Re: "That is stone age. Do you claim that they apply equally to the AI age? What are your arguments?"
B.F. Skinner is credited with providing the theoretical basis for language labs in second & foreign language education (even though Chomsky tore this apart when he critiqued Skinner's book, "Verbal Behavior" (Chomsky, 1967)). The language lab pedagogical model is essentially what most language learning apps & now LLM interactive interfaces have adopted. So yes, it's pretty relevant.
The thing that's wrong with language labs isn't the technology that's being applied but the pedagogical model. The providers/designers of these new LLM-based language labs can't even specify their learning model or the underlying cognitive mechanisms by which they work. To quote Sweller, Ayres, & Kalyuga (2011),
"Without knowledge of human cognitive processes, instructional design is blind. In the absence of an appropriate framework to suggest instructional techniques, we are likely to have difficulty explaining why instructional procedures do or do not work. Lacking knowledge of human cognition, we would be left with no overarching structure linking disparate instructional processes and guiding procedures. Unless we can appeal to the manner in which human cognitive structures are organised, known as human cognitive architecture, a rational justification for recommending one instructional procedure over another is unlikely to be available. At best, we would be restricted to using narrow, empirical grounds indicating that particular procedures seem to work. We could say instructional procedure A seems better than procedure B but why it works, the conditions under which it works or how we can make it work even better would be rendered unanswerable and mysterious."
Since all education, including STEM, revolves around language, that LLMs have no underlying schemas or models of knowledge or learning, what they generate is superficially convincing, giving the appearance of "good answers" but loaded with misconceptions, over-generalisations, inappropriate conflations, & downright pseudoscience. Essentially, LLMs have no principles or integrity in any sense of the word. This may get overlooked in political, PR, & marketing circles but in scholarly contexts it becomes apparent very quickly.
I suspect this is one of the causes of frustration in the students who complained about their LLM generated course materials. They really are a waste of time if they haven't been thoroughly audited & "made meaningful, valid, & reliable" by subject matter & instructional design experts, which typically requires a lot of work & it's sometimes more efficient for experts & IDs to just write it themselves.
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