Alyssa Vance asked, “What great classes could be taught using ideas that might be seen on the Internet, but aren’t part of a standard curriculum yet?”.
My answer:
Deep learning (especially recent ideas like graph neural nets, transformers, GPT-3, deep learning applied to science), online advertising, cryptocurrency, contemporary cybersecurity, the internet in China (seems valuable for people outside China to understand), CRISPR, human genetics (e.g. David Reich’s work), contemporary videogames (either from technological or cultural/artistic perspective), contemporary TV, popular music in the age of Spotify, internet culture (e.g. Reddit, social media, memes).
College classes often offer more diversity, so if I propose something like “the art of makeup” maybe there’s already something like that at your local college. But for middle- and high-schoolers there are lots of much viewed, much-rated youtube tutorials that could easily be classes.
Actually, a lot of these tutorials are things like machining / maker videos that used to be popular classes in school but have gotten dropped. Why? Partially budgets not keeping up with cost of living of teachers and staff (the part of “cost disease” that just means that human-intensive jobs are more expensive relative to automatable jobs than they used to be) leading to effective budget cuts over the years for most public schools. But perhaps also misguided concerns about “practicality” or perverse incentives due to high-stakes testing, both of which would make new classes difficult to implement.
But still, some ideas that haven’t been mentioned might look like CNC Machining, 3d printing, Robotics, the aforementioned Art of Makeup, Smartphone life hacks, Custom T-shirt making, Cell-phone photography, how to dance like the people in music videos.
The other class I want to see more of is how to use AI tools to create digital media.
How would this be different from movie music? There are some examples of music dynamically adapting according to what happens, but most games don’t go very deep into that. Stylistically, of course, due to the historical separation between the mediums, video game music often sounds different from movie music. But practically I suspect there’s not much difference.
Movie music wasn’t listed either, just popular music.
That said,
But practically I suspect there’s not much difference.
musical numbers in games might be intended to cover more time, and be more flow workable. But this might start to get into, ‘What type of game?’, ‘What type of movie?‘, and ‘What part of the work is the song in?’ (They might seem most similar in the trailers for each, because there they are serving similar roles/purposes.)
superforecasting: the best class would involve people actually doing forecasting on something like Metaculus or on a prediction market with financial bets.
real-world practical applications of deep learning: considering the technical and economic/ethical aspects
immersive sociology/anthropology of internet cultures: you can’t do traditional anthropological fieldwork in an undergrad class but you can lurk or participate in any one of innumerable online subcultures.
immersion in country X: using machine translation, it’s possible to consume newspapers, Twitter, TV, etc from another country without speaking the language. someone who knows country X well could build an engaging class around this.
cooking: there are not many college courses on cooking (harvard’s famous class is an exception). youtube is pretty great for demonstrations.
Alyssa Vance asked, “What great classes could be taught using ideas that might be seen on the Internet, but aren’t part of a standard curriculum yet?”.
My answer:
Deep learning (especially recent ideas like graph neural nets, transformers, GPT-3, deep learning applied to science), online advertising, cryptocurrency, contemporary cybersecurity, the internet in China (seems valuable for people outside China to understand), CRISPR, human genetics (e.g. David Reich’s work), contemporary videogames (either from technological or cultural/artistic perspective), contemporary TV, popular music in the age of Spotify, internet culture (e.g. Reddit, social media, memes).
Classes for what audience?
College classes often offer more diversity, so if I propose something like “the art of makeup” maybe there’s already something like that at your local college. But for middle- and high-schoolers there are lots of much viewed, much-rated youtube tutorials that could easily be classes.
Actually, a lot of these tutorials are things like machining / maker videos that used to be popular classes in school but have gotten dropped. Why? Partially budgets not keeping up with cost of living of teachers and staff (the part of “cost disease” that just means that human-intensive jobs are more expensive relative to automatable jobs than they used to be) leading to effective budget cuts over the years for most public schools. But perhaps also misguided concerns about “practicality” or perverse incentives due to high-stakes testing, both of which would make new classes difficult to implement.
But still, some ideas that haven’t been mentioned might look like CNC Machining, 3d printing, Robotics, the aforementioned Art of Makeup, Smartphone life hacks, Custom T-shirt making, Cell-phone photography, how to dance like the people in music videos.
The other class I want to see more of is how to use AI tools to create digital media.
These are great examples. Maybe a meta class on how to learn manual skills from video tutorials?
There’s also video game music (which might be different from music in general because it can have a particular purpose).
How would this be different from movie music? There are some examples of music dynamically adapting according to what happens, but most games don’t go very deep into that. Stylistically, of course, due to the historical separation between the mediums, video game music often sounds different from movie music. But practically I suspect there’s not much difference.
Movie music wasn’t listed either, just popular music.
That said,
musical numbers in games might be intended to cover more time, and be more flow workable. But this might start to get into, ‘What type of game?’, ‘What type of movie?‘, and ‘What part of the work is the song in?’ (They might seem most similar in the trailers for each, because there they are serving similar roles/purposes.)
Some more ideas:
superforecasting: the best class would involve people actually doing forecasting on something like Metaculus or on a prediction market with financial bets.
real-world practical applications of deep learning: considering the technical and economic/ethical aspects
immersive sociology/anthropology of internet cultures: you can’t do traditional anthropological fieldwork in an undergrad class but you can lurk or participate in any one of innumerable online subcultures.
immersion in country X: using machine translation, it’s possible to consume newspapers, Twitter, TV, etc from another country without speaking the language. someone who knows country X well could build an engaging class around this.
cooking: there are not many college courses on cooking (harvard’s famous class is an exception). youtube is pretty great for demonstrations.