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The Dangerous Mr. Khan

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Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#131

Post by chc »

DrCatbox wrote: post #75
ThomPete wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even if history is presented as a perspective, why choose Khans perspective? Why not choose another perspective? You missed the bigger picture of the article, which is that a single entity never should control re-telling of events. There should not be one perspective. One person, one entity, can not provide different perspectives, due to echo chamber effects and such, it is almost impossible.

Isn't this kind of a straw man? Salman Khan is not a fascist dictator who prevents you from getting information anywhere else. He's just a teacher. I don't see how learning from him is more of a problem than learning from other teacher.

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#132

Post by dendory »

natural219 wrote: post #105
DrCatbox wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if history is presented as a perspective, why choose Khans perspective? Why not choose another perspective? You missed the bigger picture of the article, which is that a single entity never should control re-telling of events. There should not be one perspective. One person, one entity, can not provide different perspectives, due to echo chamber effects and such, it is almost impossible.

Should we teach different things to different children, then, in order to promote educational diversity?

It's a matter of perspective and what is said and isn't said. Consider these 2 accounts of the same event:

- The US Forces battle terrorist extremists to bring peace to the country, remove lethal weapons and pave the way for the first western-style democratic election.

versus

- After decades of war, in which two world powers, Russia and America, secretly sent arms and weapons to the country to fight their proxy wars, and then America bringing their own troops in, the natives now use those same weapons to try and defeat the invader and preserve their traditions.

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#133

Post by rubergly »

pg wrote: post #112
mquander wrote: post #43

The way the author writes, it's as if he thinks there is some superior alternative that Khan is displacing. Last I checked, there ain't. Fact is, Khan's videos are considered good because the actual history education that most students take away from classrooms is even worse. Like most other subjects, that's what you get when you try to deliver a comprehensive, objective, detail-oriented education to students who (wi…

it's as if he thinks there is some superior alternative that Khan is displacing. Last I checked, there ain't. Yes, that's what I was thinking. The stuff the author quotes sounds bad, but probably better than you'd get from some teachers I had. Plus on the Internet kids can watch these videos at any age. His simplified version of history could be way better than what e.g. an 8 year old might otherwise have access to.

In the site's current form, I think the fact that a viewer of any age can watch a history video is actually a bit problematic.

For mathematics, all of the material is broken down into the very basic components, so it's easy for a video to have a set of prerequisites which any viewer should understand before watching (with a set of links to the videos corresponding to those prerequisites).

For a subject like history, the material can't easily be broken down. As the article points out, a statement like "as you can imagine, Japan did not produce a lot of its own oil" may be common sense to someone of high-school age, but an 8-year old may have no understanding of how oil is produced or where it comes for and the statement may make no sense. This doesn't render KA as dangerous or useless, just points out a problem which needs to be solved and which they are certainly aware of :).

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#134

Post by coolpixar »

salmankhan wrote: post #100
torque2 wrote: post #49

Khan's physics videos are no better. Excerpts below from my series taking a critical view of Khan Academy: http://bit.ly/khancritic ... Ironically, Khan's TED talk is in stark contrast to two previous TED talks: * Dan Meyer - Math Curriculum Makeover http://bit.ly/DanMeyerTED * Sir Ken Robinson - Do Schools Kill Creativity? http://bit.ly/SirKenTED According to Dan, today’s math curriculum is teaching students to expe…

2 million unique students are viewing our videos every month by choice (as opposed to being forced to attend class by the state). Read any of the thousands comments on our YouTube or Facebook page and the underlying feedback from students is that they are finally getting the "why" at the Khan Academy as opposed to the "memorization-paint-by-numbers-what" in their classrooms. Do we think we're ideal? No, we're constan…

Hi Sal,

Given some of the criticism of your YouTube videos, I agree with your simple advice: Let them make something better and let the viewers decide.

The Khan Academy does not have some kind of monopoly on providing education content to help people of any age learn. Rather, the Khan Academy was simply the first to resonate with so many people around the world in such a short period of time. You clearly have many people's attention.

The Internet is an open medium to provide content, and to those who think they can do better, they know that they don't need much to get something up, as has been made very clear with Sal and his use of a simple drawing tablet, screen recorder, and headset. So make it happen -- show how your content is vastly superior to Sal's that both educates and makes it fun. Oh yeah, and free.

Sal, as you have noted a few times now, you are actively looking for other people that posses your talents to educate people. Have you thought about creating an open competition on your site and let the public vote on what they think is good content and fits the "Khan Academy mold"? Just a thought :-).

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#135

Post by michael_dorfman »

hugh3 wrote: post #107
michael_dorfman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History is not comprised of a set of value-neutral facts. History is a narrative constructed out of fact and interpretations, and every history has a viewpoint. Without question, one changes history by deciding to view it differently. If it didn't work that way, we'd only need one history book and we'd be done.

Well actually, history does consist of value-neutral facts, but the sum total of all those facts is far too complicated for any one mind to comprehend. This atom moved there, that atom moved here, and so forth. Even if you scale up to the actions of individual people rather than atoms, we're still far beyond what we could comprehend... and in any case, most of it isn't recorded. Having acknowledged the limitations of…

A good historian will use the fact that he can't divorce himself from his own viewpoint as a reminder to be extremely cautious. A bad one will use it as an excuse to indulge his particular biases.

And a very bad one will pretend that he is being value-neutral and objective, and show no attentiveness to the interpretative nature of his work.

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#136

Post by TRickFletcher »

salmankhan wrote: post #69

Hi Everyone, This is Sal here. I wanted to respond directly on the author's page, but they seem to be having a problem taking comments. The reason why I make history videos is that many people I know (many of whom are quite educated) don't even have a basic scaffold of world events in their minds (or the potential causality between events). Most American high school and college students would find it difficult to giv…

Sal, I appreciate your response. You make videos that try to be helpful. Many have found them very helpful. Up until now, nobody forces people to use them so I am often puzzled by the opposition you face from some. I am a chemistry professor in a rural Western US state - I know these kinds of instructional supplements can be very helpful to many students in my state - where legislative decisions limit a school district's ability to hire and retain qualified science teachers. I've been making videos about chemistry for many years but I didn't put them on Youtube - you did, and that's what makes your efforts valuable. Congratulations!

I have many more than 20 videos made - but I find my students use them more frequently when they are created to coach them through specific problems. They use them as often as they visit me in office hours. I've also just completed a series of 35 videos for a textbook publisher that walk first year college students through very difficult chemistry problems that use multiple concepts. These are not short single topic videos so we will see how useful they are in practice. They are meant to help a chemistry student learn to think like a chemist and the jury is out as to whether that can be taught by video.

I would be happy to talk about helping with your effort in science, specifically in chemistry. I am sure there is much to be done and surprisingly, not that many working to create more content using this medium. A mix that can also provide real-time Q & A is particularly interesting. I can be reached at fletcher at uidaho dot edu. Here is an example of the kind of vid that students use to help them solve a specific problem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49k88Alfh88

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#137

Post by crux »

It's quite apparent to me that Mr. Clemens' political leanings and the exigencies of blogging culture have worked together to transform a worthwhile small point into a pretty overbaked big point. Mr. Clemens demonstrates ably, I think, that Mr. Khan is a lousy history teacher. I haven't taken any of his science courses, so I can't speak about them, but it's clear that when it comes to history Mr. Khan lacks the depth of knowledge and fluency with the facts to teach effectively. So he ends up missing things, leaving things unexplained, falling back on pop culture depictions, oversimplifying motivations.

On the other hand—what does this have to do with pretty much anything else? I think it's not a stretch to see how every deficiency displayed there can be directly derived from a lack of familiarity with the material. Do you really need to try to make the overheated claim that being waffly with facts and simplistic with the human narrative is the result of an academia-enforced political and epistemological philosophy? Mr. Khan isn't exactly saying, you know, 'As we learn from a cursory reading of Baudrillard, the concept that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in any meaningful, substantial way is clearly a fiction of the necessities of realpolitik.' He's just fudging it. Mr Clemens continues to spiral outward, proposing a grim reality where all our education is mediated through Facebook and thus (because of the nature of Facebook's algorithms at the moment) through political conformity, confirmation bias, and groupthink—which results in Mr. Khan's own pernicious beliefs being beamed, unopposed, into the minds of our modern youth. All this from “from FDR’s point of view, Hitler definitely was in the wrong here” and a reference to _Saving Private Ryan_.

Mr Clemens should have restricted his aim to a more manageable and germane topic: the unfortunate fiction that we can teach history, or anything else, by reading out loud from the textbook, or by stringing together a sequence of pictures of famous people. Teaching is hard, and many people in lecture halls and seminars all across this great nation do it poorly every day. Unfortunately, when it comes to World War II, Mr. Khan is a member of their ranks. I'm not sure that Bill Gates' neoliberal plans for a New World Order history course necessarily enter into it.

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#138

Post by michael_dorfman »

eyko wrote: post #72
michael_dorfman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 15 minutes, Khan does a great job A great job of what, exactly?

Of getting you into the narrative, interested enough to wonder – "what led to the cold war?" or things like that. I haven't seen the video, I've only read the article, and from what the author writes... it seems he goes directly into events without building / contextualising too much. But events are interesting (like the space race) to children, and they will probably be more interested once they've got a timeline of…

My question, then, is: is his lecture better, worse, or about the same as we'd expect in, say, a typical undergraduate history lecture?

I wouldn't dismiss Khan just because he doesn't go into detail with aspects

I wouldn't dream of doing that-- there's only so much detail one can fit into a brief lecture. The problem (if there is one) is one of selection and interpretation.

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#139

Post by alain94040 »

archgoon wrote: post #115
mquander wrote: post #43

The way the author writes, it's as if he thinks there is some superior alternative that Khan is displacing. Last I checked, there ain't. Fact is, Khan's videos are considered good because the actual history education that most students take away from classrooms is even worse. Like most other subjects, that's what you get when you try to deliver a comprehensive, objective, detail-oriented education to students who (wi…

>The way the author writes, it's as if he thinks there is some superior alternative that Khan is displacing. Last I checked, there ain't. Are there no libraries? I believe that if you are truly self motivated enough to learn US history on your own (which is what the Khan academy is supposed to do), you'd be better off actually looking up a syllabus online and reading about the topics yourself. A 15 minute summary of…

+1 for libraries. It's funny that on HN, where people constantly insist that text is a faster way to convey information, opening a history book is not even considered.

To me, it goes back to the goal of the Khan academy: is this meant for pop culture consumption, or more in-depth knowledge?

How does reading the diary of Ann Frank compare to Khan's video?

Re: The Dangerous Mr. Khan

#140

Post by mmaunder »

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…

Much of the practical value in history is found when you examine events in some depth. For example, taking a deeper look at the German encryption system or the code breaking infrastructure at Bletchley. Or examining how an entire nation managed to keep the D-Day invasion secret until the very last minute.

So, while this article might itself be a little breathless, I think it's valid criticism that glossing over History is unforgivable.

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