Comment by wafflemaker
5 hours ago
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?
Yeah the article feels as though its describing Khan Academy from 10 or more years ago - it is quite odd.
"What he has never had is pedagogical knowledge: an understanding of how people learn, what motivates them, what makes the difference between someone who pushes through difficulty and someone who types “IDK.”"
It is almost as though the author thinks that Khan Academy is an organization of 1, and that they don't employ learning scientists and have a content team and don't publish research papers in the learning science field.
I agree with you. It's just an attention bite as nobody would care about this article if it wasn't focused on something as big and popular as Khan Academy. It's clear that the author has never used it as a place to learn something.
You are wrong in understanding the article.
Khan: Videos + rote exercises
Learning: Projects, complex problem-solving, exploration, argumentation, etc.
Dewey is worth reading.
Direct Instruction - and the largest educational study ever untaken Project Follow Through - would like a work. Project based learning?
Recall practice IS learning. Projects, exploration, and discovery-based "learning" sounds great in theory but in practice, without actual testing, really doesn't live up to the hype.
Adam Boxer is worth reading.
Particularly in early mathematics and language acquisition (but also in most learning domains) you need both rote learning and exploratory learning. Fundamental concepts + exercises to build muscle memory are foundational to enabling students to participate fruitfully in meaningful projects, complex problem-solving, exploration and argumentation.
If you're flailing around without having memorized basic trigonometric identities, you're going to struggle severely to apply them to classical mechanics. If you can't do basic matrix multiplication, you're not going to build a graphics engine.
The article tries to damn Khan with an example about probing how neural myelination works. If you understand the foundations of electricity (by learning about capacitance and impedance) and have done some grueling foundational learning in organic chemistry, ready answers might spring to your mind. You need the former to make asking the latter fruitful or meaningful.
Khan deliberately uses the term "scaffolding" - which since we're throwing around dead education theorists harks from Vygotsky - which is precisely what a teacher provides by pantomiming elementary concepts for a child. Ultimately the child needs to internalize these basics to succeed in more complex projects with a sense of independence.
I really don't understand this article. Two things can be true at once.
Sounds like you should read the article if you have questions about what the article is about?
I've read the article (except skimming \ fast forwarding 3rd and 2nd paragraph from the end) and it wasn't there. No detailed info explaining why author's criticizing Khan Academy for not doing something it in my experience did. Maybe you haven't read it?
This article is an example of a rather poor piece of writing. You can't blame people for skimming through it.