The Dangerous Mr. Khan

I think there are a few issues here. The issues seem to be assumptions that cause disagreements. 1 - the assumption that it is easily possible to use the best teaching methods on video. 2 - the assumption that it is not possible to use video as a good teaching tool. 3 - all feedback data is directly proportional and an accurate representation of student learning.

My take on the assumptions: 1- The best (and research proven - google physics education researcy) methods are not direct lecture (aka traditional lecture / sage on the stage etc...). The best methods involve a process commonly referred to as Interactive Engagement (IE). Using these methods, students interact with each other, the instructor, and the appropriate materials for the class. Me discussing things, working some samples, asking the students to work some samples... that is the traditional approach. It is only minimally effective at changing the way students think. There are 2 links below that go more fully into the interactive education approach (backed up by Physics Education Research - PER).

2 - The assumption that videos can't work is also problematic. They can be useful. However, if i create a video in which i: discuss things, work some samples, ask the students to work some samples... well, since that is only minimally effective when I am there and able to respond to questions, it is even less effective if I am not there and the student can only watch. If the video is made in a way that addresses common prior-conceptions, then you've got a shot at changing the way people think. However, it is not effective to simply state the common prior-conception is wrong. A common example, beginners think light bulbs use up current. The first bulb uses some, the next uses what’s left. Tell them that is not the case and they will parrot it back. When they test on it, or when it is phrased or needed in a different way, beginners go back to their initial conception. The approach of, “they just need to listen” doesn’t work. A common way in which we address prior conceptions (I think originated by McDermott at UW) is to show a couple of student reasoning examples that attempt to explain a phenomena. The current student chooses if student A, B, or neither is correct. Then that same prior-conception is hit over and over in a variety of ways in an effort to truly overcome the prior-conception and establish / replace / adjust it so that the student’s concept of what is going on agrees with the accepted evidence. Again, if I make a video of traditional teaching, it will (at best) be as bad as traditional teaching. Putting it on video doesn’t make it better. This would be, essentially video Cliff notes.

3 – Feedback… This can be messy. There have been an odd number of studies that check to see if student feedback is helpful. An MIT study showed that students gave very poor reviews to a new teaching method for E&M. These are MIT kids that should be pretty bright. Pretty self-aware of their learning (one would think). The overwhelming response on reviews of the new approach was that students preferred the more traditional course structure and felt they learned little. The results were that the students in the new course (that students didn’t rate highly) did significantly better than the students in the traditional course.

Two sources of information that will help a truly concerned person evaluate these ideas in more depth. http://www.phys.washington.edu/groups/peg/rl.htm> http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...; The 2nd link is a cached copy.

Archduke was incredibly disliked by the people he was governing. Why none pulled out is a mystery to me. The terms basically crippled Germany until they decided to call the allies' bluff.

I have yet to take a college level history course, so I probably have errors.

We're allowed to possess opinions and positions that are controversial. It's not illegal to have point of view that challenges the mainstream.

From my POV, the Khan Academy view of history described here is utter bunk and doesn't really give a good historical perspective. I'm shocked, shocked to hear that K-12 history is garbage!

K-12 history curriculum has always been garbage pushing somebody's agenda.

Until the 80's, high school history in the US was all about the "American Pageant", complete with a carefully crafted timeline of achievement and wonderfulness describing how wonderful the US was. You start out making pilgrim hats in second grade and learning about how the friendly indians taught the pilgrims to put dead fish around corn as a fertilizer, and wrapped up talking about how great WW2 was. (Usually we ran out of time for Korea and Vietnam when I was in school)

From the 70's onward, "revisionists" changed the curriculum a bit to demonstrate that people other than white folks existed. For me, that meant in the winter you spent less time covering the gilded age and watched "Shaka Zulu" or "Roots" instead and in the Spring you learned about the civil rights movement. I grew up in New York City, so we were also mandated to learn about the potato famine and the triangle shirtwaist fire.

AP History was an eye-opener to me. You actually had an opportunity to leave the drivel behind and learn about something in depth from primary and secondary sources. (In my case, the American Revolution)

I cannot agree. There are so many "facts" that the mere selection of which ones get recorded already puts an overwhelming bias on the stories they tell. History is obsessed with narratives, and there is an ineluctable requirement, when doing history, to create a story where earlier "facts" leads to later "facts" in a hypothesis of cause and effect. The requirement for a pseudo-logical story with internal consistency further cherry-picks the "facts", until you're left with a complete bowdlerization of reality. The truth is, there are enough "facts" that you can very probably tell a whole lot of different stories using the raw material, but people have a very strong disinclination to cognitive dissonance and won't do this. They'll pick one and stick with it, and argue it against other stories in ego-driven battles, until a consensus emerges as a sociological phenomenon, rather than a fact-driven one.

One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. Criminals often think they're justified in the actions they take; in fact, often they must self-justify their own actions in order to sleep at night at all, so they will have their own internally consistent narratives. It's extremely difficult to fight the dominant narrative once it has become accepted.

IMO, the highest value history has is in telling stories about a world which is different from our own, but for which we have somewhat believable evidence actually existed. The degrees to which it is different tell us what varies in human nature, and what stays the same, stays the same. It teaches us to not take the present moment too seriously as some kind of apex or nadir. But I don't think it actually tells us a whole lot about the past, per se.