Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Dangerous Mr. Khan

nas.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 253 posts

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#21

Post by alain94040 »

bbg wrote: post #17

+1 for the idea that history is more than an "incoherent torrent of factoids" I heard Khan say recently on the Colbert Report that he read the Wikipedia article on the French Revolution as his source before making his video on the subject. That's fine for his purposes, but somewhere up the information food chain someone must actually read the sources, weigh them, interpret, compare, and do all the other work of under…

his math and finance videos might be quite good [...] But I haven't watched them

You may want to try watching a few first. Based on the amount of praise Khan received on HN, I had high hopes. So I did watch a few, and I was disappointed. I'm not sure what I was expecting.

I think on HN a lot of people love the concept of online education that Khan represents, but many have not bothered to seriously try it.

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#22

Post by chaostheory »

hnhg wrote: post #9
maukdaddy wrote: post #7

The comments thus far show exactly what is wrong with HN. HN has become an echo chamber where we all love certain people/companies/ideas and immediately dismiss any counter viewpoint. Instead of immediately discrediting the linked article because they're "haters" or "threatened", try reading it and understanding their point of view. I love Khan's work and what he's doing, but at the same time the article raises some…

I welcome opposing opinions but this itself doesn't present both sides of the argument, nor any context to the one example given, and sounds to me purely like a bashing exercise.

> sounds to me purely like a bashing exercise.

For the record, I like the Khan Academy and they do a lot of good; but I still think that's really unfair to say that given that the article brings up a really important point (regardless of its style of writing): Khan Academy history lessons are so abbreviated, that key, important points and figures in history are skipped. Why is this not good? One of the major key reasons we study history is so that major mistakes of the past are not repeated in the present or future. Now this is an extreme example that no Khan like outlet actually does, but what if they skipped over Jim Crowe laws in their history of the US?

Going on somewhat of a tangent, reading this article reminds me of this TED talk about filter bubbles.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...

Essentially Khan Academy and other ventures like it, may be inadvertently creating dangerous filter bubbles.

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#23

Post by natural219 »

icegreentea wrote: post #15

Has a point. The Khan Academy approach is very good for maths, and most sciences. These are cases where you can distil knowledge into a few examples and cases, and it works well. The viewer now has a working, and accurate mental model of whatever they were learning, without having to go through -everything- involved. However, this approach to history and other topics can be a problem. While some of the criticism is s…

"if the Academy really does want to be "the classroom of the world", then it -should- go into enough detail to build accurate mental models."

We have no context about the video here. Is it for 4th graders? High schoolers? For me, elementary school consisted of brief snippets of historical events (Christopher Columbus discovered America. Indians and settlers got along and had Thanksgiving), while high school consisted mostly of un-learning all of the stuff that they got wrong in elementary school (Columbus was actually a failure! Oh, native Americans hated us).

I don't think you can expect somebody getting their feet wet in history to pay attention to or care about historical subtleties.

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#24

Post by SoftwareMaven »

icegreentea wrote: post #15

Has a point. The Khan Academy approach is very good for maths, and most sciences. These are cases where you can distil knowledge into a few examples and cases, and it works well. The viewer now has a working, and accurate mental model of whatever they were learning, without having to go through -everything- involved. However, this approach to history and other topics can be a problem. While some of the criticism is s…

I totally agree with you. I don't think history and many of the humanities can be distiller into 10 minute chunks. I don't think it would be fair to distil World War II into 15 minutes, much less the last 100 years. Trying to distil romanticism into 15 minutes seems just as impossible, since to understand romanticism, you need to understand the changing, industrializing world that birthed it.

My daughter's history class this year did not focus on dates at all. It didn't even really focus on facts. Instead, it focused on why events were taking place, what the impacts of those events were, and why that is important to understand today. This is the way to teach history, but it's a lot harder because it requires interpretation.

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#25

Post by ThomPete »

chaostheory wrote: post #22
hnhg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I welcome opposing opinions but this itself doesn't present both sides of the argument, nor any context to the one example given, and sounds to me purely like a bashing exercise.

> sounds to me purely like a bashing exercise. For the record, I like the Khan Academy and they do a lot of good; but I still think that's really unfair to say that given that the article brings up a really important point (regardless of its style of writing): Khan Academy history lessons are so abbreviated, that key, important points and figures in history are skipped. Why is this not good? One of the major key reas…

"One of the major key reasons we study history is so that major mistakes of the past are not repeated in the present or future."

And yet we learn nothing from history even when we know what is considered factual.

The things we learn from history that are important become implicit part of our culture, our DNA not our curriculum.

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#26

Post by ph0rque »

I think this article points out a weakness that has a rather simple solution: Khan should bring experts in other fields with a knack of teaching well into the academy.

Also, sometime in the near to mid-future, the platform should open up to allow anyone to submit their own video lectures.

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#27

Post by bh42222 »

Oh no, a 15 minute summary of the history form WWII to Vietnam isn't thorough Well, I, never!

In all seriousness, I am not sure what the author's point is. Summaries lack detail? Short things are short?

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#28

Post by SoftwareMaven »

ThomPete wrote: post #11
maukdaddy wrote: post #7

The comments thus far show exactly what is wrong with HN. HN has become an echo chamber where we all love certain people/companies/ideas and immediately dismiss any counter viewpoint. Instead of immediately discrediting the linked article because they're "haters" or "threatened", try reading it and understanding their point of view. I love Khan's work and what he's doing, but at the same time the article raises some…

I read it and normally consider myself pretty open minded. But then you read things like this. "Here Mr. Khan stands exposed as possessing a historical perspective steeped in academia’s standard issue, postmodern, left-leaning narrative of cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and moral equivalence. " And in my mind the author is exposed. I am hoping that my son grows up being taught by postmodernist that don't pres…

That comment got me, too, but I don't think it invalidates the other arguments. History teachers need to teach students why history is important, and it's not so you won't be embarrassed when the press asks you about Pal Revere. History teaches us lessons that help us make better decisions today.

(In case its not clear, I'm mostly agreeing with you. :)

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#29

Post by mckoss »

jlgosse wrote: post #19

The only real problem I have with the Khan Academy is that they appear to be using a mouse to write notes on the digital chalkboard. This is incredibly messy and really hard to understand. For example: In the first video on motion, Sal is going on and on about the topic, and is doing a wonderful job. At the same time, he's writing notes. This would be fine, except the first '=' he writes looks like a 'c', and then in…

He uses a Wacom tablet to write.

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#30

Post by mattmcknight »

icegreentea wrote: post #15

Has a point. The Khan Academy approach is very good for maths, and most sciences. These are cases where you can distil knowledge into a few examples and cases, and it works well. The viewer now has a working, and accurate mental model of whatever they were learning, without having to go through -everything- involved. However, this approach to history and other topics can be a problem. While some of the criticism is s…

"Either have the lesson be able to provide an accurate and correct mental model, or make the learner explicitly aware that what they are learning is incomplete/unprecise/whatever."

Khan does the latter, it is called an overview. I think this aspect of the original critic's article displayed his lack of understanding of an incremental and iterative approach. If we waited until he had completed every lecture on history, we'd never have any. Given the current state, and even considering the future state, it is nonsensical to judge it on the basis of being the "sole source" of information on a subject.

The second bad assumption is that Khan's work is somehow inferior to other high school teachers' presentations of the subject. In my experience, at a high school frequently referred to as the best in the US, we barely even made it through the Vietnam war, and the "mental model" presented was merely a random collection of facts.

If only this author could see the average high school history teacher in action, he would be demanding that they stop teaching kids to glue garbage on a piece of poster board and teach his version of the subject. The difference with Khan is that it's all out there. He's open for review, and the videos can be improved.

Post reply on HN