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Life is 8 bit

It's not. A codon consists of 3 nucleotides, each of which has 4 different values (i.e., distinct chemical composition) equivalent to a two bit encoding. Total: six bits. The artificially extended version adds one bit to the nucleotide range, times 3 nucleotides, total 9 bits. So there is no way to interpret your joke as correct, sorry. It's not about lacking a sense of humour, it just that the numbers need to add up. For example, "life is braille". Which is actually close to the truth when you look at the way a ribosome works.

Anyway, like almost anything in nature, it's way more complicated than that because the natural "design" is pretty sloppy, with a lot of redundancy that serves no apparent purpose, so that the 6 bit natural code actually encodes only 20 different protein peptides, plus start and stop, so there are 42 redundant codes out of 64. You could attempt an analogy with ECC, also redundant, but it's not like that, it's more like an ECC designed by somebody who read the first paragraph of the wikipedia page then set out bravely to design their own error correction scheme without bothering to learn the underlying math, giving up in frustration half way through and leaving it for a bunch of code monkeys to make the demented scheme work anyway. Kind of like most software projects, actually. The end result is something that looks like it ought to have some underlying mathematical pattern, but the closer you look at it, the more you want to go back for a do-over.

Well. That would be a moot point if there was nothing we could do about it, but as these researchers demonstrate, there clearly is. Just to be clear about what they actually did: what defines the genetic code? It's not just four distinct nucleotides, you also need a decoder, which in nature is a ribosome. This research did not go that far. I'm sure they hope to one day, but engineering a 3-bit-per-nucleotide ribosome is a whole lot harder than coming up with 4 new nucleotides. One thing they did get for free is the ability to transcribe 3-bit DNA to 3-bit RNA, because this mechanism doesn't involve any coding, it just requires that the nucleotides pair up uniquely, as they say, like lego bricks.

Some other researchers previously repurposed some of those redundant natural codes to code for non-natural peptides, another way to extend the genetic code. Another, much harder way, would be to increase the nucleotides per codon. Then, getting back to your joke, we really could create 8 bit life. Left as an exercise for the interested reader to determine whether we want that.

Until enough people decide they want more and vote in politicians promising them what they want.

That's ALWAYS a concern. We have government processes that prevent that, but it's still a thing. I mean honestly, we can amend the Constitution; have you tried?

That concern is why we have a representative democracy of elites: we vote in people we think are very smart, complain about our needs, and they figure out how to deal with it. Do you have time to be a criminal justice expert, economist, military expert, and the like, all at once, on top of your day job? Calming the temporary passions of an excited majority is part of the reason we built this government as-is.

It's actually a fascinating thing to learn about; you should try it.

I'm working on other systems that address this, anyway. The FICA tax is universal and flat: the bigger it is, the harder it is for you to go from poor to wealthy--so much for the American dream. I also have designed a tax system based on shaping an inverse curve to fit our progressive tax structure, then fitting your income as a proportion of the GNI-per-capita into that to determine your effective tax rate: if we raise the tax rate from 40% to 50%, then those very-rich might pay nearly 10% more (1/4 increase), and those poorer will also pay nearly 2.5% more (also 1/4 increase). We're all in this together, folks. Of course you can adjust the shape of the curve, which is a bigger, more-complex, and dangerous topic--one people should distrust.

Other nations have achieved social democracy (the Nordic model) without that problem in practice. Fortunately, they haven't devolved into democratic socialism. I have confidence we can protect ourselves.

Khan Academy has some great series. The depth varies quite a bit between subjects - last time I checked, the math parts were much better developed than the biology ones - but it has some really useful stuff.

What I'd like to see are more comprehensive trade school education resources online. Yeah, I know there are instructional videos on YouTube, but they tend to be for quick things (some exceptions, obviously) and it's not always easy to find the good ones.

https://www.khanacademy.org/

Called the Khan Academy.

Great site with lots of topics.

... as he explains in his "The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined" book: https://www.khanacademy.org/ab...

Sal Khan says it won't be right for everyone, but if you are motivated, the "seat time" as a "passive learner" in large lecture courses is mostly wasted time compared to being an "active learner" working through problem sets. He says there that skipping classes was how he and others at MIT were able to take double the normal course load and graduate with high grades and multiple degrees. See:
https://books.google.com/books...

So, in that sense, it might not be surprising or an indictment of college that the GP AC poster was able to miss all the 8am classes for a course and still pass it -- if they did the assignments and otherwise read the text book or other readings and such.

Of course, while class skipping may work for large lecture courses, it may be more problematical for the best sort of small seminar courses where a lot of active participation goes on in class as discussion and is part of the learning process.

So, without knowing the class and what the GP AC did to pass it, it it hard to generalize about college.

That said, you might like these links I put together almost a decade ago on problems with current schooling practices and various alternatives:

"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...

"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...

"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...

All I can say is "Thank God people like you don't run anything important.". Science deniers claiming that the Laws of Energy Conservation don't apply to this project are simply ignorant fools. GP didn't need to rebut bullshit, the Thunderf00t Videos (yes, that is plural. As in more than one) lay\ out all of the scientific principles for you. You simply pretend they don't exist.

The Paulson bailout was a catastrophe, and frankly just wholesale robbery of the American people. The greedy scum that ruined our economy were rewarded. They then payed out big bonuses to their management. But the entire point of the bailout was to improve liquidity for companies so they could have the working capital they needed to survive, and that really didn't happen. Many companies did go bankrupt due to that lack of liquidity. It bailed out the bankers, but screwed everyone else.

KhanAcademy has an alternative solution that was far superior to the Paulson bailout.

I think GP is referring to Common Core, which everybody has been calling "New Math." I didn't know that New Math was a 1960s thing, so thanks for the link.

I remember looking at some of the stuff and being utterly bewildered. Once I learned what was going on, I sort of had an ah-ha moment. Ironically, they're teaching subtraction in a similar way that one would make change, except it's done in writing. Some of the notation is different. I'm not sure what my opinion is overall.

Khan Academy has some common core maths lessons. At the bottom of the page I linked is addition and subtraction. I can't watch videos right now but I'll probably give it a watch later tonight for the hell of it. (You know you're a sad person when Friday evening consists of reviewing elementary school learning materials.)

I'll leave a lengthier comment elsewhere, but it's amusing and horrifying watching the education system go through its contortions. If only we used $x our kids would be geniuses! Let's switch to $y and that'll fix all the problems! No, you fools, first you have to value knowledge, philosophy (term used very broadly), and logic. The reason we have kids who can't do algebra graduating is because they're the smart ones who know how money and power works. Instead, they can just hire the stupid ones like me.

Hmm, I've got Khan Academy agreeing with me too: https://www.khanacademy.org/ma... on his board at 3:16. But, what does he know, he's only one of the most highly regarded sources for learning mathematics online...I'm sure it was just a slip-up that no one seems to have successfully countered in his comments...

Nothing wrong with encouraging kids to work hard, but are you comfortable with Google and Khan Academy using (presumably) tax-free money and their mysterious "grit algorithm" to determine education haves and have-nots? Btw, one of the schools whose grit "unlocked new devices [Google Chrome laptops] for their classrooms and free home internet service for eligible families, increasing student access to online learning tools like Khan Academy" was coincidentally already a Khan Academy Case Study, which one might suspects might have given them an edge over the competition. If access to computers is truly fundamental for learning, which Google and Khan Academy seem to agree with, should it not be fully-funded rather than left to the kindness of corporations, nonprofits, and their "grit algorithms"?

Well, if it works for CEOs then why would people have any problems "justifying" it with games?

It is depressing that you were incorrectly modded troll simply because you asked a really important question about what it means to be human and compassionate.

At the risk of being downmodded, what can you expect from a society that gets barbaric entertainment from watching 2 men beat each other up senseless. Most people would rather waste their lives watching someone else's Unreality crap else such as the Kartrashians and go ape shit over nudity (Oh Noes! We were all born naked! Who knew!) then actually learn something constructive for free.

Yeah, some of us are bothered by the excessive violence. Fortunately we have a choice. Turn it off. Don't play it.

It is the same reason professional athletesget paid millions and teachers get crap pay. Society just doesn't value education. They want (and will pay for) dumb entertainment.

What? How is that individualized in any way? Is this not the very inverse of individualized?

HIs "vision" of education is silly. If the kids are watching a recorded lecture, there is no reason for them to be assembled in one place, and there is no reason that they should all be watching the same lecture. It will be individualized by letting each student progress at their own pace. Except we already have that. It is called Khan Academy, and while it works well for bright, motivated students, it leaves the dumb, unmotivated students even further behind.

My son is just about to turn nine, and he is really enjoying the programming section on Khan Academy. The site was originally designed as a math curriculum but is rapidly expanding into other fields. It is free, and it uses JavaScript with immediate visual feedback while teaching them the basic concepts of programming. There are step by step instructions and helpful hints to help guide them through the concepts, but having some occasional parental help is sometimes required. Overall, though, I have been pretty impressed with it.

One thing though: I would make sure they learn how to type first as that will greatly help their ability to program.

Not to toot the horn of my employer too much. But Khan Academy's CS platform is a great way for kids to learn and create stuff.
https://www.khanacademy.org/co...

My then 8 year old wanted to learn Lua script so he could build original content in Roblox. I tried to convince him to learn to code something easier to teach first. That was HARD, harder than I thought, to convince him to try to learn to think in code before he tried to code in Lua.

One night, he came out of his room long after bedtime crying and told me that earlier he copied someone's script into a level he made in Roblox, and now he was sure he was going to get banned because the game thought he was cheating

it was 10:00 at night and I loaded up his Roblox account, and edited the script right in front of him. It was something like this psudocode: wait(1 minute) display message("You have been caught cheating, your account will be deleted in 5 days") end

I changed it to display a stupid message like "If you see this it means you got trolled by someone who understands scripting"

He felt better, but more importantly he learned that "understanding scripting" is important and powerful... and that even his old dad who "just knows other scripting and not lua" is better than nothing.

Then he said... I guess you can teach me Javascript... then we started Khan Academy and he slurped it up like a hungry aardvark.
https://www.khanacademy.org/co...

What you describe is how Khan Academy works.

Non-profit... for-profit... lotsa profit, online, on campus... it's all just the tail wagging the dog if the education leaves you spending most of the rest of your working life paying for it, which is what it's become. Yes, the educational system is in for a big bubble-busting disruptive technology that will put the vast majority of those overpaid uni execs on unemployment. The name of the bubble buster is Khan Academy, and once it gets up to speed-- and it's getting there fast-- this country as well as many others will begin to see a level playing field in education and employment opportunities. Thank you, thank you, a thousand times over, Salmon Khan https://www.khanacademy.org/

None of them taught me anything. A complete and utter waste of time.

Try Khan Academy. My daughter used it to learn JavaScript. My son learned fractions, and much more.

You are very wrong. Additionally, being told you are smart leads to under-performance in children.

Kahn Academy was a God-send for me. I didn't even have a high-school level of maths before I managed to find my way into an Engineering degree. I learned all of High-school maths and a lot of university level maths in the space of a few months thanks almost totally to the excellent instruction available through Kahn Academy.

Many universities make researchers/professors teach. Some of them do an excellent job because they give a damn, or are passionate about sharing (as opposed to selfish and arrogant which many scientists are). Many of these lecturers are in academia because that's what they personally are good at - and so they don't understand how to teach people who aren't as naturally suited to the subject they are teaching as they were. They don't know what *normal* people find difficult or else they assume they know but completely miss the mark.

Nearly every single mathematical person I have met utterly fails at communication, as I have only found two: a really gifted guy who breezed through university maths and is currently working on his PhD and Salman Kahn of Kahn Academy who is the best communicator of mathematical concepts I have ever found - hands down. He seems to know what normal people find hard and even pre-emptively answers your questions right as they pop into your head.

This only reinforces how outdated the model of university education is and how poor value the university education itself generally is. Normal people can find higher quality resources online and consume them quickly and efficiently and apply them the next day. Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars and 2+ years getting a fairly poor imitation of a "T-shaped" education I think the real solution is to set up strong learning resources (online and meatspace workshops) and allow people to cheaply sit certification tests (and portfolio checks) on university-level subjects. People can build their core education as narrow and tight as needed and expand the "arms" of their education out as far as needed in a dynamic fashion which suits this ever-changing world. Hey, if a person completes a whole degree in this fashion they can sell good-ole' degree certificates too!

... if I looked up my old slashdot postings from then talking about Gatto and Holt and homeschooling and unschooling.

You wrote: "the entire job of a teacher, particularly a K-8 teacher, is to evaluate students and set good progression goals for that student. ..."

Fairly accurate, but interesting you did not mention activities like communicating information or values in that... Or who sets the "goals" or what they actually are. As John Taylor Gatto says, the problem with most US schools is they are working as designed (originally in Prussia to deliver obedient cannon-fodder soldiers, obedient factory workers, and obedient citizens). So, if you give schools more money, they will only do that job better!

See:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? ... Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there. ..."

That said, investments in groups like Khan Academy seem worthwhile... One of the few really good Gates Foundation investments perhaps...
https://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.gatesfoundation.org...

The Broad Foundation is making the exact same mistake as Zuckerberg...
http://www.broadcenter.org/

An alternative by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point f

For math Khan academy is worth checking out; I don't know why parent is modded zero.
Probably good for other stuff too, it was the math that caught my eye.
https://www.khanacademy.org

Some cool video (give the first one five minutes... I think you'll like it):
Salman Khan talk at TED 2011 (from ted.com)
TEDxSanJoseCA - Salman Khan - (Sequel to talk at TED)

Anyone have recommendations for learning math starting from, say, Algebra I or II level (high school) that will actually teach in a way that will be useful rather than taking a test? Stuff that will carry over into future classes as the proper building blocks, etc?

Khan Academy is quite good in my experience. You can pick and choose if you want or follow their 'knowledge map'.

Part of the revamped SAT involves establishing Khan Academy SAT Prep courses. https://www.khanacademy.org/te... The perception has been for years that test takers from wealthier families have key advantages, including taking the test multiple times and paying for special training. Gates has been a backer of Khan Academy already. I think it's a positive step if they do more to level the playing field.

I wouldn't expect water to create a film over any surface

If you are reader: Look up hydrophilic vs hydrophobic, Contact Angle or Wetting Angle, and "surface energy / surface tensions, and young's relation

If you like videos: video

In short antifog coatings create the very surface you don't believe exists.

I have an extremely terrible memory making math exceptionally hard as I can't keep numbers in my head without them going all over the place and it's not much different for remembering the equations.

So I have been looking for ways to help me remember and I found a website that does just that:

https://www.khanacademy.org/

The practice video's and exercises combined with simple short term goals such as achievements for getting x answers right in a row or within a certain speed really gives me a constant focus point.

You should give a go, it's good fun =)

and learn. It won't be immediately useful, but someday you'll put it to use to solve a problem, or to understand the nature of a problem.

Khan Academy on Diff-Qs

Over the past 20 years the currency supply as estimated by the Fed themselves has gone from $400 billion to $3,000 billion dollars - a gain of $2,600 billion.

You don't know what you are talking about. The Fed did not print all that money. It's the so called M2 type of money that has grown so rapidly. Please, educate yourself a little bit before you start spewing fire all over the internet about it.

We're really living in amazing times.

Most online courses to date have been lacking in one aspect or another, most notably student interest - drop rates of over 95% are common. Teething pains probably, as teachers begin to recognize that a) courses online must be presented in a different way, and b) teaching techniques must be effective (in terms of keeping student interest) when the audience is not captive.

Recently I saw this gem, which is extremely good. Good presentation, good technical quality (web form scoring &c), good content, and some experimental techniques in keeping student interest.

While I don't like the techniques used for keeping student interest in this course, they are at least experimenting with new techniques and learning from past mistakes. The quality keeps getting better.

Their business model varies, but one site hopes to provide an MBA ensemble for $50 (Udacity) and another gets finders fees from companies that hire the top scorers (edX). And of course there's Kahn academy, which is turning high-school education upside down.

In a couple of years, you will probably be able to get a complete high-quality education by self-study over the internet for thin money. You'll be able to study as much as you want for whatever topic you want and for as long as you want.

No more massive student loans just to get a decent education.

Another example of a moribund business model being overtaken by new technology.

Amazing times indeed.

In the meantime, the truly gifted are hitting the library, doing their own thing, and pretty much don't need no stinking program.

-see life of Linus Pauling, Einstein. etc ...

The "truly gifted" are also wasting a lot of time in "normal" classrooms. This is the 21st century. We should be using technology to customize education for each child, and let them learn at an optimal pace. This is easiest for subjects like math, and my son's school uses Khan Academy and IXL to make much of the math self-paced. They also let the kids pick their own books to read using AR Bookfind. My son has read over a hundred books this year, and has yet to find a book that isn't in their system.

Both of my kids qualified for California's GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) Program. But it seems to me that it could be expanded to include a lot more kids, because the parents do a lot of the grunt work. So if you double the number of kids, you are also doubling the number of parents. The school just needs to provide a framework. I take an afternoon off work each week to work with these kids and I love every minute of it. Some of these kids are amazingly bright. Last week I showed a fourth grader how to do a cross product of two vectors, and she "got it" in less than a minute. I walked away thinking "this kid is going to change the world someday." She also laughed when I told her a "math joke":

Q: What do you get when you cross a tsetse fly with a mountain climber?
A: Nothing. You can't cross a vector with a scaler.

Khan Academy's programming tutorials use some kind of visual programming platform. I think its worth checking out. It starts of with programming the movement of the ball. The language is English. But as it is intended to teach programming with fun, this might be the one. I had tried it with my 12 year old bother and it worked. Here is the link : https://www.khanacademy.org/cs/paddle-ball/830543654

http://www.khanacademy.org/

I enjoy working my way through the lesson trees at https://www.khanacademy.org/. Most of the stuff is pretty simple but the multiple choice tests are enjoyable to me. And the Lesson Dashboard is shiny and sparkly.

Instead if they get to the point that they need a bail out they are nationalized.

But this is pretty much what happened

The institutions that needed a bail out were forced to emit new stock that was bought by Fed. If the bank with a total worth of $1 billion needed a $1 billion bailout, they would emit $1 billion worth of stock that was bought by the government. The effect was 1) The government now owns 50% of the bank, 2) The original shareholder's stock price dropped 50% (well a bit less than that because of other factors but still...)

Khan Academy has some pretty good explanatory videos on the matter.

There were no C?Os indicted because of the mess because unfortunately the activities that led to the collapse were not illegal (unlike the LIBOR scandal where people were doing illegal things and have to stand trial. Not informing your customers about the low quality of your products is not illegal - just straight out lying is. And they were careful enough that they were not lying, legally speaking.

I introduced computer programming in my geometry class this semester with Khan Academy. It's a great interface, with clear tutorials, minimal setup (an account helps, but it ties into our school's Google Education domain automatically) and instant feedback for both results and errors. Khan's programming interface is in javascript using processing.
At the start of the unit I polled my students, and of the 63 I have in geometry, only 3 had prior exposure to programming. Those 3 had parents in tech and had done some science/engineering summer camp activities, and were looking into it on their own. I was a little surprised, because when I was a kid, my elementary school all got some programming exposure on Logo on C64s back in the 80s.

You should look into Khan Academy, I think you might like it.
https://www.khanacademy.org/

Don't sell the fuck out to political parties and destroy your credibility.

He wasn't paid by the governor to produce these videos.

If Khan would like to go over these issues, do it in a political science course, do it in a history course...

Khan academy is no longer just about math. They've been expanding into many difference topics.

...but do it in the past tense as a learning resource.

Are you kidding me??? Do you also think school history/civics/geography/political science teachers should stay out of current events as well? Do you seriously want high school kids not to learn about the latest wars/conflicts the US is in, the results/statistics of the latest US elections, or the meaning behind some of the latest newspaper headlines regarding our economy or our budget deficits?

The idea that pieces of software and one way communication videos can compete with responsive human beings and solely provide first world education is laughable.

If you actually visited a classroom that uses these methods you might stop laughing. My son attends a public school in San Jose, California. They spend an hour a day using Khan Academy and IXL. Each day the teacher has a parent come in and supervise the class. On Fridays, that is me.

The kids work at their own pace. They start with basic third grade math, but can quickly move on to other subjects once they master that. Most of the kids have already mastered long division, graphing, etc., some are learning algebra, and one is even learning trigonometry. I sit by a computer with a "dashboard" at the front of the room that shows everyone's progress. If a kid gets a few problems in a row wrong, their button turns red. Then I get up, walk over to his/her desk and see what the problem is. So anyone that is "stuck" gets one-on-one attention until they "get it".

The teacher spends the time grading papers and preparing lessons, and leaves all the tutoring to me. I can easily handle the 25 kids in the class, and it is rare than more than one needs help at a time. Even if there were 100 kids, I think I could handle it. One technique I use is to sit a smart kid next to each dumb one, so they can help each other.

The kids like it, and look forward to it. They are learning much more than a traditional classroom that moves at the pace of the dumbest kid.

Teaching math with computers works well, but I think it could also work with some science education, spelling, vocabulary building, etc. Not so well with writing, art, etc. We certainly aren't ready to eliminate teachers, but we could probably eliminate some of them now, and more and more as the technology improves.

http://www.imm.org/
http://www.foresight.org/
http://www.khanacademy.org/

I came to mention Khan Academy, and AC beat me to it. Tragedy. But here's the donate link:
http://www.khanacademy.org/donate

Why not? It's, at least, free. http://www.khanacademy.org/about

The guy (who already has an undergraduate degree and a decade of software development work experience) is asking about going to grad school (and possibly getting a Ph.D.

And you go "hai frendz, tries teh Khan, kthxbye"????

Dumbest. Thing. Ever.

Why not? It's, at least, free.
http://www.khanacademy.org/about

JavaScript can be an ugly language to work with, but the interactive editor they have looks really good and nicely works around all the issue one frequently runs into when using raw JavaScript (catches missing semicolon, catches typos of function names, allows editing color values via GUI, automatically runs the code on each change, etc.).

I don't know if anyone has been keeping track, but there's this thing called the internet where you can get a really good education for free. Tablets will give children access to this internet.

We currently have four major players in this arena:

• Khan academy, for high-school up through 1st year college
• Coursera, college level
• MITx/edx, college level
• Udacity, college level

This is in addition to all the universities which are putting lecture videos online, along with course materials and (in a few cases) the textbook content. Oh, and youtube videos of lectures, and the zillion-and-one websites explaining whichever subject you're interested in. Google "relativity" or "tensors" sometime - see if you can find an explanation that works for you.

An experiment in India has shown that when you give uneducated, poor children access to an internet-connected computer they figure things out on their own. Complex, interesting, and difficult things that you might not expect an ignorant user to manage. (Such as typing a thank-you note without access to a keyboard.)

This is all you need, kids will figure things out for themselves. Having a teacher to nudge them in the right direction, or help them over a difficult part is just gravy.

Kids are voracious learners, and have always been. Abe Lincoln used to sit at home practicing his "ciphering" (arithmetic) by drawing numbers on a shovel with charcoal. Over and over, until he got comfortable with the math. All kids do this - it's in the nature of growing up.

Just giving kids access to material will be a huge leap over the current situation. Schools and teachers are extra.

"These videos are designed for evaluation purposes. Duplication and distribution of these videos is not permitted."

Because, you know, someone might get educated for free or something, and then where would we be?

Still voting for http://www.khanacademy.org/ ...

-- Terry

From TFA (p.2):

All Udacity courses are free and will remain free, it is the certification, or level of certification which will eventually cost money.

(this excerpt was from 2nd page, about half way down in the question: The recent Forbes Magazine’s article title on Udacity read “$100 for a masters degree” is that a reasonable estimate ? )

This is cool because the material will be available even to very cash poor people, and I will likely look into classes here I'd never think about paying for at a conventional school.

jellomizer wrote:

The only way you can get $100 for a degree in education is to mass produce it. Pre-Recorded Lectures, Online articles, Mutable choice tests, all done online. Now granted some colleges nearly teach like that, a professor with a well practiced rehearsed lectures, then you do you multiple choice tests, then you got your class credit...

btw, JM: I agree with your points about delivery & cost cutting. When the Khan Academy has come up past discussions, people often talk about the idea of "flipping classes" so lectures are on the students time and class sessions are collaborative help sessions roughly like you describe (e.g. hybrid).
All very cool, I'm excited by the potential this offers.

jellomizer wrote:

While you may learn, and can get accreditation. It creates a culture of mediocre education. This takes out some of the human elements that are both good and bad. If you are able being able to be noticed by a professor and working with them on his research, having your work properly critiqued. When I went to college for Computer Science, I came in already knowing how to program, and I was working programming, but I wanted to learn more then just the core requirements, I wanted to learn the nuances. While some students in my class who passed they got the basics, I was able to use education and the work directly with my professors to hone my skills and make me better. I know I used up more then $100 expense on my education.

However I think a hybrid approach would be a good match. There are some classes, that I didn't like spending thousands of dollars on, just because I had to take them, I would much rather pay a lower rate, and take the mediocre online class to get the credit, and save some money. But save the classes I am actually interested in with live people and professors.

http://www.khanacademy.org/search?page_search_query=chemistry

Khan Academy has a good series of ten-minute instructional videos about the theory of chemistry and organic chemistry, starting from first principles, this would be a good place to start.

http://www.khanacademy.org/#chemistry
http://www.khanacademy.org/#organic-chemistry

There are many online university lectures, which might be a little too advanced for a 10 year old, but they available anyway:
http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/chemistry
http://www.youtube.com/ (Search for long >20 minute videos)
https://www.coursera.org/ (Doesn't offer chemistry yet, but may do in the future)

I myself missed out a large part of my formal education and as a result became mostly self-taught. Being homeschooled means you don't have any deadlines or exams to worry about. The core thing to maintain is curiosity (the willingness to ask questions) and the confidence ans skills to go about answering them for yourself. Google is your biggest friend!

The approach is very different from structured learning. Pick a question, a project or a task. Jump in at the deep end, google the question directly, even its is rather advanced. The explanation will probably be full of alien words and concepts that you don't fully understand and simply raise up an even bigger pile of questions. So pick the first of these new questions, and keep drilling down until you have a good enough understanding of each word or concept that you can start to make sense of the original answer to the original question. Rather than trying to cover a pre-defined syllabus in sequential order and to a given timetable, you are aiming to drill down to whatever level of detail is needed in order to have the clarity required to answer the question you are interested in. It seems slow at first, but by the time you have fully answered your first proper question, you will have already covered half the syllabus. Age then becomes irrelevant and as long as you keep asking questions, you never stop learning.

Sugata Mitra has an interesting take on the power of simply giving children the tools to teach themselves:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

As the parents and the grandparents are not confident in teaching the subject, maybe you should turn the tables, set the 10 year kid the challenge of teaching the grandparents how do "French Cooking" (as it was once known).

Khan Academy has a good series of ten-minute instructional videos about the theory of chemistry and organic chemistry, starting from first principles, this would be a good place to start.

http://www.khanacademy.org/#chemistry
http://www.khanacademy.org/#organic-chemistry

There are many online university lectures, which might be a little too advanced for a 10 year old, but they available anyway:
http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/chemistry
http://www.youtube.com/ (Search for long >20 minute videos)
https://www.coursera.org/ (Doesn't offer chemistry yet, but may do in the future)

I myself missed out a large part of my formal education and as a result became mostly self-taught. Being homeschooled means you don't have any deadlines or exams to worry about. The core thing to maintain is curiosity (the willingness to ask questions) and the confidence ans skills to go about answering them for yourself. Google is your biggest friend!

The approach is very different from structured learning. Pick a question, a project or a task. Jump in at the deep end, google the question directly, even its is rather advanced. The explanation will probably be full of alien words and concepts that you don't fully understand and simply raise up an even bigger pile of questions. So pick the first of these new questions, and keep drilling down until you have a good enough understanding of each word or concept that you can start to make sense of the original answer to the original question. Rather than trying to cover a pre-defined syllabus in sequential order and to a given timetable, you are aiming to drill down to whatever level of detail is needed in order to have the clarity required to answer the question you are interested in. It seems slow at first, but by the time you have fully answered your first proper question, you will have already covered half the syllabus. Age then becomes irrelevant and as long as you keep asking questions, you never stop learning.

Sugata Mitra has an interesting take on the power of simply giving children the tools to teach themselves:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

As the parents and the grandparents are not confident in teaching the subject, maybe you should turn the tables, set the 10 year kid the challenge of teaching the grandparents how do "French Cooking" (as it was once known).