Pretty much everyone has an opinion about learning, and the teaching that causes, impedes or just precedes it. Sal Khan famously just started making videos with the aim of helping people learn, without paying much attention to the hows and whys of pedagogy. That means that pretty much everyone has an opinion about Sal’s site, Khan Academy. Recently some teachers and educationalists held a competition for “the best video commentary on a Khan Academy video” to “encourage math educators to create videos that help their peers bring a critical eye to the Khan series”.
(So this post has been in our news queue since June, when the #mtt2k competition started. The winners were announced a fortnight ago. I let it sit there for so long because we make a point of not being about education here. We didn’t cover the whole “Is Algebra Necessary” thing because of the sheer inanity and tendentiousness of it all. The videos produced for #mtt2k are interesting, though, so here’s the post I should’ve written at least two weeks ago.)