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Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling

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Re: Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling

#31

Post by sudo_cowsay »

skulk wrote: post #3

Overall, I do agree with the thesis but: > Now… how does Sal Khan want my kid to learn? > Watch a video. I find this a little uncharitable. I learned a lot of math at a young age from Sal Khan's early videos (back when he used to erase by switching to a black pen and scribbling across the entire screen) and, to put it in the author's terms, it served as an easy-to-digest scaffolding on top of which to build a deeper…

Yes, exactly. I have also learned a lot of math, grammar, science, and other subjects from Sal. In most videos, Sal explicitly states to pause the video and try out the problem before he works through it. I do think that KA's style of teaching needs some getting used to (this was never a problem for me as it was one of my first teaching platforms). However, once you get used to it, it is a wonderful experience.

Re: Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling

#32

Post by Kranar »

nibbleyou wrote: post #28

Off-topic and may be found rude - I find multiple instances of "Kahn" in the comments. Is it really that difficult to put in the effort to learn the correct spelling of "Khan" specially when it is everywhere in TFA, the post title, and other comments?

There are only two comments with that spelling. It's not a big deal.

Re: Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling

#33

Post by teiferer »

wafflemaker wrote: post #7
jbstack wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side note, but much as I like Khan Academy overall, I've always struggled with Sal's slow and repetitive speaking style in the videos. "Now you add the five ... [pause] ... add the five ... add the five to the seven ... to the seven..." Running them at 1.5 - 2x helps a bit, but it's still annoying to the point that I find it very distracting.

OTOH creating neural connections takes time. It's a real distance. Small for us, but great for the cells. That's why explaining difficult concepts too fast, while cool for people getting things instantly, is not good for general population.

I very much agree and it saddens me often when I see folks dial it up to 1.5x or 2x "because it is boring otherwise". They might think they just get as much, only in half the time, but I'd hypothesize that they retain less because the mind needs some time to digest.

Similar with the trend to auto-cut pauses that speakers make, just to cram in more text into a youtube video. Destroys not just the pacing but any chance for the mind to take its time.

I'd love to see studies about this.

Re: Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling

#34

Post by teiferer »

jbstack wrote: post #23
wafflemaker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH creating neural connections takes time. It's a real distance. Small for us, but great for the cells. That's why explaining difficult concepts too fast, while cool for people getting things instantly, is not good for general population.

There's a difference between pacing (good), and repetitive speech (bad). Between pacing and repetitive speech.

Ironically, spaced repetition is the key to successful learning.

Obviously one can overdo it. And there is variance in what people require. But not giving things time, instead giving in to the dopamine-craving, that's killing your learning abilities.

Re: Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling

#35

Post by sudo_cowsay »

jbstack wrote: post #4
skulk wrote: post #3

Overall, I do agree with the thesis but: > Now… how does Sal Khan want my kid to learn? > Watch a video. I find this a little uncharitable. I learned a lot of math at a young age from Sal Khan's early videos (back when he used to erase by switching to a black pen and scribbling across the entire screen) and, to put it in the author's terms, it served as an easy-to-digest scaffolding on top of which to build a deeper…

Side note, but much as I like Khan Academy overall, I've always struggled with Sal's slow and repetitive speaking style in the videos. "Now you add the five ... [pause] ... add the five ... add the five to the seven ... to the seven..." Running them at 1.5 - 2x helps a bit, but it's still annoying to the point that I find it very distracting.

While it depends entirely on personal opinion, I believe that it helps significantly. It helps build up the problem/solution from the ground up and he goes through each step out loud to help a student understand. I get that some people hate it and think it is so childish for such simple steps. For other people, it helps a lot. Learning on KA works best if started aat a young age and done consistently (you get used to the style and you learn everything from the ground up).

Re: Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling

#36

Post by sudo_cowsay »

dprkh wrote: post #22
homieg33 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what my kid said about why he doesn’t like Kahn academy.

What would you recommend over khan academy?

While I am a strong supporter of KA, I just use regular schooling to review and back up what I learned on Khan.

Re: Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling

#37

Post by runarberg »

rzz3 wrote: post #30

It feels weird and unfair to focus solely on Kahn here when he’s competing with some random teacher or professor’s droning, confusing, non-interactive lecture that’s less engaging and just as lacking in interactivity or application. I also don’t think he ever purports to be “all you need” to learn. It reminds me of the people who criticize Duolingo because you can’t actually reach perfect fluency through their app--l…

I agree that it is unfair and perhaps even unnecessary to focus solely on Khan here. But I think it must be acknowledged he has caused (intentionally or not) a ton of damage to the state of education. He sparked a movement of “innovation” and “disruption” that managed to push a lot of unproven teaching methods that ran against standard pedagogy which made a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of money.

I don‘t think Khan is solely to blame for this. These entrepreneurs would probably have done equal amount of damage without Khan, siphoning funds away from proven solutions like paying teachers and providing school lunches, and into ballooning administration costs and 3rd-party tech companies. However Khan is for better or for worse the face of this movement and will justly or unjustly get that blame.

Duolingo is however less ambiguous. There is very little language learning going on on their platform. You trick people into playing their stupid game and watching their stupid ads, thinking that they are learning, when in fact they are not.

Re: Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling

#39

Post by sudo_cowsay »

vanderZwan wrote: post #20

Whenever this topic comes up I feel the urge to point out that not enough people have read Audrey Watter's "Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning" , or her blog. We might stop repeating the same mistakes over and over again if we did. [0] https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5138/Teaching-MachinesThe-... [1] https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/

My belief is that Khan Academy is tremendously useful when started at a young age and done consistently. I have been doing it for over 7 years and it was a huge portion of my childhood. Long term, consistent use of KA from a young age builds deep procedural fluency and (this is very IMPORTANT:) self-directed discipline that transform how a student handles complex concepts. Even though some critics correctly note and argue that automated drill and practice cannot replace creative, project based discovery and learning, daily mastery based practice eliminates foundational learning gaps (you get a solid understanding), lowers the anxiety around making mistakes (because you get used to repetitive practice), and automates core mechanics (it becomes a basic skill) until they become second nature. I believe that persistent procedural learning is very far from mechanizing education at the expense of real learning. Rather, it frees up valuable cognitive bandwidth and gives the precise structural confidence and fluency required to excel in open ended, high level problem solving that so many critics preach. This is my opinion as someone who did Khan Academy for 7 years (where I learned the procedural step by step learning and practice) and went to school at the same time (where I did the open ended problems and projects). I believe that Khan Academy will help millions of students learn and grow (and the computer programming community is great too!).

Re: Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling

#40

Post by endiansg4m3 »

Yeah? That's what the style of teaching is about.

Think less science and more a conversation; establishing syntactic and semantic ground rules for the speakers grasp of a behavior relative to problem.

It's not necessarily about teaching something concrete. It's about teaching a social style in an abstract way. It's discussing a painting or piece of music, in math the symbols used to represent possible number/geometry generators.

I never just watch the videos. I rewrite what is written out. To recreate the song and dance so to speak.

Pragmatically speaking life is just performance art. Only a few specific realms of science move the needle for humanity; biological health maintenance (across all contexts; housing, food, not just medical) and our research in energy infrastructure.

Everything else is just one's relative outcome. Result of their sensory experience. Feels like this should be obvious at this point.

The studies that show brain activity goes down as we use AI. Yeah. So? Is it great to stimulate ourselves so much with ultimately arbitrary content our biology immediately tries to forget due to entropy? Heart attacks are up in <60 crowd relative to last generation. Constant interaction with flame wars and tabs v spaces (functional languages and Nix or gtfo!) computer config wars level inanity is not good Bob.

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