alt Hacker NewsWhy Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling
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Off-topic and may be found rude - I find multiple instances of "Kahn" in the comments. Is it really that difficult to put in the effort to learn the correct spelling of "Khan" specially when it is everywhere in TFA, the post title, and other comments?
I have been using Khan Academy for over 7 years growing up. It has helped tremendously and taught me to be a critical thinker. There are exercises, quizzes, and unit tests to test a student's understanding and if they get something wrong, KA marks what videos or articles they should go back to and review. I agree with one of the commenters here, this article is uncharitable.
Is the article about something else than how math on Khan Academy was thaught?
I remember minimal videos (3-13 min, usually 5-8), and then exercises drilling the techniques until you understand it and don't make mistakes. If you got a perfect score (no mistakes whatsoever), you went a little faster.
That's learning by doing, or am I wrong? Or are there no exercises for things other than math?
Whenever this topic comes up I feel the urge to point out that not enough people have read Audrey Watter's "Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning", or her blog. We might stop repeating the same mistakes over and over again if we did.
[0] https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5138/Teaching-MachinesThe-...
Isn’t education often a you-can-lead-a-horse-to-water-but-you-can't-make-it-drink problem?
It feels weird and unfair to focus solely on Kahn here when he’s competing with some random teacher or professor’s droning, confusing, non-interactive lecture that’s less engaging and just as lacking in interactivity or application.
I also don’t think he ever purports to be “all you need” to learn.
It reminds me of the people who criticize Duolingo because you can’t actually reach perfect fluency through their app--like wasn’t it always obvious that it was never meant to be the only education you need; wasn’t it always obvious that you need to actually _speak_ a language to learn it? And yet it’s still a great app that has helped millions of people learn languages.
Yeah? That's what the style of teaching is about.
Think less science and more a conversation; establishing syntactic and semantic ground rules for the speakers grasp of a behavior relative to problem.
It's not necessarily about teaching something concrete. It's about teaching a social style in an abstract way. It's discussing a painting or piece of music, in math the symbols used to represent possible number/geometry generators.
I never just watch the videos. I rewrite what is written out. To recreate the song and dance so to speak.
Pragmatically speaking life is just performance art. Only a few specific realms of science move the needle for humanity; biological health maintenance (across all contexts; housing, food, not just medical) and our research in energy infrastructure.
Everything else is just one's relative outcome. Result of their sensory experience. Feels like this should be obvious at this point.
The studies that show brain activity goes down as we use AI. Yeah. So? Is it great to stimulate ourselves so much with ultimately arbitrary content our biology immediately tries to forget due to entropy? Heart attacks are up in <60 crowd relative to last generation. Constant interaction with flame wars and tabs v spaces (functional languages and Nix or gtfo!) computer config wars level inanity is not good Bob.
The article starts by talking about how interactive learning with Khanmingo failed, and then goes into depth about how watching videos isn’t enough. That’s disappointing. Khanmingo should be superior to passively watching a video because you can interactively dig deeper just like the author says is necessary.
That article is spot on: we learn by doing and experience, not being told the high level outcomes (which is not without value as a guide).
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Overall, I do agree with the thesis but:
> Now… how does Sal Khan want my kid to learn?
> Watch a video.
I find this a little uncharitable. I learned a lot of math at a young age from Sal Khan's early videos (back when he used to erase by switching to a black pen and scribbling across the entire screen) and, to put it in the author's terms, it served as an easy-to-digest scaffolding on top of which to build a deeper understanding. I don't think Khanacademy ever sold itself as a magic learning resource that removes the need to work out problems yourself.