education

The future of education

Think about wikipedia and video lessons. Now, the power of that is simple: students can study at their own pace at their own time, thus can actually have interactions with the teacher and their peers at school on perhaps more in-depth discussions. Also with the fun testing games and reward system, the students are more motivated to keep trying without embarrassment. All the learning stats and scores already in the system can be analyzed and plotted into meaningful graphs for the teachers or coaches, the teachers can then decide if they need to intervene and how. Take a look and I hope you will get inspired by it. There is definitely a lot we can do to improve the education system globally.

Here is a little info from TED on Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy.

Salman Khan is the founder and faculty of the Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org)– a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a free world-class education to anyone, anywhere. It now consists of self-paced software and, with over 1 million unique students per month, the most-used educational video repository on the Internet (over 30 million lessons delivered to-date). All 2000+ video tutorials, covering everything from basic addition to advanced calculus, physics, chemistry and biology, have been made by Salman.

Prior to the Khan Academy, Salman was a senior analyst at a hedge fund and had also worked in technology and venture capital. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an M.Eng and B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in mathematics from MIT.

Salman Khan: Let’s use video to reinvent education
http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

香港教育的問題

I am glad that someone actually tried to do a small research on this topic, though to be fair the population size is only about a thousand. But I guess if the population size were to increase the result would be worse…

Most HK students worry only about their studies at school, that is if they study at all. School work is stressful already that consumes most of they time. Anything outside of school is considered unproductive, and can be dealt with later. There isn’t much incentive to read news unless it’s for personal interest. The high competition in the job market also contributes to this phenomena.

Such is the HK education focus, they want their students to be mainly book-smart. Well, that approach has its own advantage as well as its downfall. However if that’s their focus, then they will need to make sure their students are indeed book-smart, or extremely book-smart instead. Otherwise, the trade-off wouldn’t be justifiable.

This is in fact a complex issue with long lasting impact, but most people just let the education department officers deal with it and worry about other things. That’s understandable, after all what can anybody do?

btw, I only got 2 correct out of the whole list of questions. Shame on me! ^^;