Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates Enrolls His Kids In Khan Academy
theodp writes "At some schools, a teaching load of five courses every academic year is considered excessive. But Sal Khan, as an earlier Slashdot post noted, manages to deliver his mini-lectures an average of 70,000 times a day. BusinessWeek reports that Khan Academy has a new fan in Bill Gates, who's been singing and tweeting the praises of the free-as-in-beer website. 'This guy is amazing,' Gates wrote. 'It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.' Gates and his 11-year-old son have been soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. And at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave Khan a shout-out, touting the 'unbelievable' Khan Academy tutorials that 'I've been using with my kids.'"
I tell you one example when the schools didn't have choice:
Hungarian government seals a 25 billion HUF deal with Microsoft. That includes both academic and government licenses. The universities had no say whether how would they prefer to spend the money spent in their name.
Unfortunately, Word and OpenOffice still can't seem to agree on formatting. It's subtle, but it does result in screwing up my every attempt to place appropriate page breaks -- one will make the text just slightly longer than the other.
I've found a safe solution is to use OpenOffice, but ultimately produce a PDF if I care about printing. If I don't, I use something like Markdown and HTML.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Um, whom are you referring to when you say "he should 'give something back'" ? The lectures are not by Bill Gates, they're by Sal Khan. I don't think anybody accuses Khan of not giving back. Bill Gates is merely stating that Sal Khan is doing a good job, but Sal Khan does not work for Bill Gates or for Microsoft. Nor do Bill Gates or Microsoft seem to donate any money to Sal Khan.