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Open letter to Sal Khan

christopherdanielson.wordpress.com

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Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#81

Post by ColinWright »

1O0101ll100O wrote: post #74
Jimmy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I know it is a hard pill to swallow that such a pedagogical luddite such as Sal Khan is having such a broad and important impact on learning when the professionals are struggling mightily. How are we quantifying Khan Academy's "broad and important impact" on learning? If someone learns from the KA videos, what do they typically accomplish afterwards?

In the space of 18 months ending Feb of this year the site has gone from reaching 1 million to 6 million students per month. I quantify the value of the product by the demand.

Qualifications that are easy to obtain are often in higher demand than those that are harder. And yet the harder qualification may be of more benefit, more highly valued by potential employers, and bestow greater learning.

Demand is not an indicator of quality or value.

If you think popularity is an indicator of quality, this is an interesting read:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/everybody-is-stupid-exce...

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#82

Post by elbear »

geonz wrote: post #62
yati wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you get 99 things right and 1 thing wrong, those who feel threatened by you will minimize those 99 things and blow that 1 thing out of proportion. You nailed it perfectly, mate! ॐ

Could you find some things that he got right? Oh. I didn't think so. He also says in his movies that "two plus itself times one" is what "two times one" is. That's right, he gets 2 + 2 wrong.

Are you saying that all of the videos on Khan Academy are wrong?

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#83

Post by 1O0101ll100O »

zaphar wrote: post #77
1O0101ll100O wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the space of 18 months ending Feb of this year the site has gone from reaching 1 million to 6 million students per month. I quantify the value of the product by the demand.

That is a poor way to quantify the quality of an educational product. While quality can and sometimes does drive demand for a product it's frequently possible for demand to be driven instead by fads, trends, and hype. If you want to measure the quality of something there are far more reliable metrics to use than demand. With that said I like Kahn Academy. This is a single issue in a large body of educational material…

If we assume that students are rational actors making decisions between traditional teaching methods and KA...and we assume that KA, students, and teachers all have the same end goal of teaching the kids the material.

It sure looks like, at an increasing rate, kids are choosing KA. After all they are held most directly accountable for their academic success or failure. Wouldn't demand then be a reasonable gauge of value?

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#84

Post by Trianglemancsd »

bretpiatt wrote: post #26

This article is a partisan attempt to discredit Sal's great work. Pick one example where the content has a flaw and use it to claim that all of his content is therefore "useless". I don't know the author's motives. Is it an altruistic care about the children or a personal motive to protect his career and to defend the methods he uses to teach versus a new potential disruptive threat. I'm really excited to see how the…

Hi. Original poster here. I have amended the line in the post to make clear that the "useless" claim was not intended to apply to all of Khan's videos; only to the decimal ones.

As for motives, I would invite you to read deeper on the blog to get a sense of what motivates my work. See especially the "Talking Math with Your Kids" series, where you will find the following sentiment expressed in multiple ways:

"But I don’t want Griffin and Tabitha‘s mathematical educations to depend on better telling. I want them to explore and to wonder. I want them to commit to their ideas and see what the consequences of those ideas are, and to revise their thinking when their present ideas are not good enough to explain what’s going on in the world.

And what I want for my own children is no different from what I want for my students, and no different from what I want for all children.

There is a place for good, mathematically correct explanations. I want kids to experience those when they’re the right move.

More importantly, I want them to learn to think for themselves."

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#85

Post by pjscott »

badman_ting wrote: post #28
eshvk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It is opinion at best. _You_ think his videos are boring; I find them engaging but not precise enough.

Strangely enough, opinion works as criticism. We're all just stating opinions here, including you. Get over yourself.

Has appending the phrase "Get over yourself" to an argument ever accomplished anything useful?

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#86

Post by ZeroGravitas »

stiff wrote: post #53
ColinWright wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at it another way. You train for years. You spend more years, perhaps decades, working in a classroom. You read the research, you know just how hard it is to get kids to understand decimals. You work and work to find the right way for each child to understand this concept that trips up so many. Then someone else comes along, teaches it badly, and gets lauded for doing wonderful things. Well, it's true that KA is…

There is plenty to be criticized about KA, but this has politics written all over it, if the above Freudian slip doesn't convince you, consider the following bits: Behind paywall, but someone at Khan Academy is an NCTM member, right? Right? If not, shoot me a note. We’ll get a copy to you. Or from the other article: Khan could tap into any number of existing networks of exemplary teaching, perhaps from recipients of…

"Behind paywall, but someone at Khan Academy is an NCTM member, right? Right? If not, shoot me a note. We’ll get a copy to you."

If I was supervising the way the NCTM goes about the dissemination of information via the internet I'd have serious concerns and would be pointing out some concrete and important gaps in their use of modern technology.

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#87

Post by Trianglemancsd »

spicyj wrote: post #17

Hi, Ben from Khan Academy here. I just woke up and don't have time for a full response right now but here are a few quick words. Most of our math content creation work these days is driven by our push to cover the new Common Core math standards, which have recently been adopted by 45 states. We're following these standards not only because of their recent popularity but because they are among the best standards we've…

Thanks for the thorough response here. You wrote, "Our recent push to improve our math content hasn't yet touched the decimals exercises but it will soon." But Mr. Khan posted a video of a new decimal exercise just last week, which is what prompted the post. I get that everything can't be perfect right away. Somebody at KA has been working on decimals instruction in the past year, so it was frustrating to see that this instruction was not substantively changed. I look forward to the more robust content to come.

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#88

Post by Trianglemancsd »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #86
stiff wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty to be criticized about KA, but this has politics written all over it, if the above Freudian slip doesn't convince you, consider the following bits: Behind paywall, but someone at Khan Academy is an NCTM member, right? Right? If not, shoot me a note. We’ll get a copy to you. Or from the other article: Khan could tap into any number of existing networks of exemplary teaching, perhaps from recipients of…

"Behind paywall, but someone at Khan Academy is an NCTM member, right? Right? If not, shoot me a note. We’ll get a copy to you." If I was supervising the way the NCTM goes about the dissemination of information via the internet I'd have serious concerns and would be pointing out some concrete and important gaps in their use of modern technology.

I have to agree with this, for sure.

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#89

Post by ivank »

ColinWright wrote: post #70
1O0101ll100O wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it is a hard pill to swallow that such a pedagogical luddite such as Sal Khan is having such a broad and important impact on learning when the professionals are struggling mightily. Maybe, just maybe, he's on to something that despite years of institutional training 'real' teachers are missing. Maybe it's important for a student to be able to interact with a lesson over and over again in order to catch a key p…

You make great points, and much of what you say is absolutely true. But I have dealt with pupils who have severely broken concepts of decimal place, and whose potential for understanding basic arithmetic has been damaged beyond repair.[0] I believe the KA is doing brilliant things, and opening up knowledge for all is fantastic. I would just like to be convinced that modern research about pedagogy is being integrated…

> found no way to dissuade the student that 0.35 was bigger than 0.4, no matter what we tried.

Out of curiosity, assuming you tried a number line, do you remember why that didn't work?

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