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Hmmm. Google having significant influence on the lowest level of my hardware...

A small oversight to be sure. [lol]

If we assume that students are rational actors making decisions between traditional teaching methods and KA...and we assume that KA, students, and teachers all have the same end goal of teaching the kids the material.

It sure looks like, at an increasing rate, kids are choosing KA. After all they are held most directly accountable for their academic success or failure. Wouldn't demand then be a reasonable gauge of value?

In the space of 18 months ending Feb of this year the site has gone from reaching 1 million to 6 million students per month.

I quantify the value of the product by the demand.

Have you been to the site and watched a lecture?

There are comments of other students who watched that video. These comments are questions and answers about what was discussed. There are also links to exercises covering the content. Each lecture is arranged in a logical order for each topic. There are capabilities to integrate the video lectures and exercise with real-world classes and ways for teachers to track their students progress and the areas where each student is struggling is highlighted.

It's phenomenal and worth closer inspection if any of this is news to you.

I know it is a hard pill to swallow that such a pedagogical luddite such as Sal Khan is having such a broad and important impact on learning when the professionals are struggling mightily.

Maybe, just maybe, he's on to something that despite years of institutional training 'real' teachers are missing.

Maybe it's important for a student to be able to interact with a lesson over and over again in order to catch a key point they might have missed the first pass.

Maybe it's important for a student to be able to ask other students how they caught on to something on their time scale and in a way that is pseudo-anonymous.

Maybe what makes Khan a great teacher is his breadth and depth of knowledge and context thanks to being a triple undergrad from MIT with backgrounds in math, computer science, and electrical engineering AND a Harvard MBA.

Maybe the institution of teaching is due for an evolutionary shake-up and Khanacademy is it[or at least a taste of things to come].

The price is simply too high for something that seems still too half-baked.

I know that what is 'promised' for 600-800 dollars is great but they should have proposed this phone with more solid specs. An actual demo phone would have been nice to see. I also think it would help to have more of an idea of how powerful the not-yet-named processor that I'd get next year will perform versus a trend of the Edge's current competition's processor power growth.

Finally, to me, it seems easier to add the ability to make phone calls to my favorite laptop/netbook/tablet than it would be to constrict my computer usage capabilities to an smartphone on steriods performance level.

Another vote for Zimbra.

Seriously, it's not that hard to install and setup.

Once you have it all going the capabilities are immense. It also lives on your machine, using your SSL certs, and using as much in-place HDD encryption as you want.

This is how you take your privacy back. You care enough about it to do it yourself.

My school teaches an intro course in python and then switches to c++ for the data structures and beyond.

It's gotta be easier to just start with c++ and run with it.

"AOL is here to stay." "Myspace is here to stay." "Facebook is not going away." "640K should be enough for anyone."

The only certainty is change.

I just realized this after seeing the referenced article title. Does make my response marginally off topic. I have never used Facebook or Snapchat so I had no idea they used read receipts.

Does iMessage have these too? [I don't use that either]

Read receipts are, at least in Outlook, optional to respond to. So...I don't see a problem. People send mail asking for them because for whatever reasons they have because they want to know if you've read the email. So what? It's not terribly effective as a practice, because the recipient can just ignore them but some people want to send them anyway. Nice to have the option.

Ars continues to discuss the most important topics in tech...

This software is something which should be used only with encrypted file containers[ala truecrypt] as it is closed source and its own built-in OTW encryption is not the greatest.

All email is 'in the cloud' now...So Enigmail is too much of a hassle for my recipients.

At least Thunderbird and Evolution are being steadily developed now![I jest!]