[MUSIC].
The single most important thing we can do, is to
make sure we've got a world class education system for everybody.
That is a prerequisite for prosperity.
[SOUND] It is an obligation that we have for the next generation.
>> I looked at the current education system.
I said, what's wrong with it?
And the biggest problem that I found was, it didn't know how to motivate kids.
>> Every person alive, it's in our DNA to be motivated.
I think the current model, and I'm not picking out any
players, the current model is just really good at squashing that motivation.
>> How can you make that nine year old sit in a class and say, "Do me 17 times tables"?
What for?
[MUSIC].
What if I were to say that arithmetic as we teach it today is an obsolete skill?
Okay, the whole world will erupt if I say that
because they'll say, reading, writing, arithmetic, that's the core of it.
The core of whose education? Core of the military education.
Go back 200, 300 years in this country and
say that you know, 300 years later no one's going
to teach anybody how to shoot a gun and no
one's going to teach anybody how to ride a horse?
And the teacher's going to say, you know, I mean, those are basic life skills.
This guy will get killed when he moves out.
And he'll say, no ma'am, the world will have changed.
These things will become sport.
Shooting is a sport, horse riding is a sport.
Will arithmetic be a sport in 2061?
>> Let's say I have 3 x is equal to 15.
>> For anyone who doesn't know what Khan Academy is, it's most known for
its collection of videos that I've been
making, for really the last five, six years.
Everything from arithmetic all the way through
calculus and biology and all the rest.
It can be used for individual learners or it can be used
in the classroom so that every student can work at their own pace.
My videos are definitely not the state of the current art.
They're, they're, they're a few steps behind that.
But, but, but I think that's the mistake that most
of the education technology's been going is, that they just...
They just wanna take what's already there in the current existing model.
And just use the next, the latest technology to make up,
in their mind, a more refined version of that same thing.
But they're not, they're not changing the content, fundamentally.
If the content's really interesting, and it really is.
I don't make a video on something unless I find it fascinating.
And if the content is truly fascinating, it should be reflected in the energy
or the voice of the deliverer and, and it should be obvious to the student.
They shouldn't have to have a, a rap song
about, you know, a parabola to get excited about it.
[MUSIC].
>> Video games are actually among most powerful learning tools
that have ever been created, because if you look at a
child when they first pick up a video game, they'll
start and they'll play for five minutes, and then they'll fail.
Picked themselves up, start again, play for ten minutes.
They fail. And they will do this 500 times
before they finally succeed and master the video game.
Learning things all along the way.
Completely self motivated and while I don't always endorse the notion
of instant gratification [LAUGH] I certainly endorse the notion of relevance.
In education we provide problems, separate from the relevance
or the context in which they need to be used.
That's one of the reasons why students are so disengaged.
In the video game world it's all about
exploration. You solve a problem when you bump into.
And in fact that provides the relevance for solving the problem.
[MUSIC].
>> 12 years ago in 1999 I said, well, how did I learn how to write a program?
Nobody taught me.
How do children learn to use computers?
Nobody seems to be actually teaching them.
So, I stuck a computer in a slum wall.
Nice big computer in those days with a nice big broadband connection.
In front of children who had never seen computers before, hadn't heard
of the internet, had no clue what was going on, didn't know English.
And they started browsing at about five or six hours' time.
And then it happened over and over and over again everywhere.
Until the experiment kind of burst out onto the
world media with the statement that children anywhere in groups
can teach themselves to use a computer.
There appears to be no limit to this, that children can teach themselves almost
anything if given the internet, given the permission to interact with
each other and given the absence of the teacher.
[MUSIC]
The absence of the teacher, in the presence
of the internet, can become a pedagological tool.
>> In order for education technology to be successful in a classroom
we're going to have to marry the ecosystem, the
way technology works, with the ecosystem of the classroom itself.
The goal of this is to get teachers
doing higher order things and let the computers do
the more basic things of is 2 plus 2
equals 4 and all the practice that is necessary.
[MUSIC].
>> We want technology that helps us
create an environment where students are active and
engaged, not just in memorizing facts, but
in working with faculty to really create knowledge.
Something like the iPad application for anatomy, I think is going to help them
learn more efficiently, because it gives them
information when they need to know it.
And one of the principles of adult learning is you
should learn something when you have a reason to learn it.
[MUSIC].
>> To begin, connect us together.
>> We think there's a blurry line between play and learning
and there should be an even blurrier line between those two things.
When a learning experience is playful and exploration-oriented, it puts people's
minds into a relaxed state where learning actually can happen the easiest.
>> I think the future of learning is
really to add a new dimension to learning, which is the dimension of collaboration.
Collaborator's Classroom is a place where people can share
ideas that they may not have felt comfortable sharing in class.
>> There's always some kids that are shy or they
don't want to raise their hand in class and when you're
told to do it at home you can actually see their
opinions and you get to know them as a person better
[MUSIC].
>> Science has recently told the world that Pluto is not a planet anymore.
But it's gonna take, literally, a decade to remove
that fact from the United States science text book.
With connections, because anyone is able to improve on the materials and keep things
up to date we can make that change in ten minutes rather than ten years.
>> We hope that what we're doing is going
to create a far more diverse group of university students.
Because they will come to the university
with just so much more self-directed knowledge.
So much more passion and information about what they want to do.
That's the future.
>> Everyone in the education space, you know, it's like,
does it work, prove it, this, that and the other.
And they wanted you to go and prove it before you even put it out there.
>> Why would schools be so rigid, if they didn't need to be rigid?
But when did they need to be rigid?
If you look at history the answer stares at
us, education as we know it came from war.
>> I, I don't know if it's purely an industrial age type of
thing, if it's a Victorian era, the
educated learned to suppressed, that suppression of,
of nature instincts is, is part of becoming part of society.
>> The Victorians, the amazing Victorians, produced
an education system, which would make us photocopies of each other.
>> Being quiet and being submissive, I think
that's, frankly, the only thing that's taught right now.
Is how do you be submissive?
How do you sit patiently
and be disengaged for an hour and take it?
>> How do you motivate a kid, how do you keep a kid engaged?
How do you keep them interested?
That is all psychology.
When the gamers went and they created the best video games that ever existed,
they didn't sit down and say, hey, you know, what is the cognitive science behind this?
They didn't do that.
They just did it.
They created it and now all the
cognitive scientists are coming back and saying, what
did you do? Because that's actually one of
the most motivating, engaging media we've ever seen.
And, and the video game programmers all said, I
just created something that I would want to play.
>> A sober prediction might be that nothing will
take place in the next 40 years despite the fact
that we now have gone from a PC to an iPad.
We, the education innovators and the education industry, need a win.
And once there's one win that everyone can point to then it's gonna help all of us.
>> A five year old today, by the time he's 25, it's going to be 2031.
Can any teacher say that they're preparing that child for 2031?
For an unknown world?
But I believe that I can make a curriculum for that teacher.
And that curricula needs to only have three things in it.
Reading comprehension, is the most critical skill at this point in time for
a generation that's going to read off screens for the rest of their lives.
Information search and retrieval skills. If people know
what are key words, follow a link or not.
It's a key skill.
If arithmetic is an outdated skill, this is the skill that will replace it.
And finally, if a child knows how to read, if a child knows
how to search for information, how do we teach them how to believe?
See, in our adult heads, each one of us has a little mechanism.
It comes from different places.
You and I have different mechanisms of how to believe.
Sometimes we say, this is obvious.
Sometimes you say, because so and so told me.
Sometimes, you say, this is rubbish.
What's that machine inside?
How early in a child's life can we put that in there?
If we can do it really, really early,
then we would have armed that child against doctrine.
And I don't mean only religious doctrine, I mean doctrine in all its forms.
I think our job as educators, the
biggest job in today's information saturated world,
is to give the child an armor against doctrine.
Just as, in another generation we used to teach the child
how to fight with sword, and how to ride a horse.
[MUSIC]