Web Forum: Internet news

Jan 29 2010 by Andrew Jackson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

FORMER venture capitalist Salman Khan is a man on a mission. He’s created his own online school from scratch, using nothing but a simple drawing tool and YouTube.

It began with his younger cousins, who needed extra help with their maths lessons. Khan offered to tutor them, and began uploading simple lectures to a YouTube channel so that everyone could catch up when they had free time.

Of course, that meant that everyone else on YouTube could watch them too.

This channel has grown into the amazing Khan Academy project – www.khanacademy.org – which is a virtual school where anyone can learn about everything for free.

So far, Khan has written and produced more than 1,100 videos covering economics, physics, chemistry, biology and many different branches of mathematics.

He says he’s having so much fun that he has no intention of stopping.

“My goal is to cover everything. I intend to keep making videos until the day I die.”

Most of the videos show a blank black screen, which is a digital blackboard on to which Khan can write as he talks, just like a teacher in a classroom.

His style is informal and relaxed, but also very swift. He marches through mathematical concepts at a very rapid pace – but unlike a real classroom, the pupil can always hit pause or rewind if they are confused.

Khan is American, so some of the lessons sound odd to our British ears. But the central facts about maths and science are the same wherever you are in the world.

In September last year, Khan quit his job to work on the academy full time. Here’s hoping the next 1,100 videos are just as much fun, and earn him a living as well.

GRAB GOV DATA

NEW from Her Majesty’s Government is www.data.gov.uk, and it’s a remarkable achievement. Data, you see, is the next big thing on the web.

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet it was for sharing documents, things that people can read. In the future, it’s going to be about sharing data as well.

The new Government data site has links to nearly 3,000 datasets that you can download and use in whatever manner you see fit. This is what the geeks have been waiting for. Let’s see what they do with it.