Maintaining Context
For actual context, I’ve sprinted through the great Murderbot cycle this week, so my planning session with Colleague swerved really close to Theory of Mind territory, which is on my list of topics to not discuss with LLMs on purely utilitarian grounds.
Teaching is Theory of Mind, but LLMs are great at producing stylized text. I wouldn’t put AP/IB style lit analysis questions up there with “King James Bible” as a content filter, but humans can spot it just fine. So… is that a short cut? Are the dominant, top layer, most easily reproduce-able versions of that style useful?
Colleague Transcript (full)
Got it, Colleague. This excerpt is deeply rich in its exploration of the transformative nature of Turing’s work, juxtaposed against the physical limitations of machines at the time.
From your provided excerpt, it’s clear that you’re aiming for students to grasp:
- The shift from seeing data as physical to understanding it as abstract, a move from the tangible to the conceptual.
- The evolution of computational tools, and how each had its specialized purpose.
- Turing’s revolutionary idea: the universality of a single computational machine that could be repurposed for any task.
- The juxtaposition of the theoretical Turing machine against the practical machines of the era.
Given this, let’s craft some questions to guide students’ engagement with the text:
- Conceptual Shift: “Stephenson describes data moving from the ‘physical plane’ to the ‘mathematical’. What does this mean in the context of computing, and why is this shift important?”
- Tools Evolution: “Contrast the depiction of earlier computational tools, like those from the Electrical Till Corporation, to Turing’s conceptual tool. How does Stephenson describe the limitations of these older tools?”
- Turing’s Revolution: “Describe in your own words Turing’s revolutionary idea about a ‘meta machine’. How does this differ from the prevailing thought about computational tools at the time?”
- Practical vs. Theoretical: “Waterhouse mentally constructs the Turing machine as he observes the machine at Bletchley Park. What are the key differences he identifies between Turing’s theoretical machine and the practical device he observes?”
Do these questions align with your goal to guide students toward the intended takeaways?
It talks like a goober, sure, but it only ever talks to me. I think the more important aspect of the tool sub-question is what forces shaped that specialization, which leads directly to the transition from electrical to electronic and ties in with the other Glieck reading.
I’m trying to bank shot “big” ideas out of mundane questions, and I don’t know if that’s a great idea. But I know I need more “has class read?” assignments that happen in groups and take time, because that’s where a non-trivial amount of the reading happens.
Tie And Jeans 