Study Buddy
As this post goes live, I have officially started my end-of-semester exams. This Monday, I have 3 exams of 2 hours from 8 A.M. to 4 P.M. Over the week, I will have a total of 10 exams. It will be a ride.
That being said, on this Sunday evening, when my brain has almost lost all functions, I wanted to discuss a tool that we found while studying. NotebookLM, Google's rather new study-buddy. We decided to give it a try for the subjects with less maths and more memorising.
You give the tool your source material, PDFs, pictures, Word documents or almost whatever you want. The tool offers everything from audio recordings to slide decks, but we focused on mind maps, flashcards and quizzes.
This is rather easy to understand, but what really threw us off is that there is no subscription fee, at least yet. The tool makes you interactive quizzes and mind maps that rely ONLY on your sources. When you ask a question that is not in the sources, then the bot replies, "That does not seem to be mentioned."
On a whim, we decided to click on generate a video. Having seen quite a few AI videos, we were rather sceptical. When the video was finished rendering, we decided to give it a try out of curiosity. We opened the clip – a 7-minute video. We were immediately impressed that it could generate something of that size.
When we clicked play, we were even more blown away. The AI speaks naturally, it varied its intonation and simplified all key concepts of the course with ease, all whilst giving metaphors and analogies to describe complex ideas.
After watching, we had to take a break from studying. We realised the transition phase we are in. Right now, while we're students, we are still somewhat "with the times" and can follow along, but at one point, it will all blow past us.
For now, what this means as a student is that even when the teacher is incompetent, with the course material, you can master it with a personal AI tutor by your side.
What this means for education is still unclear. For me, it simply means that the expectations of students will rise since these tools are so powerful. That being said, the systems of teaching need to adapt, which is easier said than done.
This Week's Suggestions:
This song came up in a daylist (daily personalised playlist) called jazz hip-hop on Spotify. I like the sound of jazz hip hop, but it is simply some good mellow boom bap rap music.
Have a wintery week!
