I didn’t have a lot to talk about this morning, altho I did warm up to talking about distance education near the end.
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What do you think of the Khan Academy, and especially the problem some teachers are bitching at him about:
“Khan’s programmer, Ben Kamens, has heard from teachers who’ve seen Khan Academy presentations and loved the idea but wondered whether they could modify it “to stop students from becoming this advanced.”
( http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_khan/all/1 )
This ticks me off the way the TL;DR crowd, who thinks that maybe they should shorten tweets, does.
The telling bit in that article is “Khan doesn’t want to change the way institutions teach; he wants to change how people learn”
Actually, that’s a bit of a mis-statement. What he’s doing is trying to satisfy the various ways people *do* learn. He’s using a well-established set of techniques in a way that makes perfect sense. He capitalizes on “lecture as performance” and the “level up” phenomenon from gaming.
I understand Sager and Martinez’s complaints with it. It’s *not* very radical. Flipping the classroom isn’t terribly radical either, although the dashboard/badge idea is a nice incremental innovation.
I can also understand why becoming too advanced is a problem for teachers who then have to deal with the fall out of dealing with a student that’s miles ahead of the rest of the class — basically somebody who’s already finished the game but isn’t allowed to stop playing. This is less about learning or teaching as it is about administration.
Notice the comments about the teacher not being in control or not participating enough while the students were watching the videos. That’s a powerful idea and I understand how some administrators might see that “lack of involvement.”
I do think Khan has a lot of good points — not the least of which is that flipping the classroom allows for the kind of constructivist/constructionist approaches that the teachers should be doing when they have the kids in class. He also has a common (and incorrect) perception of constructionism — that students need to discover everything for themselves.
So it goes.
What is your definition of a leader? Seems to me that Ishmael is definitely a team leader, but he does not micromanage. I can give several examples from the 1st of the books, but the later one that impressed me was the Agamemnon. He took a very disfunctional crew and not only turned them around to a close team working for the ship, but they even ended up not only respectiong each other but liking each other whilst about it. Isn’t that what a good leader does? OS was about ignorance and him being tempted into a situation he wasn’t prepared for by experience or anything else. I kind of thought of his “fatal flaw” as being impulsiveness. Jen, the priority cargo, buying a ship without money in hand, etc, etc. Just a thought……..
Good points.
He does get in over his head — but he also listens to what others say.
Ok. I can see that.