Sal Kahn on Mastery Based Learning

Sal speaks at TED about mastery-based learning

Would you choose to build a house on top of an unfinished foundation? Of course not. Why, then, do we rush students through education when they haven't always grasped the basics? Yes, it's complicated, but Sal shares his plan to turn struggling students into scholars by helping them master concepts at their own pace.  Created by Sal Khan.  ... " 

Pixar and Inspirational Mathematics

Hard to convince kids that mathematics is relevant?  Or anyone of any age?  Here Kahn Academy shows how math is used at at Pixar to create effective and beautiful media.  Share it with your kids.  Inspire someone!

" ... To help educate anyone and everyone (but especially aspiring animators and storytellers), Pixar has teamed up with Khan Academy, an online classroom that provides free mini-lectures and in-browser activities, to make Pixar in a Box. The new curriculum will walk users through the math used to create the different technical stages of a Pixar movie’s creation from making the grass in Brave to final rendering for Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc. ... " 

Systematizing Training Tasks for Specific Goals

I just got a promotion from the Kahn Academy pointing to their new iPad App.  Now available for download.    Always thought it would be a good to systematize the kind of capabilities that Kahn has for topics like math.  For example, consider training as a set of short incremental tasks.  For a manager that wants to update their knowledge, say in business statistics to better understand Big Data, put together a series of these tasks, then prompt them on their tablet to complete sections daily. If useful, gamifying the process.  Here is what they write about the resources they have:

" ... Sharpen your skills: Over 150,000 interactive exercises with instant feedback and step-by-step hints for each question.

Flex your muscles: Get interactive math exercise recommendations tailored just for you.

Show your work: No need for paper or typing -- use our touch scratchpad to work through math problems! Once you have your answer, just write it with your fingertip and we’ll recognize it!

Track back: Your activity auto-magically syncs between your iPad and khanacademy.org, so your progress and recommendations are always up-to-date, anytime, anywhere.    ... "

Thinking Under Biases. Fast and Slow

A friend sends a  link from the WSJ:  Why the Grass Seem's Greener.  " ... We are of Two Minds - One deliberative and rational, the other quick and intuitive.  They often don't agree. ... "  A review of the book by economist Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow. 

STEM, Thinking Logically, Starting at Kahn

Brought to my attention. From the Kahn Academy.   A short tutorial on thinking logically.  A reminder of early training and implementation we did using first order logic.  Essential for programming and understanding computers. There has been much emphasis on STEM (Science,  Technology,  Engineering and Math) training recently.    Especially useful for Math, which is often the most difficult thing to get students interested in.  This will become increasingly important for any re-emergence of AI.  One of the most important concepts for STEM is logical thinking.  Here is a great place to start, and its completely free.   Point it out to your children or those you are mentoring.  It's essential.

Kahn Academy on Renting vs Buying a Home

Received from the Kahn Academy. " ... The math of renting vs. buying a home. Challenging the notion that it is always better to buy. ... ". Nicely done example of how the Kahn Academy works by providing short snippets of knowledge on useful topics.  See also the comments, which have some good challenges to the assumptions.  On any analytical method it's always good to repeatedly review the assumptions with topic, data experts and stake holders.

Salman Kahn on Education

An interview in HBR with Salman Kahn, founder of the Kahn Academy.   Just have started to dive in.   " ... Salman Khan was working as a hedge fund analyst when he started using online tools to tutor his cousins in math. Nine years later, his nonprofit organization, Khan Academy, draws on the same approach to offer more than 5,000 free, web-based video lessons to millions of students across the globe, disrupting not only schools but also the education industry built around them. ... " 

Behavioral Research in System 1 vs System 2

If you have been following some recent advances in thinking about cognition: " ... Charles Young examines what we can learn about measuring ad effectiveness by applying Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 theory of cognition.  ... " via Jeff Goldstein of AcuPoll.

Decision Making Science

New and of interest:

Thinking: the New Science of  Decision Making, Problem solving and Prediction.
CONTRIBUTORS: Daniel C. Dennett, Philip Tetlock, Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Gilbert, Vilayanur Ramacahndran. Timothy D. Wilson, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Bruce Hood, Simon Baron-Cohen, Gary Klein, Simon Schnall, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Alva Noe, Daniel L. Everett, Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, Sam Harris, Roy Baumeister, Paul Bloom, Daivd Pizarro, Joshua Knobe, Daniel Kahneman

"Thinking is excellent and mind-expanding in its entirety. Complement it with Brockman's This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking, one of the best psychology books of 2012."
--Maria Popova, BRAIN PICKING

"For ... readers interested in keeping up with what serious thinkers are thinking about thinking, this book offers nourishing food for thought".  (Kirkus Reviews)

Common Cognitive Traps in Innovation

In the HBR:  (Requires free registration):   Key point being made is that estimation error can be a key element for building on innovation.  Always try to build numerical estimations of facts, then verify them with reality.  " ... Which is the more likely cause of death — shark attack or falling airplane parts? The answer to Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahnemann’s question is surprising; falling airplane parts. (In fact, you are 30 times more likely to die from a piece of falling airplane than you are at the jaws of a shark.) We have tested this query with senior executives across multiple continents, and they inevitably get it wrong. Why does this happen? Events are perceived as more likely to occur if they are easier to bring to mind. We have the TV special Shark Week and movies like Jaws to remind us of the danger of sharks, but there is no Airplane Debris Week. With unfamiliar, low probability events,  disproportionate media coverage can lead to gross estimation errors. ... "

Radical New Teaching Method?

 Aspects of AI inspired learning theories.  Heavily technology driven.  Now further enabled by MOOC. A kind of self organizing approach that assumes that children will organize to teach themselves using either their peers or the Internet.  I am skeptical that these kinds of methods will work alone.  People still have to be in the loop.  Families and environments must be strongly cooperative.  Home Schooling and Montessori are old and successful models.  See the Kahn Academy.  But different people learn in different ways.   You still have to work with accreditation/measurement of the results.    These approaches have been tested, and should be, but failures are rarely reported, since they are not in the rosy script.

In Wired:    (Read the whole article, a compelling story)

" ... an emerging educational philosophy, one that applies the logic of the digital age to the classroom. That logic is inexorable: Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think. Decentralized systems have proven to be more productive and agile than rigid, top-down ones. Innovation, creativity, and independent thinking are increasingly crucial to the global economy.... " 

" ... In 2009, scientists from the University of Louisville and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences conducted a study of 48 children between the ages of 3 and 6. The kids were presented with a toy that could squeak, play notes, and reflect images, among other things. For one set of children, a researcher demonstrated a single attribute and then let them play with the toy. Another set of students was given no information about the toy. This group played longer and discovered an average of six attributes of the toy; the group that was told what to do discovered only about four. A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.  ... "

Khan Academy and Bank of America

Saw a commercial for this service the other day. Financial training from the Kahn Academy sponsored by the Bank of America.  A partnership.    A nice idea.  If you have not seen or tried it, the Kahn Academy is an online repository of thousands of free video teaching segments, starting with topics like algrebra and physics.  These segments answer some basic financial questions like: What is a Mortgage? Very popular and useful. I have always wondered why other knowledge resources, like the Wikipedia, have not tried this.  Unclear how much the content from the Kahn Academy has been modified to fit the financial goals of Bank of America.

Science of Human Nature and Behavior: A Master Class

I was reminded of this conference by a correspondent,  held in 2011:

In The Edge:
" ... Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking; Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak on the evolution of cooperation; UC-Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides on the architecture of motivation; UC-Santa Barbara neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga on neuroscience and the law; Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the history of violence; and Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels on The Book of Revelations ... ". 

At the link, videos, written materials and links to many of the authors' work.  A rich set of materials.

CFOs Thinking Fast

Brought to my attention by a collaborator.  I am a believer in quantitative analytic thinking and a critic of intuitive flash thinking, so obviously agree to these cautions,  In the WSJ: 

" When CFOs Think Fast ……They may get the company into a lot of trouble. Here's where they go astray—and how to avoid it. ... Daniel Kahneman, in his best-selling book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow," says there are basically two modes of thinking. Fast and slow. Fast thinking is intuitive, he says. It arises from experience and broad unconscious associations between ideas. Slow thinking, in contrast, relies on reason, analysis and deliberation. Both have their time and place. But the psychology professor and Nobel laureate in economics warns about the risks of too much fast thinking when thinking slowly would lead us to better decisions.... "

Khan Academy Computer Science

The much talked about Kahn Academy now has a Computer Science Curriculum.  With code examples:  " ... All of the code in the Khan Academy Computer Science platform is written using JavaScript and Processing.js. Feel free to browse through the documentation here to learn more about these technologies.... " .   The examples still look to be very thin in breadth, but a good start.

Kahn Academy Has an App

In FastCompany:   Look forward to taking a closer look.  Will this prove to be a fundamental change in  the educational process?   This App iPad is now on the iPhone App store.

" ... Khan Academy, the wildly popular YouTube lecture series, is slated to launch its iPad app any minute now in Apple's store. The enhanced version of Khan Academy will include time-syncing between devices--no Internet connection required--an interactive transcript of the lectures for easy searching, and a handy scrubber for moving between parts of the lectures. Perhaps more importantly, now that more schools have begun adopting Khan's lectures for their own classrooms, the free iPad app could possibly replace or supplement textbooks, saving cash-strapped schools and students a lot of money... " 

Thinking Fast and Slow

I have been making my way through Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow for the last few months.  This is very well worth reading.  I do wish there was more about how these  ideas could be applied more generally to areas like marketing and merchandising.   I can see how it might be.  Also a good source of behavioral research information. 

Freeman Dyson, physicist and favorite thinker and writer, insightfully reviews : Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. Excellent thoughts regarding How to dispel your illusions. The basis of irrationality in economic decision making. Includes his take on the famous 'luck vs skill' Lancaster bomber survival analysis of WWII. Even addresses the near universal dilemma of calorie consumption among many of us.

More on the Kahn Academy in Higher Education

This remains a very interesting approach to providing educational snippets to all:

As a fledgling voice of reform in higher education, Salman Khan is an oddity. He cannot name any higher education accrediting agencies off the top of his head. He advocates for competency-based credentialing, but has never heard of Western Governors University. He is capable of talking on the phone for a full hour without using the word “disruptive” once. Until recently, he was an analyst for a hedge fund ... " 

Thinking Fast and Slow

Freeman Dyson, physicist and favorite thinker and writer, insightfully reviews : Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.  Excellent thoughts regarding How to dispel your illusions. The basis of irrationality in economic decision making.  Includes his take on the famous 'luck vs skill' Lancaster bomber survival analysis of WWII.  Even addresses the near universal dilemma of calorie consumption among many of us.

Thinking Fast and Slow

In the NYT Book review: A review of Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.  The dismantling of 'Homo Economicus'.    Heady stuff that has stimulated a lot of new thinking about decisions and their irrationality.