Author: pmackay

One problem that arose when the internet became mainstream was that, sharing information was difficult because of copy right laws. One of the major goals of the Creative Commons licenses was to enable people to share their content online by releasing their content under an open license. This revolutionised how people used the internet, because now, people could freely access and distribute information at nearly no cost, without having to worry about copy right laws. There has been movement towards open source, both in software and information, however corporations and tech giants are reluctant to contribute to open source, especially if it would compromise profits. I argue that open source should be the standard not only for institutions like those that are funded by tax money, but also massive corporations and monopolistic tech giants.

It is ironic that there is nothing open about “OpenAI”, their AI models are closed-source, and they are moving from non-profit to for-profit. Contrast this with the communist Chinese release of the most innovative and advanced, free and open-source AI model to date, DeepSeek R1. Cable Green states that “In order to solve big problems information must be open” I agree with this statement. This point is evident when considering, open access to Covid-19 studies and information lead to rapid vaccine development, open curriculum’s saves schools and students tens of millions per year, open source software like Linux is the backbone of the entire internet, and open source AI models are leading in innovation. DeepSeek R1 became the most downloaded app on all app stores, ChatGPT at number two. It has effected American markets (NVidea lost ~one trillion), forced OpenAI to release a better free model, and demonstrated that the future of AI is open.

The open source movement is necessary for making rapid progress in the scientific field, therefore the standard should be open. However some of the biggest players are holding society back from making open source the standard. With that being said there has been massive innovation in the open source movement, yet there is a lot of work to be done.

https://unsplash.com/photos/macbook-pro-on-top-of-table-vSchPA-YA_A

Teaching, and subsequently learning is not a perfect science, there are flaws with any system of teaching. In this post I will describe potential issues with the direct instruction style of teaching, and why I think it is the most popular mode of teaching. Then I will describe an alternative teaching method which is based around inquiry, and its strengths and weaknesses.

This week we learned about inquiry, a couple of things that stood out for me in Week 3: Inquiry Process, & SIFT Methodology was the contrast between teaching methodologies. The direct instruction system is setup such that students are expected to do well on exams and assignments, but the means to achieve the ends, are not accounted for when graded. Essentially the teacher gives the student material and it is in the students hands to do anything in their hands to do well on the test/assignment, with no weight given to the process of learning. The curriculum is mapped down onto the student which can lead to a mismatch in: interest (the student may not be interested in the subject), and difficulty (the content may be too easy or too hard for the student). In some cases, this teaching structure can cause students to only learn the bare minimum, and memorise rather than deeply understand topics and build mastery. I argue that the main reason that this structure is most commonly used in schools is that its resource efficient. Meaning that the ratio between student learning over resources consumed is high, meaning that, an adequate amount of learning can be achieved by students without the school using many resources.

The other teaching method is called inquiry based learning (IBL), it is based on how people naturally learn. For example children try to atomise (take something complex and reduce it to its most simple parts) anything that they are curious about, they would ask their parent a string of questions about something, or experiment with a thing to better understand it, then apply that knowledge to their understanding and build upon it, this is synonymous to learning using inquiry. This form of learning gives the freedom to the student to map their learning up to the curriculum, which leads to higher quality learning, mastery, and retention of both information and skills. I would argue that inquiry based learning is objectively better than direct instruction because it promotes deep learning, competence, and process over strictly getting good grades. The potential downside to this approach is the expense, the ratio of teachers to students, equipment cost, and work space could all add to the cost to IBL.

Given the pros and cons of each teaching style, I propose that schools should implement aspects of IBL into their courses, or offer some fully IBL courses. Doing so would make students more valuable to the work force by enabling them to obtain mastery, competence, and experience in a specialised field of their interest. This would make it much easier for students to find a high-paying job soon after graduating high school.