In recent months I have written almost half a dozen posts about Khan Academy and how it can and will influence changes in the way teaching and learning happens in our school. In my NAIS recap last week, I wrote about the excitement created by Salman Khan’s TED-style talk, which was clearly for me and many, many others a major highlight of the conference.
That talk by Khan is now available: he repeated it, seemingly to my observation nearly exactly verbatim, at the TED conference, and the TED people have been kind enough to post it online, and I share it with you here. It is a worthwhile 20 minutes, to be sure.
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March 19, 2011 at 7:15 am
There is no question that this is a wonderful and worthwhile turnabout of the way that mathematics education has been “delivered”; I’ll stick to math because that is what Mr. Khan addressed mostly. However, there is still the question of whether this is the content that students need. Very few really question this the world over, but I was recently reminded of this when Michael Herzog sent me something I read years ago, “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart, that once again raises the content question to a higher level. Even if this content is necessary (I wonder), it should not be all, as it seems to have become in the Palo Alto schools; there still must be attention given to the creation of mathematical concepts and students grappling with the “big ideas”, things that most mathematics teachers ceased to address generations ago, if they ever did. We have an army of math teachers who were taught and now teach only mechanics, the “how” and not the “why”, and whether that is even important is not discussed.
March 21, 2011 at 1:23 pm
[…] Jonathan Martin Let’s use video to reinvent education: Salman Khan’s NAIS talk (now on TED) In recent months I have written almost half a dozen posts about Khan Academy and how it can and will influence changes in the way teaching and learning happens in our school. In my NAIS recap last week, I wrote about the excitement created by Salman Khan’s TED-style talk, which was clearly for me and many, many others a major highlight of the conference…[MORE] […]