My friend Amanda Dykes, shared this slide from a presentation on Instagram:
I thought it was an interesting tweet,because I am not sure of the accuracy in the wording. As Amanda stated, for a site to be the number one “educational” site, schools wouldn’t block it. If you changed the word to “educational” to “learning” though, that is something that I would definitely believe. People use YouTube for learning all of the time. Just the other night, I was trying to learn to play a song, and based on habit, one of the sites that I would look at is YouTube. There is so much information listed on there that it is a shame that so many schools block it, prompting the “School vs. Learning” argument.
This tweet from Leif Rask caught my eye though:
@gcouros @amandacdykes likely neither. Khan academy, Coursera, EdX, etc are much better sites for academic content. — Leif Rask (@lsrask) June 9, 2015
Again, “learning” and “academics” are not necessarily the same thing. In fact, when I googled the definition for “academic” one of the definitions was “not of practical relevance; of only theoretical interest.” This only fuels the “School vs Learning” debate.
If schools are a place that promote learning, not learn about “school stuff”, but actually learn,to ignore the places where most of the world learns doesn’t make much sense. We easily say things like “we need to teach a way a child learns”, yet we too often ignore the places where so many of them are going to do that.
