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Nigerian engineering students' favorite teachers are Indian YouTubers
Sekinat Motunrayo Ojeniyi, Samriddhi Sakunia, Rest of World, 2023/06/27

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In retrospect, the fact that Nigerian engineering students are turning to YouTube tutorials from Indian teachers is not surprising. But what should be noted is that these tutorials are an important part of these students' education. "During my days as an engineering undergraduate, what was taught to us in classes did not do enough to help students have a deeper understanding of our courses. Indian YouTubers helped bridge that gap and made a difference," electronics engineer Fasominu Oluwafemi, who studied at the Bells University of Technology in Ogun, told Rest of World. At a certain point, you would have to expect the economics to shift, with the videos forming the primary part of the education, and the in-person instruction employed only on an as-needed basis.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born
James Vincent, The Verge, 2023/06/27

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From the early days of the semantic web and web services the sales pitch featured the promise of services 'orchestration' along the lines of "plan me a seven-day vacation." So here it is again, this request that most of us will use once a year, if that. And this I think forms the basis of what may be more push-back than Google expects for its new AI-assisted search service. It wants to replace the "the 10 blue links," you see, or at least, those search results left over after the deluge of advertising, and it plans to replace them with an AI-generated summary: a few paragraphs summarizing the result, three links to sites with information that 'corroborates' what's in the summary and a 'bear claw' icon that when clicked splits the summary "sentence by sentence, with links underneath to the sources of the information for that specific sentence." But this idea - "producing cheap content based on others' work" - could "damage whole swathes of the web that most of us find useful — from product reviews to recipe blogs, hobbyist homepages, news outlets, and wikis." And it's not clear we want the 10 blue links replaced.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

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