I mentioned the TED video of Salman Khan, leveraging Youtube videos for education.
Sal got $2 million from Google for his non-profit and here he is presenting at Google after his TED presentation where he explains more of his insights on how videos can be used in education
Here are a couple of points that caught my attention. "you want other people to be around you. When you're actually trying to solve a problem." This makes sense, but how convenient is this to do. "Hey Tom, I could use your help looking at this problem I am working on." But, Tom is on the East Coast and you are on the West Coast. The best guy to help me out is Tom, and my alternative is to go at it alone, wait, or search for someone else who can help me.
The irony is the one time you usually have lots of people around you is when you are listening to a lecture, passively with the rest. This is when watching a video makes a lot of sense. Part of what keeps you from watching great videos is the event ecosystem that has a business model to get people to attend conferences. What would happen if you published the conference videos ahead of time to the attendees, then had sessions where you discussed the ideas interactively with the audience.
Sal did an experiment at the Los Altos elementary school where they shared the math videos with the kids, and let them go at their own pace.
If the attendees were working on problems, then the teacher/lecturer would intervene on the kids who were stuck. This is where there is problem solving in a group.
Sound radical. Imagine how much more you could learn.
I was talking to David Schirmacher the other day and he said how many people had sitting in his DCIM presentation at AFCOM. I am going to pass this idea by him for maybe a future 7x24 Exchange presentation.