Sal Khan has been getting quite a bit of attention lately. He’s been featured on Jon Udell’s blog, described by Bill Gates as his, “favorite teacher,” and awarded a $2 million grant by Google. He makes mathematics screencasts, thousands of them, inside a closet, in his house. His math videos have had over twenty-five million views and his YouTube channel has over seventy-five thousand subscribers. Let’s repeat that again – he’s one person teaching thousands of students math from a closet inside of his house using YouTube and screencasting software. That’s education, 21st century style, my friends.

Imagine the potential of our cognitive surplus. It’s not a pipe dream, it’s happening today. And Kahn isn’t alone. YouTube is rife with people teaching each other how to do things, whether it’s using software, changing the oil in their lawn mower, or the typical middle / high school curriculum fare. Where we learn and how we teach has been and continues to change rapidly. It’s up to us to recognize and grasp the tremendous opportunity that we have. Carpe diem. Seize the day, people of the world. Let’s make the educational opportunities of the 21st century extraordinary.

Check out the Khan Academy in action:

What if classrooms had an open API where parties outside and in could create mashups? What if students could learn at their own pace, but still gather together with others to study in groups that transcend age, ethnicity, gender and nationality? If you can believe it, it’s happening today. This brave new world of learning is being shaped by disparate parties with no apparent connection and often competing goals. It’s a world of constant churn where innovation and ideas make maddening leaps and the connections between people appear out of thin air, and disappear just as quickly. It’s a world where ideas and innovations fail regularly, but are replaced by hundreds of new ideas.

YouTube Social is one such idea. It’s a mashup put together by a group of people who thought it might be nice to watch videos on YouTube with a group of people, sharing a “virtual” remote and a “live” chat room. It’s doubtful they thought two licks about learning, or education, but because of the footprint of YouTube, the readily available, and constantly expanding, educational content, and our ancient social wiring they’ve made a tool that could serve education well. It’s easy to imagine this being used by a teacher / mentor as a discussion and review tool, or by groups of students gathering together online in informal study groups. Now, I have no idea if YouTube Social is going to achieve any substantial amount of active use, but it represents some very interesting ideas about how the web-video experience can be pushed beyond isolated, passive consumption. It’s a pretty compelling idea, err classroom, don’t you think?

Interested in learning more about what we’re going to be up to in @ BlogWorld? Check out this short video.

Because we are increasingly producing and sharing media, we have to relearn what that word can mean. The simple sense of media is the middle layer in any communication, whether it is as ancient as the alphabet or as recent as mobile phones. On top of this straightforward and relatively neutral definition is another notion inherited from the patterns of media consumption over the last several decades, that media refers to a collection of businesses, from newspapers and magazines to radio and television, that have particular ways of producing material and particular ways of making money. And as long as we use media to refer just to those businesses, and to that material, the word will be an anachronism, a bad fit for what’s happening today.

Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

The term education is an anachronism. Please do not misunderstand me, our public systems of education have been hugely successful. They helped create the cognitive surplus that is radically reshaping how we interact, learn and work with each other. However, today our public eduction system is redundant, backwards and calcified. It has become the ancien régime to the revolutionary learning systems and communities that have developed online (e.g. web search, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc). The traditional education has become too slow, too static and, frankly, too inequitable to meet the needs of our ever evolving society. It is built on top of an archaic understanding of our social construct that does not reflect current social behaviors (where and how people learn), learning platforms (the ongoing silicon revolution), and cultural shifts (the integration of the network and social graph). The result is extraordinarily high costs with extremely low returns.

We need to redefine education within the context of the cognitive surplus that exists today. How are people learning today? What systems do they use? How do they work together. If we don’t focus on those questions and instead attempt to patch the ancien régime we’ll continue to fail. It’s that simple. Waiting for Superman won’t work, but we might be surprised by those things surrounding our every day lives that will.

Essentially Lessig questions why we treat the use of digital media differently from text. We freely and frequently quote (aka copy) text from copyrighted sources yet “throw the book” at anyone who uses digital media in the same manner. In Lessig’s view this treatment stifles ideas and creativity, inhibiting our individual and collective contributions to culture.

Call me a twit for saying it, but this has profound implications for screencasting. In fact, I used Jing to “quote” the section of Charlie’s interview with Larry you see above. Is this legal? Is it ethical? A small citation would seemingly fall under fair use guidelines, but there’s been so much FUD that its hard to ascertain how the copyright owners and their lawyers would perceive my use.

In fact, Charlie Rose seems to be open to non-commercial “remixes” of his old content and they make the clips available for embedding / download. They’ve even gone so far as to encourage it in a curious off site manner.

This however doesn’t clear up what I’ve done. I intentionally “copied” a portion of the video with Jing, uploaded it to my server and embedded it on my personal blog. It’s important to note there are legitimate reasons why I wanted to do this. First, I wanted point to just the relevant portion of the video. If I was citing text, I wouldn’t hand you a chapter with a highlighted passage and hope against hope you had the patience to find it. Second, I’m making another one of Lessig’s points. Today’s technology is enormously powerful and highly fluid. It took me longer to find the Lessig quote than it did to record and share the piece on my site (writing this post is another story). It’s absolutely mind blowing to think about combining video literacy / picture superiority effect with instant sharing across the globe. Lawyers and politicians just aren’t prepared to grok the information flow, empowerment and, dare I say, “culture” of it all.

If you haven’t seen it before check out Lessig’s free culture pitch:

Or just watch the entire interview. As always, there’s plenty to chew on. ;-)

Of course the bit about the the brain being holistic and self-organizing immediately brings to mind the way popularity is distributed within human social networks.

As it turns out, there’s a pretty substantial body of academic work that looks at visual design, communication and learning through a Gestalt lens. One interesting idea is that the parallel processing employed by the brain lets sense impressions be related between disparate senses (synesthesia). So for instance an activity such as typing may appear to be mostly tactile, but is actually mostly visual. Through visual learning we shape our expectations of keyboard interactions and then if possible / needed we map our visual interactions to other senses like the sound of a key being pressed or the feeling of the keyboard (actually all of these stimuli reinforce each other and are used in parallel).

To me this explains why the iPhone’s lack of tactile response is more than made up for by visual and audible cues (the audio is actually a bit over the top for me and I turned it off after the training wheel stage).

In fact visualization is so important that we may actually map our other sensory input to our visual mental model. When we listen to music or read a book we often envision ourselves inside the story or a visual narrative of our own devising. So in some respects most learning may in fact be visual. This has obvious implications for rich media. It’s the core driver behind video on the web and things like screencasting, slidecasting, and annotated screen capture.

And that brings me to what I like to call jingtations–annotated screen capture citations created by Jing. It’s my belief that taking a snapshot of an article fragment and then annotating it by highlighting passages or adding arrows and callout commentary is often a superior way to quote and communicate with people. A jingtation provides context, narrows focus, adds emphasis and provides stylistic relief. It takes someones original thought, adds emphasis, then wraps it up in a visual bow for easier digestion. Its something we all ought to explore, regardless of the tool used, as we seek more efficient ways to communicate clearly and concisely with each other.

This data dovetails into a Jakob Nielsen article on how much text users read that one of the project managers at work, Blake Nyquist, pointed me to.

And of course there’s Kathy Sierra’s learning theory wisdom.

I’ve got a few questions running around in the ol’ noggin:

• What’s the takeaway for social media?
• What’s the right balance between rich media and words?
• How many people actually want to watch videos / listen to audio in fast forward?
• Are pages with images / video rewarded with higher click through rates? What monetization potential?

Seesmic obviously is trying to answer some of these questions in the video realm, but it’s an open question if these ideas really have legs.

More questions than answers which means I need more time to mull things over. If you’ve got insights I’d welcome them.