May 29, 2011
Online Learning
I don’t often rave about an online product. After all, I’ve been “surfing the web” since it was a text based system called “Gopher” and a major debate was not whether it was possible to make money online, but whether it was ethical to do so. I watched IE beat up Netscape, but Mosaic had to come first. Google upended Yahoo’s “What’s Cool” page. But Yahoo had to come first. Facebook hit Dartmouth “by invitation only” when I was a grad student, but discussion boards had to come first. Twitter took the world by storm, but texting came first.
What’s the pattern? Massive disruptive technologies are based on converting known areas (indexing, socializing, short messaging) into a “many-to-many” world. But everytime they start with a game-changing one-to-many online competitor to “old school” processes. I’d read about Khan Academy, and in our ‘Reducation’ (Reform-education, Revolutionize Education, etc) group that I was introduced to it by Iowa’s peerless Christian Renaud and education evangelist John Carver last summer. It was a developing site then. I returned to it last week, as I looked at how to engage my kids in learning for the summer in a fun way. Simply put, I believe the next domino is about to fall.
The site is an engaging way to intertwine learning and playing. My 7 and 9 year old boys compared it to their favorite computer game, Civilization. A revolutionary approach to “mass customization” of the learning process, mostly centered on math, finance and science, but expanding fast. No doubt educators are scrambling to take the concepts into the next generation of networked, mass-customization schools. But Khan Academy looks to me like the precursor of the “many-to-many” platform that will pronounce, in yet another major area, that geography is dead. Long live online learning. Check it out, and join my kids. Who knows, maybe I’ll even “coach” a few more kids.
