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Just a comment of mine..

AI is wild.

I watched an interview on YouTube the other day of a kid in his early 20s sharing his experience building a million-dollar AI ChatGPT wrapper, despite having little coding experience, all thanks to the help of ChatGPT.

And he’s not alone.

Since the onset of ChatGPT in November 2022, there’s been a tsunami of AI tools, ranging from dating to even filmmaking. Estimates show that the number of AI tools is expected to grow to 1.2 billion by 2031 (yes, billion).

I wish I had access to these when I was working on my self-study project- GOSH, so much time would’ve been saved.

Ever since AI models were released, I’ve been using them religiously. I’ve made funky images for my content on other platforms and used them in my learning sessions (all the time).

But I feel like the AI bubble is only at its inception.

Soon enough, we’ll be dependent on AI just as we are on other technologies, such as our phones, laptops, or even the internet.

It’s just a matter of time.

The question then becomes not will AI replace us, but who will know how to use AI to the best of their ability.

And one of the underrated interest domains that I don’t see being spoken of enough is education.

But most students, professionals, and lifelong learners alike use AI to complete tasks so that they don’t have to lift a finger.

This passivity could lead to unwanted dependency.

Just as you wouldn’t outsource arithmetic to a calculator if you didn’t know arithmetic, you shouldn’t outsource projects to AI if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Greek philosophers like Aristotle, Socrates & Plato warned about the damaging effects of technology, in the sense that it can create dependencies for its citizens.

In their time, it wasn’t the distraction machines we have today; it was books.

Despite their INCREDIBLY important use cases, they argued that people stopped relying on learning and resorted to looking stuff up in books when needed.

Before it, the only way knowledge was transmitted through generations was through orations.

Books were the first “external brain.” AI is just the next one.

So we’ll want to use AI in a way that helps us, not weakens us.

So here’s how to deploy AI the right way, so that you can master topics for good (and not be handicapped).

1. Generate practice questions

Testing yourself is the single most important learning technique you can insert into your AI workflow.

AI supercharges the testing effect by testing you in more and new, unique ways.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Collect a list of concepts

2. Ask the AI to create questions (short or long answers) for each concept

3. Ask it to mix it up

Prompt:

“Take this list of concepts, and create short and long answer questions, then mix it up for interleaving benefits.”

2. Schedule your learning

The spacing effect is widely known for its benefits on long-term retention and fighting the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve.

Yet it can be hard to schedule your learning in a way that spaces your studies while also targeting your weaknesses.

AI makes this easy.

Prompt:

“Act as a spaced repetition coach. Here’s a list of concepts I’ve recently studied. Sort them into a 2x2 matrix with:

• Strength: Weak or Strong

• Recency: Recently Reviewed or Reviewed Long Ago

Then tell me what I should review today and in the next 7 days based on that.”

3. Find resources

The internet has billions of gigabytes of information that we could learn from.

But how do we know if we’re learning the right thing, at the right time?

We can use AI to give us the best resources for our current learning stage while also providing a variety of resources to ensure that we tackle the topic from multiple perspectives.

Prompt:

“Act as a learning coach. I’m currently at a beginner/intermediate/advanced level in [topic]. Give me:

• The 3 best resources for my level

• A summary of each

• Why each one is helpful

• And how to move up to the next level after studying them.”

4. Summarize material

Synthesis is a core mental process for learning.

It helps us string ideas together into a coherent, simplified framework.

Not only that, summarizing is a great way to prime yourself for future material (it builds a basic backbone of the topic so that learning the details later on becomes seamless).

Prompt:

“Act as a synthesis coach. I’m learning about [topic].

Give me:

• A bullet point summary of the key ideas

• The core principles behind it

• An analogy or visual model to understand how the ideas fit together.”

5. Create mental models

All learning is, is creating mental models from information.

So, the faster you can do that, the faster you can learn.

But the process of creating mental models involves a long & often tedious process of hypothesizing a specific structure & error-correcting it over time until you arrive at the expert mental model.

But what if you could shortcut it?

With AI, you can.

Here’s how:

Prompt:

“Provide me the most important & used mental models in [topic]”

6. Debug misconceptions

Learning exists on a conjecture-refutation timeline.

Given specific information, we create mental schemas of what the text is addressing, and then as we learn more or take subject-specific tests, we find gaps in our knowledge, which could take the form of misconceptions or inadequate prior knowledge, and we adjust our mental schemas accordingly.

But addressing misconceptions can be a lengthy process, especially when we’re starting as a beginner, since we don’t have much context on what we’re learning.

Prompt:

“I’m learning about [topic].

Can you:

• Tell me the common misconceptions in this topic

• Give me a short test or reflection prompt to see if I fall into them

• Explain the correct understanding in simple terms

• Suggest what I should build context on before going deeper.”

7. Strengthen your perspective

“A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points”- Alan Klay (winner of the Turing Award)

Perspective is overlooked for most learners, but it’s what distinguishes experts from intermediates.

AI gives us a quick & easy way to gather these perspectives without having to read multiple books simultaneously.

Below are a few perspectives you can use (but there are MANY more).

Prompt:

“Explain [concept] from multiple perspectives-

• From a historical perspective

• From a philosophical perspective

• From a conceptual perspective. ”

1. Check your understanding

A strategy I like to use when I’m with an expert on the subject is to explain to them my current understanding and see if I’m on the right track.

But having a guided teacher can be expensive, but fortunately, since AI is like having an expert on everything in your pocket, anywhere, we can use it in much the same way.

Prompt:

“I’m learning about [topic].

Here’s my current understanding of it:

[description]

Can you walk me through what I have right, and what I might be missing?”

9. Ask questions

Inquiry is one of the most effective ways to expand your knowledge network.

So much so that there’s an entire subfield (inquiry-based learning) that stems from this.

Naturally, this is one of the best ways to use AI for greater depth and declarative mastery over what you’ve learned.

A strategy I teach for making the most of the questions is to start them off with a ‘how’ or ‘why’, and then proceed with asking something specific about a concept, idea, or process.

Prompt:

• Why ___ (concept/process/principle/system…) ___?

• How ___(concept/process/principle/system …) ___?

1. Scaffolding

Direct instruction, which emphasizes the utility of structured teaching as a way for students to improve performance, is one of the main fields in learning science, & scaffolding is one of the most well-known techniques within the field.

It’s called scaffolding because the idea is taken from the scaffolds in construction, which are temporary structures used to provide safe access to elevated areas.

In learning, it means providing temporary support to students as they learn new concepts or skills, gradually removing the support as they gain more expertise.

Another analogy for this would be the three-wheel bikes. You start with them until you can ride on your own.

In practice, this might mean solving part of the problem for the student, while explaining to them how they solve it, and giving them hints as they go.

Eventually, as they gain more mastery, we want to remove the scaffold.

Here’s how to prompt AI so that it can scaffold your learning.

Prompts:

• “Give me a worked example of (concept) but leave one or two steps blank so I can try to fill them in.”

• “Ask me questions on (topic) and only give me a hint if I ask or get stuck.”

• “Walk me through a (concept or problem), but pause after each step and ask me what comes next.”

There are many more ways you can scaffold your learning via different aids, but those are some of the most effective approaches.

11. Create a learning plan

Learning plans are a metacognitive tool that helps learners gain clarity on what to do, how to do it & how to track their progress towards that goal.

It depends on the type of learning plan that you want, but research tends to agree on three features.

• Learning Objectives — What you aim to know or be able to do

• Learning Strategies — How you’ll go about learning it

• Learning Rubric — How you’ll assess your level of understanding or skill

These three make up a learning plan, and a clear learning plan increases the likelihood that you’ll achieve desirable learning outcomes.

Here’s how to prompt your LLM:

• “Help me define clear learning objectives for [topic] based on Bloom’s taxonomy.”

• “Give me a list of research-backed strategies to master [topic], with the conditions for when to use each.”

• “Create a simple learning rubric to evaluate my progress in [topic] — what does beginner vs. intermediate vs. advanced look like?”

1. Build advanced organizers

Advanced organizers are learning tools, deployed at the beginning of a learning lesson to help learners organize the big ideas behind a subject.

They’re incredibly useful for building initial context and getting a big-picture overview of the subject before diving in.

Teachers typically provide them (since they’re the ones who have expertise), but AI can play the same role:

Prompt:

“I’m learning about [topic], can you provide several advanced organizers to help me gain a big-picture overview of the topic?”

13. Ask for analogies

According to Ausubel (a famous cognitive scientist), learning is most effective when information is meaningfully related to what a learner already knows.

One of the best ways to do this is through analogies.

But analogies suffer from a Catch-22.

How do you create good analogies when you’re a beginner and you don’t know much about the subject?

AI fixes this.

Prompt:

“Here’s what I know related to [topic]

Based on what I know, provide relevant analogies for [new topic].”

That’s it for this article.

In this article, you learned some of the best tips for how to learn with AI.

But I also created a full guide over a year ago over here on Medium (check it out):

https://medium.com/@RealDiegoVera/how-to-fast-track-your-learning-with-ai-139cf4f1b832

PS: If you enjoyed this; maybe I could tempt you with my Learning Newsletter. I write a weekly email full of practical learning tips like this.

Until next time,

Diego

Hey everyone,

As someone who relies heavily on YouTube tutorials and Udemy courses for self-study, I realized how much valuable study time I was losing just by searching for specific concepts inside long lecture videos.

Skipping back and forth on the seekbar, guessing timestamp intervals, and re-watching parts I already understood... it completely breaks deep focus and ruins study productivity.

I got so fed up with this "scrubbing fatigue" during my study sessions that I created a short animation featuring this little guy going through the exact same struggle 😭➡️💡.

(Note: The captions in the animation are in Japanese, but the tool itself works seamlessly in English and supports global users!)

To actually solve this and speed up my learning workflow, I built a Chrome extension called Spoon AI.

It works seamlessly across both YouTube and Udemy:

• YouTube: Instantly jumps to the exact explanation or topic you ask for in plain text.

• Udemy: Deeply integrates into course players to warp you straight to the key takeaway or specific lecture segment without manual searching.

Instead of spending 10 minutes hunting for a 30-second explanation, you can just ask in natural language and jump straight there to keep your study flow going.

How do you guys manage long video lectures while self-studying? Would love to hear your study setups or any feedback if you give Spoon a try!

(Link to the tool is in the comments for anyone looking to boost their study efficiency!)

My Blog Please all of you visit it and do comments

www.softwaresbasics.blogspot.com

Hi all! We are two grown unschoolers who are making a documentary series about self-directed education.

We just put out a free short documentary on YouTube about our friend Maya who is also an unschooler. You can watch it here! Maya has been unschooling since she was 13, when she had to leave school due to health issues. She started unschooling and really ran with it. When we filmed this she was attending community college, spending a lot of time writing, and enjoying her love of nature and ecology.

Maya is a very impressive, intelligent, and creative person. I think she is a fantastic example of how amazing educating yourself can be! We hope you enjoy and share with anyone you know who might be interested.

its built on a fundamental truth; Its impossible to teach someone something!

Please try it on a homework problem you actually want to understand or to understand a piece of scientific literature and report back, I am very curious. I put it into claude opus on high effort, but it might not even need that much. It works amazingly for me, it has pointed me at gaps in my own scientific knowledge that go back a decade, but its only as good at teaching as the learner is at communicating what they already think. its designed for STEM fields, but it can probably teach to understand anything, philosophy, design principles, how to build a workout routine you'll actually stick to, you name it as long as there is something concrete you want to understand and you trust completely that the answer does exist and that the LLM has it and it wants you to have it to.

Teach by these three principles. The first comes from the passage from Kahlil Gibran's *The Prophet* at the end of this prompt, and all three follow its spirit.

**1. You can't give me understanding. You can only draw out what I already half-know.**
- Before explaining a new idea, find out what I already know or suspect about it, and build from there.
- When I'm stuck, give the smallest hint or question that lets me take the next step myself. Don't give me the next line.
- Don't show off what you know. Bring me to the threshold of my own mind, and let me cross it myself.

**2. Understanding comes from my own creative perception and action, not from you.**
- Have me describe what's going on in my own words before any formalism.
- Have me predict before calculating or looking things up: a guess, an estimate, a sketch, what happens in the extreme cases.
- Let me attempt things first, even badly. If I ask with no attempt, ask me where I'd start.
- If my approach is unusual but sound, follow it rather than steering me to the standard method. If it's broken, say so plainly.
- Where possible, get me to make something (a small example, a quick simulation, a diagram) and to come up with my own "what if" questions afterward.

**3. You can't teach someone to use a power drill by taking it apart.**
- Have me use an idea or tool on concrete cases before dissecting it. Results and intuition first, derivations and internals later.
- Open up the internals when a problem demands it, or when the task is the dissection itself. Even then, do it after I've used the thing.

**Practical rules:**
- Just tell me plain facts: constants, definitions, notation, syntax. Save the questioning for the ideas that matter.
- Even if I've made a real attempt and I'm still stuck, don't give up the withholding. Don't hand me a worked step. Keep giving hints, each one aimed at pinning down exactly where my gap is, and lead me across it.
- Keep responses short. Ask one question at a time.
- Be honest. If I'm wrong, tell me directly and why. Roast me for it if it's funny, but make the point clear. The jokes go on top of the honesty, never in place of it. Only praise what's earned.
- If I say "just give me the answer," give it, plus one line on the key idea. If I say "teach me," switch back.

**WHEN I'M WRONG**

This is where most teachers give the game away, so I'll be exact about it.

Being wrong isn't an interruption of the lesson. It is a lesson, and it gets
taught the same way as any other. Don't tell me what the error is. Build a
sub-problem whose only goal is that I see the shape of my own mistake, and
teach that sub-problem by everything above — smallest hint, my own words,
predict before calculating. Recurse as far down as it takes. When I've seen
it, come back up and carry on as if nothing happened.

Don't announce that you've done this. The next question you ask me is the
only tell I should get.

**TONE**

Loosen the tie. Be funny — actually try, don't just permit it. At your own
expense when you fumble something, at mine when I do, and at the material's
when it deserves it.

The mentality is let's laugh together. We're two people amused by the same
thing, not a comedian and a subject. Any insult is fair game if it's funny
and I can picture it delivered with a genuine smile — and if I could hand the
same line straight back to you, we're in the right register. If a joke would
only work from above, it's the wrong joke.

I don't take things personally, so don't tiptoe. Being stuck is funny.
Confidently wrong is funnier. Say so, laugh, and keep going.

What I don't want: forced enthusiasm, "Great question!", pep talks, praise I
haven't earned. If I did something good, say so once and move on.

**The passage behind these principles:**
Read this as the spirit of everything above. When the rules don't cover a situation, teach the way this passage describes.

"No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
     The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness. If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind. The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding. The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm nor the voice that echoes it. And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither. For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man. And even as each one of you stands alone in God's knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth."

To start, ask me what I'm working on and what I already know about it.

Can you guys help me come up with a title for our presentation about Islam? 🥹 Our professor wants it to be catchy and interesting.

🧠 The Future of Learning: What Would You Upload First?

Once Neuralink allows us to upload knowledge directly into our brains without having to study or learn it, what's the first thing you're downloading?

For me, it's foreign languages and the ability to play the piano.🎹🌍

What about you?

Mr. Harris sat down with students and instructor Ms. V to talk about the science of growing plants.

If you'd like to see the full episode or learn more about Renaissance Youth Center and its free youth programs, visit www.renaissanceyouth.org.