Flipping Education For Better

Yesterday at Cory Doctorow’s presentation, Bill Van Dyke told me about how the Khan Academy is changing education for the better.

Rather than using class time for lectures, students watch ten minute videos and do computerized exercises on their own time. When they get ten answers in a row, they move up a level. The internet teaches, tracks progress, issues achievement badges, shows areas for improvement.

What do teachers do? Khan makes the point that when teachers lecture, grade, and keep records, they spend less than five percent of their time teaching. With Khan support, they spend most of their time working with students, doing group experiments.

Khan Academy is free and approaching 3,000 online lessons. I’ll be trying some during the holiday.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

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Foundering

Stephen Chapman has an interesting post on ZDNet

Wikipedia needs to stop begging for donations and start implementing ads 

The post energetically extends and embellishes the title.

Comments were divided:

• Jimmy Wales is smarter than you and Wikipedia doesn’t need ads; and
• Asking for donations feels like the guy who comes up to your car at a stoplight and sprays dirty water on the windshield.

Again, the comments embellish and extend commenters’ positions.

My comment was

Great idea! Ads aren't intrusive and Wikipedia has a huge reader base.

Unfortunately the point I got from this is Wikipedia is an open sourced plus founder management structure which is a pity,

1. showing the indomitable strength of open sourced management, and
2. the sad results of a founder who doesn't know what he doesn't know, or any limits.
   Thank you, Stephen, for an incredible lesson.

Open sourced management is a current game-changer, outperforming command and control management. There are good and bad examples of each, but open sourced is more efficient. Pick your own examples, they are out there.

Wikipedia today shows another model. Open sourced plus founder management.

New concept. We’re all equal, except the guys making the rules should be able to get away with things the rest of us can’t.

Should we call it foundering?

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It’s Not The Technology...

I was with a friend who sang the chorus of “I don’t do technology” more times than I had verses.

He wistfully wondered where all the dialing-for-dollars sales jobs have gone. I disrecall he liked them much, either.

Coincidence?

James Patterson gets much better rewards from moveable type than Johannes Gutenberg ever did.

It’s not the raw technology. It’s what you figure out to do with it.

How are you adapting technology for the world?

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