Kahn Academy, YouTube, XO-1

[Walter Bender]

On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 8:45 PM, Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net> wrote:
>
> I'm a bit surprised nobody has mentioned Khan Academy here before.
>  http://www.khanacademy.org/

There is a long thread on the iaep list beginning here:

http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2010-December/012201.html

There are pre-converted (to .ogg) versions available as well as an
archive.org stash.

-walter

>
> Salman Khan gave a fun talk at Stanford on Jan 26.  You might be able to
> watch the video from here:
>  http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/
> The nominal format for EE380 talks is talk from 4:15 to 5:15, Q&A from 5:15
> to 5:30.  The online broadcast and video recording stops at 5:30.  In
> reality, the break from formal talk to Q&A is whatever the speaker wants and
> Q&A often keeps going past 5:30.  Sal's Q&A/talk didn't end until close to
> 6:00.  (I almost missed my train.)
>
> The quick summary, is that he has made ~2000 ten minute videos and
> distributes them via YouTube.  His target is k-14, mostly math and science.
>
> He got started when helping a cousin with math.  Videos solved the scheduling
> problem.  As long as he was making them for her, why not make them available
> to other people.  ...
>
> They aren't fancy.  The few that I've listened to have been good.
>
> He's a lively speaker: good if you like discussion, probably not so good if
> you want a rigidly organized formal speech.  (Maybe he's good at that too if
> he changes hats.  The Stanford talk was not formal.)
>
> He has funding from Google and Gates so he's doing what he wants and doesn't
> have to pay attention to outside interests/pressure or pollute his web pages
> with ads.
>
> He's working on a serious translation project.  (top 10 or 20 languages)
> They are looking for volunteers.
>
> He's got a trial going with a local school.  One approach is to reverse the
> normal lecture/homework setup.  Watch the videos at home, work the problems
> at school where the teacher can help the students who need it.  He's working
> on software to present math problems, grade them, give out badges (to get
> kids fired up), collect stats for teachers...
>
> It all looks good to me.  I'm sure lots of people will hate it and/or him.
>
> He told one story...  Some school board wanted to use his videos to train
> their teachers (sure) but they wanted to hide the videos from the kids.  ???
>
> Anyway, he has lots of good stuff that might be interesting to OLPC, or some
> installations.
>
> ---------
>
> Topic switch...  How well does YouTube work on a XO-1?
>
> I'd like to look at his biology stuff.  (probably others too)  Is it reasonable to do that on a XO-1?  (I'm running the latest os6.  I'll switch back if that matters.)
>
> The recent discussion on Flash was interesting.  I installed Adobe Flash.  I get reasonable audio but the video is only an occasional picture.
>
> top says the CPU is close to 100%.   I assume that's the limiting factor.  Is there any hope that things will get better soon and/or what can I do to help?
>
> His videos are mostly whiteboard type drawings.  It should be low bandwidth/low CPU.  (but that may not fit what YouTube is setup for)
>
> ---------
>
> His web pages have a Download button which pulls an flv off archive.org and drops it into my Journal.  But I can't do anything with it there.  There isn't any default Activity to run it and I can't setup one for it.  Is there some way to setup that binding?
>
> His videos are only ~5 to 10 megabytes.  (Maybe more, I only checked a few.)  But the XO-1 doesn't have room for many of those.  I've got an SD card with lots of room.  How do I download a batch to a SD card and run them from there?  Or move my Journal to a SD card or ...  [I guess by default I could move all of ~olpc there.]
>
> ---------
>
> I was thrashing around.  While doing a download, I filled up the file system behind my Journal.
>
> It gave me a button to go delete something, but when I got there, it jumped back to the Journal full screen again before I could do anything.  (I got out of that by disconnecting the ethernet cable which was fortunate because I normally use WiFi and just happened to be using wired because I had broken WiFi.)
>
> How do I find out how big something in the Journal is?
>
> ----------
>
> Google for >Khan Academy OLPC< starts with a couple of links looking for Arabic translation volunteers.
>
> The 3rd one is OLPC Maroc which has some technical info that I haven't followed yet.  The key step seems to be ffmpeg2theora.  Is anybody familiar with that?  Is it likely to help the CPU limitation?
>
> I'd be happy to do a lot of pre-processing on another more powerful machine, especially if I don't have to pollute it with too much Adobe Flash crap or at least if the un-pollute recipe is clean.  (But I'll setup a blow-it-away system if the pollution is too messy.)
>
>
> --
> These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.
>
>
>
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org