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(Just look at the comments below the YouTube video.) It seems like the #MTT2K project/phenomenon has pushed some issues about math education from simmering to boiling - which I think was Dave and John’s intent. And unfortunately many of those comments are uncritical defenses of Khan Academy that often adopt a much nastier tone than John and Dave’s snarkiness from the video.
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More comments at this point than conversations. So this has turned into kind of a big deal.Īnother thing it’s spawned is a slew of comments and conversations about Khan Academy. Khan Academy took down the video that Dave and John critiqued and replaced it with two new ones. The video now has over 11,000 views and has spawned a Mystery Teacher Theatre 2000 contest (with Twitter hashtag #mtt2k). then on to Slate, the Chronicle, the Huffington Post, and Wired. The video was first picked up by Dan Meyer’s blog, and from there made it to Education Week. It turns out I missed my chance at viral internet stardom, because Dave finally made the video along with John Golden (another GVSU math person): I told him to sign me up to help, but I got too busy to stay in the loop with it. That particular day, Dave mentioned this idea about projecting a Khan Academy video onto the screen in a classroom and having three of us sit in front of it, offering snarky critiques - but with a serious mathematical and pedagogical focus - in the style of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Being a screencaster and flipped classroom person myself, we’d talked about making screencasts more pedagogically sound many times in the past. We were talking about screencasting and the flipped classroom concept, and the conversation got around to Khan Academy.
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At some point around the beginning of February 2012, David Coffey - a co-worker of mine in the math department at Grand Valley State University and my faculty mentor during my first year - mentioned something to me in our weekly mentoring meetings.
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