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Khan of Khan Academy at TED (video)

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Re: Khan of Khan Academy at TED (video)

#51

Post by enry_straker »

GeorgeTirebiter wrote: post #38
zmmmmm wrote: post #31

This man is certainly one of my heroes. I love this part from the FAQ on the Khan Academy: What topics do you plan to cover? My goal is to cover everything. Yes, everything! ... My goal really is to keep making videos until the day I die (which will hopefully not be for at least another 50 or 60 years). Should give me time to make several tens of thousands of videos in pretty much every subject."

Very Asimovian, don't you think? Isaac Asimov wrote either 506 books (or 515, say some sources) in his 72-year lifetime. (Jan 2, 1920 - Apr 6, 1992)

Was about to make the very same point.

I used to, and still, treasure the books on science that Mr.Asimov wrote. It was fantastic. I just wish that he had lived to see this phenomenon taking place. I think he would be very, very pleased with Salman

Re: Khan of Khan Academy at TED (video)

#52

Post by andresmh »

ThomPete wrote: post #48
andresmh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Khan Academy is not the future of education. Don't get me wrong, I think they're doing a superb job and I'd encourage people to contribute to their efforts. Khan is obviously a great presenter with a remarkable ability to explain complex concepts using a new medium. However, the future of education is closer to hacker culture than it is about new and better content delivery mechanisms. Let me explain. First, I to…

I think you are missing the point here. Learning math is not like learning programming. Math has a quantitative evaluation process. The kind of scenarios you are talking about both have a quantitative and a qualitative evaluation process. I.e. you can be creative in your programming and the "answers" but not so much in math. Also I don't think Kahn Academy is in any opposition to Seymore Paperts "Mindstorms". In fact…

I think you're right regarding Khan Academy not necessarily being in opposition to Papert's Constructionism. But I think Papert would argue that learning math is very much like learning programming. In fact, he created the Logo programming language as some sort of "mathland" where learning math would be like learning French in France ( http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2007/03/the_origins_of_/, http://j.mp/h6BiOC)

Real mathematicians have often lamented on the approach to mathematics that schools have taken. For example, this essay titled "A Mathematicians Lament" starts like this: "A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. [...] Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the 'language of music.' It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school. As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language— to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules: 'Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.'"

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

Re: Khan of Khan Academy at TED (video)

#53

Post by andresmh »

ericflo wrote: post #49
andresmh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Khan Academy is not the future of education. Don't get me wrong, I think they're doing a superb job and I'd encourage people to contribute to their efforts. Khan is obviously a great presenter with a remarkable ability to explain complex concepts using a new medium. However, the future of education is closer to hacker culture than it is about new and better content delivery mechanisms. Let me explain. First, I to…

Everything Kahn says seems to indicate that he doesn't believe in simply "watching a video and drilling on some problem set."

You're right. He does talk about teachers having more time for mentoring, which is great. But I guess my concern is mainly about people's re-interpretation of his message.

Re: Khan of Khan Academy at TED (video)

#54

Post by kul »

solipsist wrote: post #16

I've heard countless people rave about Salman Khan and his teaching methods - both here and away from HN. The truth is, I had no idea why he and his teachings were such a big deal... until now . I had seen some of his videos before and read some of the articles about the Khan Academy, but had never given them my full attention. To me, it was just another guy with his own teaching methods. But when I see him talk at T…

This is how we were taught at Oxford. The only problem was, the unmotivated/disorganised students (like myself) often didn't do the reading/studying in our own time and so had to have these extremely painful tutorials one on one with the tutor.

Also, I remember when doing Economic Theory, I spent 40 hours reading/studying in a library per week and still couldn't get my head around some of the advanced math and game theory, and really wish I'd had a teacher to teach me those concepts before the tutorial where we'd go through the problems. It turns out I was lacking knowledge of some mathematical transformations that I hadn't been taught because I didn't specialise in double math when I was 16.

Nevertheless, I favour this form of teaching.

Re: Khan of Khan Academy at TED (video)

#55

Post by Dn_Ab »

ThomPete wrote: post #48
andresmh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Khan Academy is not the future of education. Don't get me wrong, I think they're doing a superb job and I'd encourage people to contribute to their efforts. Khan is obviously a great presenter with a remarkable ability to explain complex concepts using a new medium. However, the future of education is closer to hacker culture than it is about new and better content delivery mechanisms. Let me explain. First, I to…

I think you are missing the point here. Learning math is not like learning programming. Math has a quantitative evaluation process. The kind of scenarios you are talking about both have a quantitative and a qualitative evaluation process. I.e. you can be creative in your programming and the "answers" but not so much in math. Also I don't think Kahn Academy is in any opposition to Seymore Paperts "Mindstorms". In fact…

I disagree with you assertion on creativity in maths. Maths allows creativity and is very open ended. You can do things that are not required but are creative - leveraging identities and properties to vastly simplify a problem, reframing the problem to make it more tractable etc. And programming is very useful to learning maths. Any topic that requires some form of calculating to build familiarity will benefit greatly from playing by programming.

Consider complex numbers. You usually first meet them with imaginary numbers and polynomial equations. But they are extremely obtuse. But if you look at operations on them in terms of vectors, lateral extension of the reals to make the picture in terms of solvable polynomial equations complete, or in terms of polar coordinates, rotations, trigonometry, and e you start to get a fuller picture. But if you really want to get them you program a simple system (scaling and rotating triangles for example) that allows you to leverage all those properties. You build in the identities and operations. And then you experiment. Play with it. Play is vital to learning. With that, you get motivation and a fuller understanding than a mere that is just the way it is. With that deeper more intuitive understanding you are able to remember and internalize it better. Making the future topics easier but more importantly, developing the ability to draw connections rather than merely leaving each concept in isolation.

That is why maths is so hard. So much of it is completely divorced to how they were originated and completely unmotivated and magical. With no intuition future learning is further crippled, building apprehension via a negative feedback loop.

Re: Khan of Khan Academy at TED (video)

#56

Post by econner »

I've been looking at the Khan Academy site a bit.

I find the exercise dashboard kind of strange. Is math the only available subject? And do you have to go through all the prerequisite exercises to progress to the next ones?

Re: Khan of Khan Academy at TED (video)

#57

Post by ThomPete »

Dn_Ab wrote: post #55
ThomPete wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are missing the point here. Learning math is not like learning programming. Math has a quantitative evaluation process. The kind of scenarios you are talking about both have a quantitative and a qualitative evaluation process. I.e. you can be creative in your programming and the "answers" but not so much in math. Also I don't think Kahn Academy is in any opposition to Seymore Paperts "Mindstorms". In fact…

I disagree with you assertion on creativity in maths. Maths allows creativity and is very open ended. You can do things that are not required but are creative - leveraging identities and properties to vastly simplify a problem, reframing the problem to make it more tractable etc. And programming is very useful to learning maths. Any topic that requires some form of calculating to build familiarity will benefit greatl…

You are confusing learning math with the field of math.

Again I am a big proponent of Seymores work but that is not the point here.

The point is that Kahn Academy allows you to learn math in your own tempo and that is the future of education. That doesn't mean that other things wont be important too but to say that it's not the future of education is simply missing the greater point IMHO.

People who have never been able to understand it before now suddenly do. We don't all need to be math wizards.

Re: Khan of Khan Academy at TED (video)

#59

Post by singular »

This is wonderful. Education is, IMHO, the most important thing in the world, full stop, since it forms the basis for what we are able to do and more importantly how we think.

Personally, I found school boring and tedious (and got pretty average grades) until going to 6th form college where I discovered something amazing - learning isn't defined by a failed teaching system - learning done right is a joyful and wonderful thing (unsurprisingly my grades significantly improved at this point).

The fact that learning is a joy is one of the most important discoveries you make in life (or don't, unfortunately I think most people don't) and anything that allows people to discover this is a vastly important thing.

(It's important to note that learning, as with everything else, isn't 100% joyful all the time, but that the joy of it infinitely outweighs any difficulty and pain encountered along the way).

I've noticed a pernicious worship of ignorance that pervades, at least, my country (the UK) - the idea that learning is boring and there's something wrong with you if you seem to enjoy it - that alone is to my mind incredibly dangerous. Nothing could be further from the truth, literally. This is nothing, though, compared to countries where ordinary people are simply unable to access quality education or even any education at all where the Khan academy is an example of the internet at its democratising best.

Go Sal!

Re: Khan of Khan Academy at TED (video)

#60

Post by acangiano »

patio11 wrote: post #39
arjn wrote: post #23

Khanacademy is neat but I find it odd that people on HN either aren't aware or dont care about other earlier sources such as : - MIT's OCW - USNW eLearning channel on Youtube (esp Richar Buckland) - TIMMS (Germany, possibly the first of the video resources) - UCBerkeley youtube channel - Dr. Adrian Banner (Princeton) - Harvard (esp Michael Sandel's lectures, amazing) The above can be easily searched for and are hardl…

Superior products launched earlier ignored for lack of effective marketing, while an arguably less innovative and minimalist but attractively packaged product geared towards a grossly underserved niche succeeds in capturing attention because the competition in that niche is ossified and terrible? One could almost try to extract a lesson out of that...

If I could change one thing about hackers, it would be their overall misunderstanding and attitude towards marketing.
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