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.'"

Comments

Gates Foundation

[sourcerror]

It would cool, if the Gates Foundation donated for Khan Academy, because as far as I know Khan is now burning his savings.

Re:Gates Foundation

[gilesjuk]

It would be nice if Microsoft hadn't been overcharging education establishments for their software for years. Perhaps then they would have had more money to spend on other things.

All that money Gates and Microsoft have is down to them emptying everyone's pockets for mundane software like Office, adding the Microsoft "tax" to every PC sale and so on. Gates's charity is all about recognition. The best charity is that where the donors are anonymous, that way they have no agenda, they aren't trying to change the way people think about them.

I'm sure if we all had more money than we could possibly spend we would give it away.

Plenty of criticism here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticism

Re:Gates Foundation

[thenextpresident]

The criticisms presented there seem to essentially be criticisms that could be thrown at any charity. None of them registered as problem with the foundation itself. In some of the cases, the only solution to resolve the complaint is to lower or eliminate the amount donated.

Sorry, but those people complaining are going to complain whatever happens.

Re:Gates Foundation

[IamTheRealMike]

The website says that "generous individuals" have donated enough that he can do it full time. Given Gates' well known financial commitments to education it wouldn't surprise me at all if Gates has donated.

To a lesser extent I guess Google is also donating by hosting the projects infrastructure for free, notably YouTube but also AppEngine and other things.

Re:Gates Foundation

[Aquitaine]

Wow. What an angry, narrow-minded post. 'Insightful' indeed.

I have no more love for Microsoft than the next guy, but you act like we're all being forced to buy MS products and that every cent they've earned was all but stolen from our pockets, and that, if it weren't stolen from our pockets, we'd be giving all that money to charity ourselves. Yeah, right.

Gates believes that recognition will drive more people to charity than anonymity. As an un-involved businessman who gives a small piece of his small profit to charity every year, I share your preference for anonymous donations, because the cause (whatever it may be) is certainly more important than the donor. This isn't what Gates is arguing. He's saying that whatever harm comes from the recognition factor, at the end of the day, you'll have an order of magnitude more money coming in from people who want that recognition such that, if the cause is so important, funding it an extra order of magnitude is much more important than our anonymity principle. That's a tough case to argue, because vanity is definitely a big piece of philanthropy, and as much as I think stamping people's names on university buildings or theater/classroom seats is dumb, I'd rather have a theater or a classroom with some stranger's name on everything than not have it.

Gates' charity is not 'all about recognition,' either. He honestly believes that recognition is an important piece of the cycle; you're free to disagree, but as I imagine that neither you nor I have achievements that even come close to what his charity accomplishes in a single year, I think it's very easy for us to throw stones and paint him as a jerk.

As it happens, I actually don't completely support a big piece of what his charity does -- focusing on disease in Africa -- but it's foolish and simply wrong to suggest that Gates is just a successful crook rather than an accomplished individual who is free to spend the fruits of his labor as he pleases.

Re:Gates Foundation

[Anonymous Coward]

but you act like we're all being forced to buy MS products

Umm, we are. Every time you buy a computer from a large vendor, it WILL have windows preinstalled. Sure, you could assemble your own or buy from a small, independent retailer that does this for you, but economies of scale will ensure that even with the "microsoft tax", the large vendor will be cheaper.

But don't make the mistake of assuming that this means everything is fine. The large vendor would be EVEN cheaper if it weren't for the microsoft tax. So your only choice is between paying an extra in the form of the microsoft tax, or paying a bigger extra to make up for the economies of scale that the small vendor can't tap into.

For people who actually have to watch how much they spend (read: MOST people), the choice is pretty clear.

That said, if you'll allow me to end this on a personal note, you swallowed Gates' bait hook, line and sinker. Here's a guy whose company HAS been abusing its monopoly, HAS been convicted in court, and WOULD have been broken up if it weren't for Ashcroft taking office after Dubya's elected and helping them out (good old boy!) - a guy who, for all practical purposes, has been breaking into your house and stealing your savings for 30 years, and now he's spending PART of the billions he's stolen on charity, and you cheer him on? Grow a spine, you lickspittle.

Re:Gates Foundation

[Beetle B.]

The criticisms presented there seem to essentially be criticisms that could be thrown at any charity.

This. Essentially, the criticisms are saying that the money could be better utilized, and not saying that it is doing any damage as it is. Put another way, had Bill Gates never provided the money in the first place (which is his right), nothing would be better. The Foundation isn't making anything in the world worse.

Re:Gates Foundation

[BasilBrush]

OK, I'll bite. What do you think is wrong with a charity combatting disease in Africa?

Re:Gates Foundation

[Aquitaine]

I was just talking about that subject this morning, as it happens. The argument against fighting disease in Africa basically says that, when you spend hundreds of millions fighting diseases and starvation that kill children in Africa in countries without well-developed, democratic societies, what you get in 20-30 years is a large population of healthy young adults who are still in a country without a developed society, without even a semi-modern economy, and without much modern healthcare outside of what other countries donate. In other words, you have a population that is vastly larger than what the country can economically support, and you don't have jobs for them, so you get a lot of militant young guys whose pasttimes are either making lots of babies or causing problems.

Now, that's a gross oversimplification of the problem, and I'm actually not sold on it as a reason to say 'bah, let disease kill millions!' as that's a pretty cold stance to take. You'll sometimes hear opponents of this kind of charity point out that disease is Nature's way of controlling population, but you could justify quite a few scary things with that reasoning.

I do think that the 'feel good about yourself by donating to starving children' drive of the last 60-70 years is shortsighted in this respect, but of course it's much easier to feed even large numbers of starving people than it is to set up a modern government and economy in some of these African countries, assuming even that you have the right to try and do so (which is a big assumption).

In other words, not unlike Mr. Gates himself, the 'disease and starvation in Africa' subject is a complex one that has a lot more going on than the sound bytes you usually hear. I haven't reached a conclusion on Africa because most of the conversation about it goes like this:

Feels Good Guy: I just gave $1,000 to charity and saved the lives of 100 kids in Africa!
Skeptical Guy: What about their education? Their future health care? Do they have a chance at being self-sufficient later or will they simply need even more external support as they get older?
Feels Good Guy: Racist!

Anyway, that's what's (potentially) wrong with it. I tried to paint a pretty neutral picture because I really do want to hear more actual conversation on the subject rather than the knee-jerk stuff that's out there.

Re:Gates Foundation

[sourcerror]

Well, the main problem I see is that you don't see these charities supporting trade schools, only elementary schools (and that won't improve the students' job prosopects).

Re:Gates Foundation

[BasilBrush]

But given that the Gates Foundation spends money on third world development as well, that seems to mostly satisfy that reservation of yours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation

Of course the foundation and every other charity can do little about the politics of some countries. But letting people needlessly die because they are in a country which currently has a bad government is not really on. Besides citizens of those countries will not concern themselves with fixing their politics whilst they are still concerned with basic survival. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

Re:attention to the polarised

[Sponge Bath]

"He's an overflowing cup filled with the very cream of human goodness. In all the time I've known him he's never done anything immoral." - Hanover Fiste

I love LaTeX, but really, now

[Mathinker]

> started using LaTeX, which is older but vastly superior to Word

I love LaTeX, it produces beautifully typeset math, but for your average biologist, English professor, etc., I can see that something a bit less high-powered and easier to use ("what you see is approximately what you get") would be more optimal.

In other words, it's not chance that many academics don't use LaTeX.

Re:I love LaTeX, but really, now

[Mathinker]

Ooops, forgot to add --- all those academics who don't use LaTeX could probably use something open-source (OO.o, Abiword, KWord), except that my guess is that (many of) the journals they publish in only accept their submissions in MS Word format. So they decide to play safe and use MS.

Re:I love LaTeX, but really, now

[Jezza]

Err, nonsense. This is a tool you use everyday right? How long did it take to learn to use a pencil? OK so there is a bit of "upfront" learning, then you can write documents everywhere you can find an editor, and seldom think about formatting. Yet your documents look fantastic (or sh!t if you've got no taste).

How many Microsoft Word users actually use Styles? (Fewer than you think) How many understand Sections? (Fewer than you think) How many actually understand tab stops and how to use them (I mean the different kinds)? (Fewer than you think)

So you either have a tool that when you don't know how to use it, you're totally aware you don't know how to use it, or a tool that most people think they know how to use even though they don't have a clue.

Now what's optimal?

Re:Give me fooking break

[Anonymous Coward]

He didn't hold a gun to anyone's head. He made his money because people CHOSE to buy Microsoft products. They could have easily bought something else.

Re:attention to the polarised

[drinkypoo]

Gates Foundation makes for-profit investments that are killing the very people they claim to be helping

Gates is personally heavily invested in big Pharma

You have stuff to learn from this guy.

Yeah, how to hide in plain sight and control governments.

Re:attention to the polarised

[hedwards]

No it doesn't. He started giving money away because his dad yelled at him about not giving anything back. William Gates Sr has been well known around Seattle for a long time. And one of the things he's known for is his generosity and more recently his push for an income tax on only high earners to compensate the state for the relative free ride that those individuals get under the current sales tax system.

Re:Give me fooking break

[hedwards]

For much of that time there wasn't a viable alternative and his business plan was to keep it that way. It's a bullshit argument people make that because there wasn't a gun involved that there must therefor have been a reasonable choice. Which is just something that Libertarians say so that they can sleep at night, the reality is that if you wanted to apply for a job and send in an electronic resume, good luck doing so with any other format than .doc because nobody would be looking at it. Or at work if you wanted to collaborate, you were stuck with Excel, Word, Powerpoint, etc., all owned and sold by MS. And that was their business plan, make people an offer that they had little choice but to accept at a price that was much higher than what the market would bear were there any real competition.

Re:Education...

[xtracto]

Can you elaborate on that?

I am a scientist (PhD in Comp. Sci., currently working in an EU project along with around other 20 scientists and their PhD students) and do not see any issue with the Kahn material.

Basically, because he is not claiming any new scientific achievement but just explaining currently known and proven facts and processes in a way which is easy to understand to the majority of people.

Hence, he does not need any "scientific method" to impart such knowledge.

So I reiterate, can you please elaborate what is wrong with his approach?

Gates complains a situation he created

[walterbyrd]

Gates complains about smart Americans all going to Wall Street instead of R&D. But Gates has gone before the US congress, many times, and argued that even more US tech workers should lose their jobs to H1B visa workers.

Just last year, even as Microsoft was firing US tech workers by the thousands, Microsoft was simultaneously hiring their H1B replacements.

Due to the situation that Gates himself has helped create, smart Americans would be stupid to train for STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) jobs.

Re:Gates complains a situation he created

[DarkFencer]

No - what often happens with H1B is the lying. You ever see those job postings which ask for impossible things like 20 years experience with Java or 7 years experience with Windows 7? The companies that want an excuse for H1B will accept (knowing its false) that the H1B applicants actually have that experience. They will use that excuse to say "Look - we can only find people with H1B that have this experience! We need to hire internationally!".

I'm not saying all the time impossible skill requirements are because of this (there are ignorant people often writing job requirements) but it is true sometimes.

Re:Gates complains a situation he created

[Phil06]

Agreed, however those workers from other countries are only good at doing what they are told to do. Soon there will be nobody left to tell them what to so. When I was let go last year, I was told that my job was going to be done by two guys in India; great at doing what they were told but utterly incapable of figuring out what needed to be done. We don't need more science and tech workers, we need more innovators, in all fields. We have a culture that reveres innovators, people who probably have failed dozens of times but still came up something brilliant. Those other countries don't have that culture. The problem is that you can't teach innovation. All you can do is create an environment and numerous opportunities for individuals can be rewarded for coming up with something clever. We need brainstorming classes, not more pre-calculus.

Re:Gates complains a situation he created

[Anonymous Coward]

"Look - we can only find people with H1B that have this experience! We need to hire internationally!"

Have you looked at the college education in the United States recently? There are hardly any Americans in the graduate programs. And this is with the FASFA/Financial aid packages given to citizens. Professors would love to hire competent Americans - they pay much less from their grants. The reality is that graduate schools (Masters and Ph.D programs) are filled with international students (largely Indian and Chinese). So, yeah, while some of the H1B might be bullshit, it is often quicker to hire competent foreigners rather than hold out for the (much harder to find) competent citizen - talking purely statistically. Often hiring a H1B is quite expensive, since the companies have to do the paperwork as well.

Re:Gates complains a situation he created

[dcposch]

Bullshit.

I'm currently "training for a STEM job", as you would put it, by pursuing at degree in computer science. I don't think my choice was a mistake. I see the fact that our industry is a global one as an opportunity, not a threat.

The US is in the enviable position that a lot of other countries' best and brightest want to work here. By restricting the number of H1Bs that companies can hire, the goverment is squandering some of that opportunity. And it's doing so at the behest of people like you, who think of jobs like poker chips--little non-replaceable entities that you can gain, lose, give away, or have "taken" from you. That's not what jobs are. Consider, for example, what happens when Intel hires a rockstar Chinese chip fab engineer. That engineer creates a cadre of supporting positions--testers, integration engineers, PMs, EE interns from the local college, etc. Maybe he, a litho expert from India, and an industrial robotics expert from the US end up leading a project to build a new fab in America. Maybe that fab leads to a couple million processors every year that are being etched in America instead of China.

Collaboration like this is what put America on top of the innovation food chain in the first place. Google was started by a Russian guy and an American who were grad students at Stanford. Tesla Motors was co-founded by an American and Elon Musk.

The way I see it, every country starts with roughly the same bell curve of talent and ability. Some have great education systems and make the most of it. Others, not so much. Where America sits on that scale is for another post. But the crazy thing is: America can cheat. We can cherry-pick the smartest and most innovative people from places like India and China. We can skim off the top of a pool of 2.5 billion people, simply by letting them in.

That some of us think it's good for our government to prohibit us from hiring those people boggles my mind.

Re:Gates complains a situation he created

[walterbyrd]

Enjoy training your H1B replacement, or having your job offshored.

Just to let you know: everybody thinks it will never happen to them. I have worked in IT for 30 years. I hear it all the time: "I'm much too valuable, they could never hire a foreign worker to do what I do."

Pride before the fall.

Re:attention to the polarised

[FuckingNickName]

Yeah, what's happening here is that someone with a lot of capital is investing it to increase the amount of money available. This is what almost all well-funded foundations do. It would be, you hopefully realise, fucking stupid to either stuff the money under the mattress or give it all away immediately.

Now, such investments will almost certainly in some ways trickle down to operations which are harmful to some people in some way. Every cent you have in a bank or other investment account is doing a similar thing. It is perfectly legitimate to call a foundation up on this in the hope that you can encourage them to make investments you consider more ethically sound, but it doesn't imply some sort of plot to exploit / harm the ones you're helping.

In Gates' specific case he's tried to stop the investment side from interfering with the giving side and vice versa to prevent conflicts of interest. The inevitable result is that sometimes an investment will appear in some indirect way to harm a charitable effort. Perhaps you can argue that each side should keep a closer eye on what the other is doing.

Re:attention to the polarised

[FuckingNickName]

Even if his giving today is completely the result of his dad persuading him, what exactly is wrong with that? Are you saying that goodness is only goodness if the decision to be good is made in a vacuum?

"Yeah, he saved my life, but he only saved my life because last Thursday his grandmother encouraged him to attend a First Aid course." The guy still considered the options and made the final decision to attend the course / give away the money. He didn't have to.

Re:attention to the polarised

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. So, by that measure, Al Capone would be a standup guy as long as he donated half his take to charity, right? I bet he actually used to do that to, to keep the city happy. Wouldn't surprise me.

Most of Bill Gates money was taken by illegal measures, and that means he isn't a nice guy until he gives it all back and does what's right. You don't get to commit perjury and you don't get to run an illegal monopoly and fix it all with some charitable donations, no matter how large, in my books.

Re:Wow.

[fermion]

What you are talking about is called a library. A place where people can go and learn all sorts of things. Most developed countries have one in various locations to be accessible to the populous.

One may say the tech innovation is the video aspect, but people have been making educational videos for years, often selling that at very low prices or giving them away for free. I have a friend who does this and sells them in the villages of developing country where is from. They don't have internet access or reliable electricity, but they have laptops with DVD players. In terms of getting information to the children who need it, and not just the kids who already have all the advantages, this method works.

So what is the innovation here. That he is recording lectures? That he is streaming lectures for those few that good internet access? Maybe I am down on this because what I don't think lecture is 100% of an education. Much of what I leared I learned from reading books or working the problem. This would be a good supplement to a home school education, but there is no relevance in these lectures.

On assumption of the Bill Gates Foundation and High School that works is that the world is full of mostly bad teachers doing a mostly bad job and it would be better to have mostly good teachers creating content and delivering content to the kids. The reason kids are out of control is that they are no engaged. But kids are not robots and often must be redirected to things they don't like like doing math in math class and formalized exercise in gym.A teacher is there to asses and try to teach to each student, at least some of the time. It it was simple as making a video and having the students watch the video, there educational problem would already be solved. There is no silver bullet for complex problems.

Re:More important than Africa

[Doug Neal]

With America's wealth, it shouldn't need charity to fight disease. Also, the two aren't mutually exclusive. Also, it's not more important.

Re:You've got to be kidding

[thijsh]

[...] real--and competent--teacher.

You are literally lucky to find one, while this is just a guy with a tablet and an internet connection doing a pretty decent job... To claim it's 'disastrous' is a bit of a hyperbole.

In my experience most people who hate math and geometry (and consequently suck at it) seem to have had inadequate tyrants as math teachers in high school (there is an apparent abundance of those). So a guy who tries to teach in a pleasant way which might stimulate your child(ren) to learn more about the subject is the best possible thing you could want if you want them to learn the joy of learning. Overall Khan seems to do a better than average job teaching, so he provides a great starting point to learn about these subjects. Just compare his site to Wikipedia: it's nowhere near perfect, but it's the best available to quickly learn something about a subject.