Sure, programs like Twitter are a boon for campus communities and for social circles of all kinds. They permit students and professors — the tech-savvy ones, at least — to keep their friends and associates apprised of what they’re up to, where to find them, what they’re thinking. But what if you want different groups of acquaintances to know different things about how you’re spending the day? What if you don’t want certain people – your boss, for example – to know what you’re really doing?
Then you need Swarm, says its inventor, Christine Satchell, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Melbourne. While completing her doctoral dissertation at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology — it was titled “A Young Nomad’s Guide to New Digital Terrains” — she came up with the idea of cell-phone software that lets users choose what to report to which of their associates.
By flicking through and clicking on a few of Swarm’s screens, menus, and icons, a user can signal different things to different people in a phone’s address book. Loaded into just about any of the newfangled 3G phones, Swarm’s icons indicate that a user is — or claims to be — on vacation, driving, or working; it can also signal that the user is socializing, and where to join in, or that the user is sleeping, so that friends don’t interrupt a nap.
But users can also choose to tell some contacts that they’re at a certain pub having a beer — the icon is a cocktail glass — and at the same time assure the boss that they’re running an important errand. Users can add icons that signal their mood, or add music, photographs, or videos to their shout-outs.
Ms. Satchell admits that her system’s capabilities have earned it the name “the liephone,” but she says she prefers to see it as giving users control over their own identity — or identities.
A segment about Swarm that appeared this month on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s weekly television program, The New Inventors. —Peter Monaghan
54 Responses to Keeping Friends and Acquaintances Informed, or at Sea, in a Swarm
gasstationwithoutpumps - July 3, 2012 at 2:26 pm
I was nodding along with you until you threw in one gratuitous remark that made the whole article fall apart for me: “above all a relationship between learner and instructor that engenders trust.” While that relationship is very nice and makes learning easier, it is not an absolute prerequisite of learning. I have learned a lot from reading and working on my own—doing so is essential if one wants to stay in a technical field for 30–40 years.
If you sincerely believe that real learning only happens with relationships between learner and instructor, you doom most engineers and scientists to very short careers.
Robert Talbert - July 3, 2012 at 4:22 pm
Would it help to say that learning “works best” when such relationships are in place? Because of course most of us can learn under just about any conditions, but some are more conducive to the learning process than others.
gasstationwithoutpumps - July 3, 2012 at 7:59 pm
I’m not sure I completely agree that learning works best with a relationship between learner and instructor that engenders trust, but I couldn’t honestly argue against it either. It may well be true, but it is hard to test one way or the other.
It is a much weaker statement than your initial statement “Learning at these levels requires … above all a relationship between learner and instructor that engenders trust,” which I believe is clearly false.
David Wees - July 3, 2012 at 10:29 pm
Do you trust what you are reading? Do you trust the source of the information you are getting? I’d say that if you didn’t trust it, a lot, you wouldn’t bother to even attempt to learn from it, even on your own, so in some respect trust is pretty important.
gasstationwithoutpumps - July 4, 2012 at 12:25 am
Since we have exceeded the depth of comments allowed on the blog, I’ll start over at the top level.
When I’m learning a new subject, I do trust my sources somewhat, but I generally use multiple sources and check them for consistency. For some things, I use very untrustworthy sources, but check the stuff I learn against the real world. For example, I’ve been teaching myself circuits and trying to design lab exercises for a new circuits-for-bioengineers course. I’ve used probably half a dozen different circuits books (none of which I have at home currently), Wikipedia, manufacturer’s data sheets and application notes, DIY electronic hobbyist sites, and more. I’ve then tried building each circuit idea that I’m considering for the lab exercises. When I’ve been relying on a bad source, the circuits don’t work the way I expect, and I look for better explanations of what is going on.
The DIY electronic hobbyist sites often have the simplest circuits and the clearest explanations, but these sources are also often wrong—the simple explanations are not always correct ones, and the simple circuits often fail miserably. That does not mean that I can’t learn anything from those sites—just that I have to treat anything they say with a healthy dose of skepticism, checking against other sources and against the real world.
So, no, it is not necessary to trust one’s sources in order to learn from them, but one does have to become aware of how reliable or unreliable they are.
MarkTenneyNewMathDoneRight - July 4, 2012 at 9:03 am
Excellent point by David Wees below on the need to trust sources. We trust textbooks at times when we don’t fully understand them. If we find later that we relied on them in mistake that is very damaging to our trust in that source.
The Khan videos are being promoted as more trustworthy than teachers. The cult of Khan says you should trust your impressions after watching a Khan video over any other source. What you think you know after watching a Khan video is supposed to trump any other source for the cult.
Anyone who disagrees with the Voice is instantly attacked by cult followers. They are the ones who ramp up the conversation to the point that only self confident satire can penetrate. The cult followers of Khan need an intervention.
Bill Gates is one of the cult followers of Khan. He is saying fire teachers whose students don’t maintain a high upward pace. Gates is saying the videos are better than the teachers fired from high stakes testing.
The pro-Khan side can not be allowed to get away with saying these videos are just a tool for teachers to use when Bill Gates is saying fire the teachers of students who don’t have a high upward curve to test scores and Khan videos are better anyhow.
Bill Gates is saying trust the Khan videos, trust the tests, distrust the teachers. This is false and has to be confronted as a fraud and a lie.
The Gates Cult of fire the teachers is about distrusting the teachers actively. This is very much a war of who to trust. No one should feel that this fight over the Khan videos is not a crucial battle. Bill Gates is waging this war against teachers ruthlessly. The same ruthlessness that got the Antitrust Division of the DOJ concerned in the 1990s about his methods. Gates is using Khan videos as a tool to undermine confidence and trust in teachers so they can be fired wholescale.
klwi3329 - July 4, 2012 at 5:50 pm
My sense is that all of you are pushing Mr. Gates into a position he does not in fact believe. Surely he is intelligent enough not to believe in silver bullets. From the 7/6/12 Chronicle article: “continual refinement to learn, make mistakes, try new things out . . .”
Jay - July 4, 2012 at 6:00 pm
From the KA FAQ, we find evidence of project-based learning in action:
Project hooks: These projects tend to be collaborative and get students excited about a concept. At Summit San Jose, we saw students start a Geometry unit by watching a clip of Mr. Burns from the Simpsons devise a contraption that would block a portion of the sun over Springfield. Afterwards, students simulated that experience and set themselves up for learning more about ratios, proportions, and similar triangles.
Scaffolded projects: These projects contain many parts and correspond to different KA exercises. At KIPP, for example, students learned about decimals, fractions, and percentages with a multi-stage project. The project started with a budget and a set of coupons given to each student to “buy” items for their room from an online store. After completing corresponding KA exercises, students worked on parts of their project such as converting fractions and percentages to decimals, calculating total savings, and solving for the amount of commission made.T
The video below starting from 3:30 to the end includes another example.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lsus_cFDNOE&feature=player_embedded
Even more from the KA website’s blog
Having the students estimate the value of coins in a a large jar given any tool at their disposal (including sample coins, scales, rulers, spreadsheets). We then took pictures and posted them on Mechanical Turk to see if the “crowd” estimate was better (we payed 0.01 per guess) even though their information was not as good. This led to a fascinating discussion of information and noise and when crowd estimates could be better than experts.
Six students played a variation of Risk called “Paranoia” Risk where every player had the secret mission to eliminate one other player from the board (you only knew who you had to eliminate; you had to try to figure out who was charged with eliminating you). Once a player is eliminated, the winner is declared and the game is over. All of the other non-playing students were each given $500 in monopoly money and a colored strip of paper representing each of the players on the board. At the end of the game, a colored strip is worth 100 if that player won and 0 if they lost. The students then traded slips as the game progressed. Several students independently developed spreadsheet models based on the probabilities involved in the game. Led to a deep discussion around information in markets and when bubble behavior develops (for example, several securities irrationally traded above 100).
We played a variation of freeze tag where we changed the size of the playing field and the number of “freezers”. Students predicted and observed how the dynamics of the game changed as more freezers were added and the threshold needed to freeze everyone. They were quick to draw analogies to other areas of science.
“I’d have students focused on building, creating and exploring real-world projects— from composing original music to building robots, writing mobile applications or running truly novel experiments. The Khan Academy software and videos would facilitate this by allowing many of the core skills to be developed independently and it would be a resource when the students hits a need to develop a core skill because of their projects (I now *need* to learn trigonometry and matrices to figure out how this graphical object in my mobile app will look when it is rotated). As we fine tune the projects and explorations that work in this setting, we will attempt to integrate them more deeply into the core Khan Academy platform so students and teachers around the world have the infrastructure and tools to fully explore their creativity.”
http://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/6844033473/bringing-creativity-to-class-time-by-sal-khan
MarkTenneyNewMathDoneRight - July 4, 2012 at 6:10 pm
“killer app” “United states v Microsoft” 2910 results
“The definition of “killer app” came up during Bill Gates’s questioning in the United States v. Microsoft
antitrust suit. Bill Gates had written an email in which he described
Internet Explorer as a killer app. In the questioning, he said that the
term meant “a very popular application”, and did not connote an
application that would fuel sales of a larger product or one that would
supplant its competition, as the Microsoft Computer Dictionary defined
it.[6]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application
K.A. Khan Academy Killer App for mass teach firings. Takeover the education industry with video and software sales. This includes supplanting Stanford.
Jay - July 4, 2012 at 7:37 pm
To date, KA has *not* resulted in a single teacher being fired. Khan and his team have repeatedly iterated that teachers are not going to be fired and that they are valuable. Khan has spoken of improving the professions, actually, by increasing teachers’ salaries to 150-200K to professionalize the job. To suggest that KA advocates firing teachers is not just inaccurate, but a low way to critique Gates.
Robert Talbert - July 4, 2012 at 9:51 pm
Jay, thanks for sharing this link. The one question I would have about Sal’s vision for education as described in that blog post — and it’s a pretty compelling vision — is how students get from the videos to the projects. If students are getting first contact with science and math content in the videos, it seems unreasonable to expect them to be able to jump right into a project of the sort he is describing. Something in the conveyance of those basic skills, something in the videos, has to help those students think like expert learners. Where are they going to get the tools to apply what they know to a project?
Jay - July 4, 2012 at 11:17 pm
Yes, transfer is an important issue and one that is certainly worth discussing in depth. I meant to publicize some examples of projects that are often overlooked and might redirect the conversation to a more productive avenue. But I think I can speculate (as an outsider looking in). Basic skills seem to be conveyed in a mastery-oriented environment with emphasis on peer interaction (as seen on the KA website and other videos). Research shows medium effect sizes for those two methods from syntheses of meta-analyses, a strong body of research indeed. Note too that KA is in the process of developing a Computer Science curriculum, which will serve as a jumping point into interdisciplinary learning to science and math. Much evidence favors interdisciplinary learning as it relates to math and science education. If implemented well, I could see students writing code to apply mathematical or scientific processes/content (which is KA’s plan). Admittedly, many of the videos and exercises are lacking in depth and nuance. Hopefully, iterating upon weaknesses (as realized via A/B testing) and feedback from critics will spur improvement.
Keith Williams - July 5, 2012 at 12:57 am
No. Teachers are human beings who interact with students; instructors instruct i.e. they give instructions. There is a big difference. (When oh when will Higher Ed finally figure out that it is selling itself down the river by settling for anything less than that? So many of my colleagues so willing to obsolete themselves…)
The Khan Academy is a great new resource, and it’s a sign of greater things to come… but it’s much more akin to a book than a teacher.
blandpointlessusername - July 5, 2012 at 1:24 am
I heartily agree. Basically everything that anyone knows, someone learned by observing natural events at one point. Natural events definitely aren’t trustworthy, consider for example earthquakes.
I really like the concept of somebody doing and MST3K parody of a lecture, but this particular parody could use a bit more work.
rjensen65 - July 5, 2012 at 7:34 am
The Trouble With Derek Muller
The trouble with Robert Talbot is that he relies on Derek Muller’s superficial
experiments on undergraduates and then extrapolates the findings to the entire
world. He’s Exhibit A about what we warn doctoral students about when they are
learning how to conduct research and write up results of research.
In my viewpoint learning efficiency and effectiveness of any pedagogy is so
complicated in a multivariate sense that no studies, including Muller’s
experiments, can be extrapolated to the something as vast as the Khan Academy.
For example, the learning from a given tutorial depends immensely on the
aptitude of the learner and the intensity of concentration and replay of the
tutorial.
For example, learning varies over time such as when a student is really bad
at math until a point is reached where that student suddenly blossoms in math.
For example, the learning from a given tutorial depends upon the ultimate
testing expected.
What they learn depends upon how we test:
It all boils down to how badly a student wants to learn something like how to
take the derivative of a polynomial. Chances are that if a student is totally
motivated and intent on learning this process, he or she can keep studying and
re-studying Khan Academy videos for mastery learning far beyond what most any
other pedagogy on this subject can offer.
The writings of Derek Muller are too superficial for my liking. Of course,
learning from the Khan Academy can be superficial if the students are intently
focused on really, really wanting to learn. So what does that prove about the
students who are intently focused on really, really wanting to learn.
The Kahn Academy is really intended for students who
really, really want to learn. Don’t knock it just because it doesn’t work as
well for unmotivated students used in superficial experiments.
A Really, Really Misleading Video
Do Khan Academy Videos Promote “Meaningful Learning”?
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/expert_gently_asks_whether_khan_academy_videos_promote_meaningful_learning.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
A Really Misleading Article
“The trouble with Khan Academy,” by Robert Talbert, Chronicle of Higher
Education, July 3, 2012
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/07/03/the-trouble-with-khan-academy/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
huntbull - July 5, 2012 at 8:47 am
If anyone thinks that the mild critique by David Coffey and John Golden of Kahn Academy was harsh, they should read some student evaluation of good f2f teachers. Wow–when I was in graduate school they would have counted as being supportive…clearly smelling salts are needs in some parts of academia and quasi-academia if people are upset about this stuff.
Guest - July 5, 2012 at 9:10 am
…
prisnerich - July 5, 2012 at 9:23 am
Nice, a self-link and reference to the same page.
bghansel - July 5, 2012 at 10:09 am
Reading on your own involves at least some type of trust of the authors, as David Wees suggested.
Learning from doing your own work also requires you to trust yourself to at least follow up on various doubts you will have about your experiments and studies and to consult with people you trust — people you believe have knowledge and clarity on the issues at hand — to find errors you can’t see yourself. You may not need an instructor to learn, but you do need colleagues.
clairdunn - July 5, 2012 at 10:26 am
As Talbot says: KA is what it was meant to be. But, the ripples it has made are far greater than KA itself. I am specifically referring to the juggernaut that is screencasting used in formal education by Udacity (http://www.udacity.com) (and very soon, no doubt, by other institutions). I am currently enrolled in my second Udacity class (Statistics 101, taught by Sebastrian Thrun). The trust is there completely; the education is occuring; and the work is gradually getting more rigorous. I have no doubt that when I am done with this course I really will know enough to make intelligent intrepretations of the statistics that constantly occur in almost every field today.
Udacity has raised the bar for even our greatest universities (Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and others). And once a bar is set, progress occurs beyond the bar, not beneath it. Stay tuned, and enjoy the cornucopia that is about to be ours.
Donald Jordan - July 5, 2012 at 11:56 am
This article raises some valid points, but overlooks the fact that the shortcomings found by professors in the Khan Academy’s approach is a symptom of American policy decisions and high stakes standardized testing in the K-12 system. This is the way many students are taught and expect to be taught.
Bert Walker - July 5, 2012 at 12:17 pm
Khan academy might not be ‘all that’, but it is the Wave Of The Future of academia. Automation and telecommunications technology now provides more information to more people than ever before, and the trend only promises to increase. It doesn’t matter what it is you’re studying, the overall volume and quality and value of information accessible through the internet is only getting bigger and better. What’s it all mean, Mr. Natural? It means that In The Future, which is also NOW, ‘school’ could be your tablet PC/equivalent device. It’s coming, closing in on your last excuse for not studying. If your excuse was money, the grass is already a-quiver from the brisk winds of change fast approaching. It will eventually come to the point, when the only obstacles between a prospective student/college student/lifelong learner and a state of expanded learning and knowledge are: motivation, ability, fear, and good sense. And, if the Information Age is helping to break down some of those obstacles and facilitate a wider access to knowledge, information, training, then I say ‘good’, even if it ends up taking some of the gloss n glamour away from traditional ivory tower-type institutions that used to mete out their wares for a pretty penny, pennies that are hard to come by in this Con Me, hence the need for something to bridge the gap between those that need schooling and those providing it at high cost. Education is as much a business as it is anything else, but if the public cannot afford to attend the classes, you might as well burn the books and repurpose the building as a homeless shelter.
Robert Talbert - July 5, 2012 at 12:52 pm
I’m confused. When and where did I reference Derek Muller? (And when did my last name change spelling?)
Also, I am not “knocking” Khan Academy, as I tried to make very clear in the article. What I have issues with is when people try to present KA as something that it isn’t.
Robert Talbert - July 5, 2012 at 12:56 pm
I’m a Udacity “graduate” myself (finished CS101) and I have to say that if there is anything like a “next-generation” Khan Academy, Udacity is it. I’ve blogged here before about the pedagogical quality of the CS101 course – http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/04/03/udacity-cs101-whats-been-good/
I still don’t think Udacity competes in the same space as brick-and-mortar universities, but their stuff is very, very good and I hope Khan Academy is taking notes on what they’re doing.
Robert Talbert - July 5, 2012 at 1:01 pm
That was an intentional omission because the post was already getting too long, but I do think you’re right that the focus of KA on “getting the problem done” rather than conceptual understanding is symptomatic of the grade-centeredness of K12 (and a lot of higher) education right now. I’ve blogged before about what happens when you try to flip the classroom and put the control for learning in the hands of the students: http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/02/06/resistance-to-the-inverted-classroom-can-show-up-anywhere/
Short version: Many students clamor for less lecturing, but when you follow through on that request, the students find themselves in VERY unfamiliar territory and end up, shall we say, homesick for chalk-and-talk rote mechanics.
theotherelizabeth - July 5, 2012 at 8:07 pm
That’s really interesting. I’m also taking Statistics 101 from Udacity, and so far it is nothing close to a college-level statistics course. The first week was about a sixth grade level of mathematics. I haven’t completed the second week yet, but it appears to be about the level of probability found in a high school algebra 2 course. I have no problem with the quality of the very brief videos; Sebastian Thrun is pleasant and encouraging as an instructor, but the course content so far has been disappointing. I have seen posts to this effect in the forum, and the developers have responded that they will be ramping up the difficulty in future weeks. I hope so.
I’ve heard that the other Udacity courses are more rigorous. But the format of really short videos with quick multiple choice or short answer quizzes doesn’t allow for questions that require you to apply your learning to more complex problems. This isn’t a critique of online courses––I think they can be done well, but Udacity chooses to try to “teach” thousands of people in one course, and I’m not yet convinced that can be done well.
Donald McKendrick - July 6, 2012 at 6:18 am
I’m sorry but I think you missed the point completely. At which point did you make Sal Khan aware of his mistakes? There is a comment box at the bottom for a reason. It’s the same as raising your hand in class. Instead your co-workers essentially cyber bullied him. Maybe they even intimidated others from putting up screencasts due to the possibility of receiving the same public humiliation.
Khan Academy is a community not a classroom. You can’t make people learn but you can enable them to do so. The learning comes from taking what the screen cast educates them on and applying it. Many users use the videos as a revision aid so practice materials are already available to them. They do however have a very good math practice section which even shows the connection between the previously learned skills.
Finally Khan Academy has not redefined “mathematics to be the study of how to perform hand-calculations and pass mathematics exams”, institutions such as universities have done so. Khan is about allowing freedom to study any subject freely. There’s not a single exam in sight.
There is a nice big volunteer section at the top of KA. Maybe you could be more constructive in your criticism?
Kevin O'Neil - July 6, 2012 at 6:59 am
Lucid, critical (though fair) critique of Khan Academy. Has a place, but cannot come close to replacing teachers (in its current state)
Robert Talbert - July 6, 2012 at 7:56 am
“You can’t make people learn but you can enable them to do so. The learning comes from taking what the screen cast educates them on and applying it.” — This is precisely my point, and this is exactly where KA stops working. At what point does KA enable students to map what they’ve learned onto new and complex problems? It doesn’t just magically happen when students reach a critical mass of factual content knowledge, any more than a kid in PE class can suddenly climb up a rope after having done enough pushups.
Again, it’s OK that KA doesn’t do this. But we need to be aware that it doesn’t do this.
“There is a nice big volunteer section at the top of KA. Maybe you could be more constructive in your criticism?” — Follow that logic for a minute. Suppose I find some inadequacies in the street I live on — maybe the concrete’s cracked or there needs to be a stop sign but there isn’t one. Should I not point out these flaws unless I agree to join the work crew to fix the concrete or erect the stop sign? Or maybe I should require commenters who criticize my posts to start up their own blogs before they’re allowed to post comments?
jwr12 - July 6, 2012 at 2:27 pm
Jay: “Khan and his team have repeatedly iterated that teachers are not going to be fired.”
And I would like to even once iterate that Khan and his team will not be fired, and while I’m at it I will also agree to not fire you. Now, it might not bother you that someone you’ve never heard of suddenly has the authority to repeatedly iterate that you will not be fired — and I repeat, you will not be fired — but it gradually may bother you that out of nowhere someone with a ton of money but with radically different visions of education and knowledge is calling the shots over whether you will be fired.
And I repeat: I’m not going to fire you. At least, not yet. But in any case, rest assured that that my stated intention is not to fire you. That is also my team’s intention. My team and I and Bill Gates will not fire you, although we can’t really qualify whether or not the Louisiana school board may use the product we’ve developed as an excuse to fire you. Because we’re not responsible for what other people may do once we’ve moved the goalposts on knowledge and education. Our sole responsibility is that suddenly we have the power to say, or rather iterate in an offhand way and graciously, that you will not be fired or at least our intention is not to fire you.
I hope that that is a source of comfort both as you ponder the future of a field you care about, and as you think about the emerging political economy and how you fit in it.
PS: Doesn’t iterate imply repeat? At least, I seem to remember something from my math classes to that effect.
Donald McKendrick - July 6, 2012 at 3:09 pm
It can show students through the math map which skills build towards later skills and considering the early state of KA I think that is a good start.
I apologize if i came off aggressive, I mostly had a problem with the methods of criticism the video employed. Of course you shouldn’t join the construction in the situation you described, however mocking those the that currently maintain the concrete is not the right way to go about it either. However in the KA situation you are adequately qualified to help in a much more constructive manner. You could in fact make the videos that you claim the service is missing. Considering you employ screencasts in your teaching you may even already have suitable ones!
Consider it this way, math teachers make mistakes. In a classroom no one may notice the mistake and then that has been false information passed on to students. In the case of KA the scale is global. Someone is bound to notice the problem, and through social media it may even be able to reach out to those that had seen the incorrect version. Once people get away from the idea of Sal Khan being the worlds teacher and realize that the community of educators and learners he is growing is the important part maybe through discussion of the concepts on the site between peers can truly allow deeper learning.
I do in fact have a very young blog on the topic of online learning so this is why felt compelled to comment and voice my opinion. While I disagree with some of the things you have said I have at least been able to gain knowledge on what someone like yourself expects from an online learning resource.
v8573254 - July 6, 2012 at 4:06 pm
“That explains a lot about Windows.” Yeah!
Why does anyone listen to the guy who couldn’t get a OS to work?
Sebrinap789 - July 7, 2012 at 1:27 pm
I believe that Khan Academy which gives demonstrations of mechanical processes can be a useful resource to students who need the extra support for a math class. In addition, it is a great concept because learners have a phletora amount of learning styles. (Visual, auditory, and kinesthetic) I believe technology has mainstreamed a majestic community of collaborative learners to participate in the teaching and learning process. Thumbs up to Khan Academy!!!!!!!!
v8573254 - July 7, 2012 at 5:18 pm
This video reminds me of and old Tom Lehr routine from the 60′s called “new math.” I would know less about the subject after watching the video that I did in the beginning.
ostupkex - July 8, 2012 at 12:35 pm
He’s right. Many of us learn quite well on our own and let’s face it, most universities ask students to do plenty of this. Everyone in a big lecture hall must master the process and even those in small class room must do plenty of it. Heck, it’s called showing up unprepared if you don’t go over the material before class and teach it to yourself.
So let’s not glorify the old way of achieving this. I spoke with a friend who went to a school that scheduled large lecture classes and set up overflow rooms with TV feeds. He said that Khan Academy is just like the experience he had in those classes except the lectures are better.
Jason Senedak - July 8, 2012 at 11:23 pm
As I made my way to the site, one of the posts I saw was in reference to Kahn Academy. This peaked my interest because I use some of his lectures on history in my class. The most interesting thing about the article was the section that mentions what KA is not (a replacement for a classroom teacher). I could not agree more. As a history teacher, I try to engage students in learning in a multitude of ways and KA is a great supplement, but it is by no means going to put classroom teachers out of a job. Students need more than just a video to truly learn something and that is where a teacher can flourish in a classroom setting.
The Kahn Academy videos are a great supplement to everything else we do in class. I have links to it on my class website and encourage students to view the videos two time before an exam, but the KA videos are only a fragment of the entire holistic approach to education. If we use technology as a tool to help educate, teachers and IDs will continue to be a highly valuable commodity when it comes to education.
Reid Riggle - July 9, 2012 at 2:31 pm
I find this blog timely and stimulating. The discussion is at the very heat of effective learning and the role of technology. While learning can occur in isolation, the human endeavor is essentially a social one. Thus, it can be argued that there is an important role for the “trusting relationship” between an educator and a student in developing insight and understanding.
matias_addy - July 10, 2012 at 2:28 am
So what do you make of the replacement video on ‘Why a Negative Times a Negative is a Positive’?
I wish that class time better allowed instructors to be indulgent with the whys and wherefores, but there isn’t always time to build up every new topic in this level of detail.
Robert Talbert - July 11, 2012 at 7:28 am
What I make of the video is that the #mtt2k criticisms are hitting home. I’m glad that Khan is at least responding to criticisms in a constructive way. I wish the same could be said for some of his die-hard fans, who react to criticism of KA by assuming that critics are some combination of jealous, bitter, scared, or hopelessly behind the times. I was particularly disappointed by this official post to the KA Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/khanacademy/posts/352076234864350
Adding a bunch of “Why” videos doesn’t solve the basic problem. These explanations need to be built into the screencasts themselves, and usually they are not. These “Why” videos have the look and feel of add-ons, added in a reactionary way. The video about why the divisibility by 3 trick works, in particular, was done hastily and without a whole lot of thought behind how best to present this idea. http://www.khanacademy.org/math/arithmetic/factors-multiples/v/the-why-of-the-3-divisibility-rule
I may post a #mtt2k response video on this soon.
I don’t expect KA to go back and retrofit the hundreds of videos they already have up, although they certainly have the resources to do so, and they’ve updated many of their videos in the past. But my whole point, and the point of others, is that proper instruction of any concept involves conveying at minimum an intuitive sense of why the concept works and where it fits. KA doesn’t typically do this. Again, that’s not bad by itself, especially if KA videos are being used in a classroom context where teachers work on the concepts with students. But as a standalone educational service, KA has a lot missing, and tacking on “why” videos only treats the symptoms.
Bart Schuster - July 12, 2012 at 12:05 am
The KA videos don’t seem to do anything a teacher couldn’t do for the student, except perhaps give time. The time and personal attention of a live teacher is valuable but limited, but the KA video has plenty of time to repeat the lesson, and even drill the lesson in thru repetition if needed.
I think Robert Talbert is correct that a series of tiny skills would not necessarily equal a complete course because short pointed lectures don’t present the big picture. The KA videos seem more like very good tutoring, which can go far to support student success, but tutoring is not really a substitute for that actual class. The class defines the need for tutoring rather than the reverse. Is video tutoring the future of education? I think the issues and complications of the future may get bigger not smaller and that “the big picture” will continue to dominate acquisition of knowledge and especially using knowledge effectively. At the same time the KA videos can continue to make a huge difference for students, or just people in general, where is comes to learning specific and well defined lessons.
Bart Schuster
OnlineGraduateSchool.tripod.com
Twitter.com/arrive2_net
Matthew Pruchniewski - July 12, 2012 at 4:46 pm
” It takes…open channels of communication that do not just go one way, and above all a relationship between learner and instructor that engenders trust.”
My startup is hoping to facilitate these necessities of a strong online education. Feel free to sign up early at omnihours.com and we’ll notify you when we open the doors.
paul martin - July 13, 2012 at 1:23 am
My aberdonian feeling on teacher vs instructor is that there it can be a market segmentation tool for the use of snr mgmt to divide and rule. Oh yes and Gogo Khan
paul martin - July 13, 2012 at 1:31 am
Shout out for the Open University of the UK. I can still see those 400 students smile as the videoed Fortran lecture from Sheffield cut to the beach in Scotland and its polar conditions – the teenagers were almost as stylishly dressed as me. We also invented golf.
Susan Jones - July 13, 2012 at 4:25 pm
What makes it “great” ???
Why not invest some of the millions into half-decent content, instead of the technological trappings? I *have* watched a handful of the videos and the paragraph about being sloppy and often wrong is painfully, consistently accurate.
More importantly, the instruction is not couched as “okay, first you should know what this means.” Sal Khan’s belief (as he says it) is that the best way to learn math is to do a bunch of problems and then try to think about what it means. It’s a pretty unusual learning style.
Susan Jones - July 13, 2012 at 4:30 pm
In my experience, when people are “stung” by a painful truth in an argument, they try to dissect the style of the argument to distract from its truth.
I have lots of students who really, really wantto learn. What they learn from KA style teaching is “I must be hopeless because I don’t understand what he’s talking about,” because it’s all explained as if they already understood what was going on. (In his addition level 2 lesson he says that he knows he’s confusing us, but that’s so it will be easier later. How encouraging!) We’re told “it’s easy, it’s easy” — so if it *isn’t*… we must be the damaged goods.
And if we don’t learn from it, clearly it’s because we didn’t want to badly enough.
Susan Jones - July 13, 2012 at 4:33 pm
There have been gobs of comments and corrections below his videos. They go unanswered. It’s more important to put the money into the trappings and the badges (which you “earn” by having your computer turned on or getting “likes” so now a lot of the comments say “please like my post so I can get a badge!”).
Here’s a survey question: how many people go to the site who *aren’t* trying to pass a class?
Susan Jones - July 13, 2012 at 4:36 pm
Khan consistently and repeatedly makes the same kinds of fundamental errors.
Do you know how many times he says things like “Two plus itself times one” is what two times one is? Last time I checked, two plus two was four… but in the very basic “what is multiplication” he’s saying that.
He also consistently demonstrates a process — and tells us that he is goign to help us understand it — and then somewhere near the end of the video *might* (if it’s really easy to do) include something visual.
Again, I keep finding that when people can’t answer a criticism, they jump all over the “method” of the criticism.
Susan Jones - July 13, 2012 at 4:37 pm
FYI: unless you meant “peaked” as in reached its highest point, you might have wanted to say “piqued.”
Donald McKendrick - July 14, 2012 at 6:47 pm
Does this form of criticism actually add anything though? Its completely inefficient. First of all you are removing the feedback from the actual site and posting it elsewhere. Again its a very demoralizing form of criticism.
Here’s a possible solution, new videos are peer checked (by those with some qualification in the field) before they are released to the public. I’m sure there are enough people out there willing to do this (three possible candidates are even mentioned in this article) that they could be checked at least 5 times. I’m not attempting to be petty but in your post there are spelling mistakes. Maybe you didn’t check over it or maybe you did and you just didn’t notice it. Mistakes happen, they just need to work on how they react to them being pointed out.
I don’t have any classes to pass. I just use it as a revision resource when I want to brush up on a few things. For me the badges are unimportant but unfortunately we live in a time where a lot of young people don’t value education as much as they should. The badges can help to encourage progress and commitment.
I worked in student feedback for 4 years. I can tell good criticism when I see it. This is not an example of such. Yes the lectures were replaced with new ones, but in the long run this is just petty. How encouraged do you think the staff of KA will be to sit through feedback that mocks them?
ladyofledgers - July 16, 2012 at 1:24 pm
No one comments about the fact that he gets some things wrong. He gets the Balance Sheet wrong in the intro accounting video and he doesn’t respond to people’s inquiries that he should update it.
Joe Wagner - July 27, 2012 at 11:37 am
Backpack TV video response to Mystery Teacher Theater 2000 and in defense of Sal Khan and Khan Academy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fhZ8_Gge54
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Pam Mulready - August 15, 2012 at 9:35 pm
Without viewing the video critique, it sounds like it added value and depth through feedback and informed meta-analysis of the original communication, resulting in a revision of the material? It does not need to be an either or question for such material, as learner context is everything and discrimination through critical analysis by an informed expert would be a most valuable layer!
Steve - August 16, 2012 at 7:49 am
The math videos by PatrickJMT on Youtube are much better. As a student, I found his videos much more insightful and to the point. It is clear that Patrick actually spent years teaching.