your evidence for this assertion constrained to your observations of your younger relatives?

Certainly 'excellent grades' may not be linearly correlated with deep learning, but I'm curious how you correlate 'years spent mastering' with LLMs.

Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and ChatGPT to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated than those who have spent years mastering the skill of extracting information from dense books

The problem is that while YouTube and ChatGPT will get you through high school and perhaps a year of university, you'll eventually reach a point where you need information that is only available in dense books. And if you haven't learnt that skill of reading dense books, you have a problem.

There was actually an article in the newspaper just today about how a record number of university students in Sweden are struggling and failing because they are simply incapable of reading and extracting the necessary information needed from the textbooks.

> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades

Can they sustain their attention on dense and technical things at all, or when there is no grade involved?

Pointing to school grades is not really a good measure of "can these people actually digest and understand complex and longform information and narratives?" The relevance of that requirement should be obvious: at many points in your life you will need to manage boredom and your attention, to understand boredom and focusing for a longtime as a part of life and learning.

When I was a TA in uni 5 years ago, many students found reading anything longer than 8 pages to be interminable or downright impossible, which I found rather pathetic. They would give up. These were all kids who got excellent grades. They couldn't accept or manage their boredom at all, even if it was just a part of learning to do things. They constantly wanted summaries, which to my mind is worse --- they wanted someone to tell them what and how to think about something without engaging with that thing themselves. We all have to do that sometimes, of course; but, we should not expect that to be the default. What they lacked more than anything was intellectual curiosity.

> Times have changed.

Yeah sure, but that's a platitude that doesn't warrant anything.

> Students [...] aren't shallower or less educated than those [...].

Proof needed. You can't just say that.

> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology.

The tests and grading norms have changed. It's been shown that (in some countries), secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago. Being born into a world of technology only makes you apt to using that technology. It doesn't make you smarter or provide you with more knowledge. As a counter anecdote: quite a few secondary school pupils know that there's an infinite number of primes, and that E=mc^2. However, they've got no clue at all to what that means or what it's good for. It's just factoids, not maths or physics.

And in relation to the linked article, those excellent grades are irrelevant. And you even admit it. Young people don't read. Won't read. Can't read. Literature is pretty much doomed. Your cultural relativism doesn't assuage that.

Both approaches are not incompatible. It's probably more efficient to build a high level map of the subject using podcasts/YouTube videos than reading a dense book. Once you have that high level map, you have the tools to choose the dense book that is more appropriate for what you are looking for. That way the number of dense books that you have to read is reduced compared to a world without YouTube/podcasts, and the end result is the same.

Of course, if you stop just after the podcasts/YouTube, you end up with a biased map of a subject which ends up probably not being very useful if you want to apply that knowledge successfully.

Most schools will only ask for the first part, so that is enough for the kids. But I mean, they were already doing similar things beforehand to avoid having to study dense books...

I think it is two-sided.

The kids who actually have curiosity will use the internet to speed way, way ahead of anything we've seen before. They will use the resources in the "right" way: getting access to more materials, getting better feedback, getting more motivation from social groups.

The same device will be used by everyone else to just feed addictions: more videos about useless crap. More time spent simply tickling mental itches, getting more and more exposed to things that are very harmful.

> extracting information

> excellent grades

have nothing to do with interiority -- the main thrust of the article

What will they do when there isn't a podcast or video to teach them a concept?

They get excellent grades because they make sure the professor feels that they agree with them on political and ideological issues. Be a nice and friendly person, and agree with the academics on their political beliefs and you will get good grades. Knowledge has nothing to do with academic grades.

You could as well have written that you know young people who get excellent grades because they pay the smart kid to do their school papers.

I think it’s far too early to state that with any confidence.

Grades are irrelevant

We all know students with good grades who struggle at exams

Keep in mind that some of the criteria have changed as well over time, probably not as fast as technology itself, but skills like reading comprehension are tested for less in favor of e.g. tech literacy.

I don’t think ChatGPT belongs with the other two. It essentially counts as reading.

Every time I read about the next generation not being able to read, I recall all the boomers falling for penis enlargement pill scams again and again. Exactly the people who complain about standard tests being too easy nowadays are the people who panic at the sight of a self-checkout.