selection bias? Is KA randomly selecting these schools for their trials? Or is it a convenience sample? In that case the schools that elect to work with KA are not likely to be typical American schools.
56 karma · joined September 22, 2011
But dont do it as a startup. What they are doing is not revolutionary, but another resource (albiet valuable). KA does not solve the fundamental problem that smart people dont want to become teachers. In time the hype around KA will fade as the problem in ed persist despite its efforts.
The problems in education are structural. Technology cannot revolutionize a government monopoly. The major players have no incentive to change.
The evidence suggests that its individualized instruction in a structured environment with clear expectations that is best -- of course you cannot scale this, but clever videos are no substitute.
The Khan Academy's audience tend to be good students-those who would thrive in any number of environments. Im not worried about these students.
Its the students who might have been great had they been exposed to a better environment that worry me. For this it takes good teachers and a system that attracts them to the field (which the current system does not).
Contrast this with GWT, which is a Java to Javascript compiler. Unless you wrap it in a native method, you dont write javascript with GWT: i.e. GWT is a Java-Javascript compiler, not a new language like Obj-J
LAMP is better because only losers use stuff from MS. This is the sort of argument that you see alot of on the internet.
Lisp may be superior to Blub. But if Blub has excellent libraries X,Y, and Z that make solving your problem a lot easier, using Lisp may be a no-go - unless you can interoperate with Blub code from Lisp -- something that a virtual machine like the JVM makes very easy without having to write bindings.