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Khan Academy Lite

bjk5.com

83 pointsaronasorman11 comments

Thanks for the very sweet blog post, Kamens!

We would love to answer any questions about KA Lite or Learning Equality, and where we're headed. I'll be on a plane for the next few hours, but others on the team can chime in and I can respond a bit later as well.

Also, note that we're hiring! We're building a scrappy team of passionate, dedicated devs down in San Diego: https://learningequality.org/about/jobs/

KA Lite is great. I was working on an educational computer lab in a prison, and it was moderately easy to deploy on our Windows Multipoint server. Unfortunately we had to delete it becuase there was too much video content for the prison administration to screen and approve. FWIW, we also had to delete the offline wikipedia (kiwix) for the similar reasons.

Approve for what out of curiosity? I'm sure they don't expect a how-to on making a shiv half way through a KA video.

> I'm sure they don't expect a how-to on making a shiv half way through a KA video

If the prison doesn't screen and approve, a computer technician could smuggle banned content in among the regular Khan Academy videos.

When I explain the screening criteria to people, the anecdote I use is that we had to delete the clipart from MS Office because one of the images was a star-of-david, which apparently has some alternative applications such as communicating gang affiliation. (No, there is nothing stopping a user from exercising the symbol by way of unicode character.)

We did hear a story in Idaho where they walked in on prisoners watching a Khan Academy video about building a motor (https://www.khanacademy.org/science/discoveries-projects/dis...). Since motors are contraband (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edc37hoSD7Y), they had to remove the video.

We'd be curious to hear what state this was in. KA Lite is being used in prisons all across Idaho, and many in Washington state, some in New Mexico, Virginia, and a few others. In some cases, this is grassroots. We're figuring out ways to help overcome institutional resistance to make sure it can be accessed by as many prisoners as possible.

You can install KA Lite and other educational packages on a LibraryBox, which is basically a router with a web server on it. http://www.hackersforcharity.org/librarybox/

Cool! Yep, you can install it on anything that runs Python (it's all written in pure Python, with no libraries that have binary dependencies). We run it on Raspberry Pi's, netbooks, server racks, Sandisk Connect hotspot devices, old Pentium III's, and now (thanks to python-for-android) even standalone on Android devices (which should be released soon). We want to support any old, existing hardware, as well as the cheapest stuff available off the shelf today.

Thanks a bunch!

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