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 totally buy the argument that a YouTube video can be a better method of delivering content than a book or even, as Kahn says, a live teacher. However, learning is much more than that. Learning is about imagining, playing, creating, sharing and reflecting (Resnick 2007, PDF: http://j.mp/gqnc6f).
To say that learning math is about watching a video and drilling on some problem set, is like saying that learning Python is about doing a tutorial and solving some exercises. Hackers know this well. You don't really learn a programming language until you build some project, especially a personally meaningful one. Creating something not only helps you learn the language but also its community, culture, practices, how to ask questions and get feedback on your work.
Think about it, would you rather hire a developer that has finished some tutorials or one that has actually hacked some projects? The same logic applies to most other fields. Artists and scientists know this as well: you learn by doing in the social context of a community.
Unfortunately, schooling has taken the "hacking" away from learning and has focused on improving content delivery, artificial problem-solving and test-taking. Often using technology. I liked when he mentioned that the teachers have more time to mentor students. However, their mentoring is most likely still focused on the artificial and decontextualized approach of traditional schooling.
Initiatives like the Khan Academy will probably play a role in the future but to really improve education the system and the approaches should change. One should look at exemplar learning environments like the hacker communities or even the Brazilian Samba schools. Settings that are "real, socially cohesive and where experts and novices are learning" (Papert 1980, Google Books: http://j.mp/dLNbGG).
In 1971, Ivan Illich outlined an inspirational alternative educational environment where "the child grows up in a world of things, surrounded by people who serve as models for skills and values. He finds peers who challenge him to argue, to compete, to cooperate, and to understand; and if the child is lucky, he is exposed to confrontation or criticism by an experienced elder who really cares."
Illich said that the four resources learners need are "things, models, peers, and elders". In his 1971 vision, Illich said that "the operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity"(http://j.mp/hNUVV8). Sounds familiar? When I read Illich, I think of HN, StackExchange, and the larger ecology of spaces that hackers have created around social learning. My hope is that these and other similar approaches scale up and get adopted more broadly along with resources like the Khan Academy, OCW and others.
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 you could imagine the videos being used to teach children to get started before they go on to hack together their little programs.
What they have done is for the first time made a system that quantifies the learning process so that it benefits the student rather than the school.
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.'"
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.
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.
I was arguing your assertion that maths is not creative, even in the basic level. I completely agree that non uniform pacing is a really great breakthrough and do not argue the efficacy of these videos. Nor their impact on the future of education. But saying there is no creativity in maths is the type of thing that hurts the education of the subject - with teachers punishing kids for doing things unlike the book says.
I also think, especially for learning kids maths, not to underestimate how powerful learning as playing is in motivating concepts. I do think such a thing done right, where you would replace a bunch of videos with one game would be even better than the videos as the future of education. As that type of active learning allows not just variable pacing but also variable exploration and creativity. And by building a repertoire of stories for concepts, it counters how alien and not straight forwardly relatable to real life experience more abstract maths is. A fact that makes learning maths hard.
As a first test of this idea I hope to someday make or see a game where kids program little battling bots and in the process learn concepts from high level physics and maths. as a side-effect. without realizing they are learning. I guess based on personal experiences, I feel there is still a class of kids that the khan academy style won't reach.
I think I know what you are getting at but I think we are talking about two different things.
That kids learn concepts from high level physics and maths does not mean they learn formal math.
I am not saying that they need to learn formal math (in fact there are plenty of arguments against spending so much time trying to teach kids any math)
But it's important to understand that if everyone have to learn concepts in their own way they will loos the ability to communicate with each other.
The ability to transfer metaphors from something we understand into the world of Mindstorms and through that develop conceptual understanding of various areas does not necessarily transcend into understanding of math.
It might though create something else and quite wonderful. But formal math it probably wont be.
This might be semantics but after reading your comment it makes me feel like Kahn Academy is an improved version of the present of education. The future of education, in my mind, is still a world where we kids get to be apprentices of real mathematicians, engineers, doctors, biologists, artists, etc.
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 disciplines), there is a core set of skills and patterns that need to be mastered - once you truly understand those skills and patterns - you can then use them in creative ways to solve the problems.
Khan's great skill is in helping to explain those skills and patterns, leaving the teacher time to help the student master the practice of them.
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.
From the lecture, that sounds like one of the techniques that are at work with the Khan Academy. Teachers encourage students to help other students. Teachers spend their day helping kids instead of futzing around with lectures and books.
That's where hacker culture comes from. People talking to each other, helping each other.
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.
I agree somewhat. I think that I, personally, learn best when I have some challenge I can't solve yet, and learn skills to solve it.
An example: In Calc, my teacher was teaching volume of some function rotated around the axis. Integrals. After covering it for a day or two, someone asked, what is the volume of a torus?
My teacher took this, and spent a week solving the problem, introducing techniques (like trig substitution and integration by parts) as needed. On the last day, be bought donuts for everybody.
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.
Comments
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 totally buy the argument that a YouTube video can be a better method of delivering content than a book or even, as Kahn says, a live teacher. However, learning is much more than that. Learning is about imagining, playing, creating, sharing and reflecting (Resnick 2007, PDF: http://j.mp/gqnc6f).
To say that learning math is about watching a video and drilling on some problem set, is like saying that learning Python is about doing a tutorial and solving some exercises. Hackers know this well. You don't really learn a programming language until you build some project, especially a personally meaningful one. Creating something not only helps you learn the language but also its community, culture, practices, how to ask questions and get feedback on your work.
Think about it, would you rather hire a developer that has finished some tutorials or one that has actually hacked some projects? The same logic applies to most other fields. Artists and scientists know this as well: you learn by doing in the social context of a community.
Unfortunately, schooling has taken the "hacking" away from learning and has focused on improving content delivery, artificial problem-solving and test-taking. Often using technology. I liked when he mentioned that the teachers have more time to mentor students. However, their mentoring is most likely still focused on the artificial and decontextualized approach of traditional schooling.
Initiatives like the Khan Academy will probably play a role in the future but to really improve education the system and the approaches should change. One should look at exemplar learning environments like the hacker communities or even the Brazilian Samba schools. Settings that are "real, socially cohesive and where experts and novices are learning" (Papert 1980, Google Books: http://j.mp/dLNbGG).
In 1971, Ivan Illich outlined an inspirational alternative educational environment where "the child grows up in a world of things, surrounded by people who serve as models for skills and values. He finds peers who challenge him to argue, to compete, to cooperate, and to understand; and if the child is lucky, he is exposed to confrontation or criticism by an experienced elder who really cares."
Illich said that the four resources learners need are "things, models, peers, and elders". In his 1971 vision, Illich said that "the operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity"(http://j.mp/hNUVV8). Sounds familiar? When I read Illich, I think of HN, StackExchange, and the larger ecology of spaces that hackers have created around social learning. My hope is that these and other similar approaches scale up and get adopted more broadly along with resources like the Khan Academy, OCW and others.
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 you could imagine the videos being used to teach children to get started before they go on to hack together their little programs.
What they have done is for the first time made a system that quantifies the learning process so that it benefits the student rather than the school.
Pretty significant if you ask me.
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
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.
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.
I was arguing your assertion that maths is not creative, even in the basic level. I completely agree that non uniform pacing is a really great breakthrough and do not argue the efficacy of these videos. Nor their impact on the future of education. But saying there is no creativity in maths is the type of thing that hurts the education of the subject - with teachers punishing kids for doing things unlike the book says.
I also think, especially for learning kids maths, not to underestimate how powerful learning as playing is in motivating concepts. I do think such a thing done right, where you would replace a bunch of videos with one game would be even better than the videos as the future of education. As that type of active learning allows not just variable pacing but also variable exploration and creativity. And by building a repertoire of stories for concepts, it counters how alien and not straight forwardly relatable to real life experience more abstract maths is. A fact that makes learning maths hard.
As a first test of this idea I hope to someday make or see a game where kids program little battling bots and in the process learn concepts from high level physics and maths. as a side-effect. without realizing they are learning. I guess based on personal experiences, I feel there is still a class of kids that the khan academy style won't reach.
I think I know what you are getting at but I think we are talking about two different things.
That kids learn concepts from high level physics and maths does not mean they learn formal math.
I am not saying that they need to learn formal math (in fact there are plenty of arguments against spending so much time trying to teach kids any math)
But it's important to understand that if everyone have to learn concepts in their own way they will loos the ability to communicate with each other.
The ability to transfer metaphors from something we understand into the world of Mindstorms and through that develop conceptual understanding of various areas does not necessarily transcend into understanding of math.
It might though create something else and quite wonderful. But formal math it probably wont be.
Don't know why you've been downvoted I have upped you again.
This might be semantics but after reading your comment it makes me feel like Kahn Academy is an improved version of the present of education. The future of education, in my mind, is still a world where we kids get to be apprentices of real mathematicians, engineers, doctors, biologists, artists, etc.
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 disciplines), there is a core set of skills and patterns that need to be mastered - once you truly understand those skills and patterns - you can then use them in creative ways to solve the problems.
Khan's great skill is in helping to explain those skills and patterns, leaving the teacher time to help the student master the practice of them.
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.
From the lecture, that sounds like one of the techniques that are at work with the Khan Academy. Teachers encourage students to help other students. Teachers spend their day helping kids instead of futzing around with lectures and books.
That's where hacker culture comes from. People talking to each other, helping each other.
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.
One of the fundamental points of the OP was that "The real use of being there in person as a teacher is for interacting with the students."
While I understand your concern in general, it seems unfounded in this case.
I agree somewhat. I think that I, personally, learn best when I have some challenge I can't solve yet, and learn skills to solve it. An example: In Calc, my teacher was teaching volume of some function rotated around the axis. Integrals. After covering it for a day or two, someone asked, what is the volume of a torus? My teacher took this, and spent a week solving the problem, introducing techniques (like trig substitution and integration by parts) as needed. On the last day, be bought donuts for everybody.
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.