Motus Mentis

4 Comments

1. JK says

   I can see I’m gonna have to widen the horizons of stuff I send you. You may recall my lamenting about a particular subject. A few weeks ago a neighbor asked me if I would help her with it but alas I felt inadequate. Then I saw that Bill Gates had donated (well his foundation anyway) a sizeable chunk of change to what you’ve linked to.

   I did some checking and now I’m a helluva lot more confident than I was. You were correct incidentally – I had just been taught wrong.

   Posted March 23, 2011 at 10:33 pm | Permalink
2. Kevin Kim says

   I think the Khan Academy is a great idea, but its applicability has limits, especially in areas like language teaching (which requires live human interaction) and lab science (which requires more than a home computer). I appreciate the notion of peer tutoring and definitely agree that a curriculum that demands actual mastery before a student can move on to the next level is far better than what we generally do now in classes. I’ve been thinking about using the Khan Academy myself in order to brush up on my math.

   The question gets murkier, though, as we move away from math and hard science and more into areas requiring either a hands-on component (language interaction, lab science, wood/auto shop, etc.) or a more right-brained* way of tackling a subject (art, much of the humanities curriculum, etc.). And I guess that’s what bothers me about the TED video: the lack of discussion about how this new method can be applied to “softer” or “fuzzier” fields of study.

   Not to say that such a goal is impossible, of course: just as a sculptor has to master basic techniques before moving on to more ambitious endeavors, the Khan approach is, in some way, applicable even in the arts and humanities. But because the basic Khan method involves packaged videos and not live interaction, there’s little that the approach can do when the student starts tackling those higher-cognitive problems, the ones requiring deep analysis and creative synthesis.

   The Khan Academy has a lot in common with the Suzuki Method for strings, I think; it’s modular, it requires mastery before one can continue to the next level, it breaks skills down into discrete components and assumes that certain skills build on others. There’s a risk, though, that the Khan Academy might share the Suzuki Method’s flaw, to wit: by commodifying education, it risks churning students out as un-spontaneous “products” incapable of real thought and lacking that creative spark. It’s interesting to contrast the Khan talk with many of the talks by Ken Robinson (who has done his share of TED spiels). Both educators are worth listening to, and both approaches to education have their proper places, I think.

   _____

   *I know this term is currently slipping out of vogue as we continue to discover how intricate brain processes really are.

   Posted March 24, 2011 at 1:22 am | Permalink
3. Malcolm says

   Good comment, Kevin. I don’t usually gush so.

   Yes, the method, particularly the interactive quizzes at the website, seems best suited to more quantifiable areas of study. But Mr. Khan did make the point in the TED talk that using his system “flips” the teaching model, with class time becoming far more interactive as lectures are shifted to the time when students are working alone.

   I’ve been impressed for some time by The Teaching Company’s series of video courses; what I thought was great about Khan’s effort was the enormous systemization and expansion of that basic idea.

   Not perfect, as you say, and not a panacea: no revolution in education will ever make power-learners out of the lazy or the feeble-minded. But not too shabby nevertheless; and I was very taken with Mr. Khan’s intelligence and dynamism.

   Posted March 24, 2011 at 9:27 am | Permalink
4. Kevin Kim says

   And this is where William Shatner breaks in and screams:

   KHAAAAAAAAAAAN! KHAAAAAAAAAAAN!

   Posted March 24, 2011 at 10:48 am | Permalink