91–100 of 102 posts
By giving alway classroom tools like test management and monitoring, he is also equipping teachers to become more scalable and as he described - data driven.
After reading a few comments, I haven't seen this point made so I'm gonna go for it: > The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, > but does not expect mastery. > We encourage you to experiment [and fail], but we do expect mastery. This, in my opinion, is the most potential ridden idea made by Khan. Today, middle schools is ~3 years, high school is 4 years, university is 4 years, etc.; w…
>and there wouldn't be kids who didn't know how to tie their shoes; I've met at least a few people who, being charitable, I would be extremely hard pressed to see passing a calculus exam. I'd agree that for some it's down to motivation but the motivation may come 20+years later or not at all. Certainly though I'm extremely wary of declaring that all people can attain the same intellectual level which appears to be wh…
Regardless, I don't think the existence of can't-be-motivated learners compromises the ideals of a Khan-like system. Sure there are kids that aren't going to get it no matter what, but their productivity in any system is going to be nill, Khan, tradtional, or otherwise.
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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 a…
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I respectfully disagree. Some things in life are about practice, practice, practice and mastering skills. Others are about creativity and play. I do weightlifting, and everything is about form. There is no room, none, for creativity, in something like the squat. That isn't to say that once you develop core strength, you can't then use your strength creatively, and do new exercises. Likewise with math (and many other…
I see your point. But the key here is choice. You chose to go to the gym and do repetitive exercises. You probably do this in part because you want to be healthy and it makes you feel good. Do some kids want to do repetitive math exercises? Sure, I was one them! But they are a small minority. Should we force kids do repetitive exercises just because it is good for them? It's a tricky question.
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…
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…
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…
That's where hacker culture comes from. People talking to each other, helping each other.
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What I found more interesting was that lack of those tools in current teaching. I can't believe no one's made those kind of analysis tools available to teachers before.
In a traditional class room its not possible to collect that data in a practical sense. Teachers are already over worked and technology is in short supply. Which is why tools like these are not available, its only possible here because all students are interacting with the khanacademy.org system.
Seems like the problem is not necessarily lack of data... In fact when the freakonomics team applied econometric analysis to large quantities of data already possessed by the Chicago school district they were able to prove cheating on standardized tests (http://www.wikisummaries.org/Freakonomics:_A_Rogue_Economist...)
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?
At the moment, yes, math only. We're working to entirely cover K-12 math before moving on. You can jump to any area or exercise you want at any time. We suggest exercises, but I've seen plenty of 5th graders jump to Calculus and play around with Limits just because it's interesting/challenging and they saw their friend try it.
One thing you guys might be interested in: https://courseware.stanford.edu/pg/concept_map/index/41601 Daphne Koller is a Stanford CS professor who has been teaching her course CS228 on Probabilistic Models in a similar format for a couple of years. She has the lectures online by chunks of about 10 minutes and then uses in-class time for more interactive sessions. (I'm not sure if you can access the videos if you don't have a Stanford login though)
I really think this method of learning makes so much sense for any level student. Can't wait to see it progress!
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…
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…
The week after that, he went over all the concepts again, but seeing the problem, then seeing the way to solve it seems better, to me.