Nine Theses on Wikipedia: A Special Feature
I submit these nine theses to Wikipedia’s community and to the world. I do this, as Martin Luther said when he posted his famous 95 theses, “Out of love for the truth and the desire to elucidate it.”
My Blog
-
What are the best books about countries for children?
As I explained in an earlier post, my older son (age 5) and I are reading through books about most of the countries of the world. In the last few months we’ve gotten through books about Peru, Columbia, Bolivia, and now Ecuador. I gave him the option, not long ago, of stopping this and going…
9 comments on What are the best books about countries for children?9 minutes -
Post-launch raves about Reading Bear
Here’s a run-down of the initial publicity and online buzz about Reading Bear. Reading Bear was on the front page of the high-profile tech blog TheNextWeb.com yesterday, with this article. Techie Buzz “Reading Bear Teaches Kids to Read for Free”: “There is a great new tool to teach kids how to read. It’s called Reading Bear.…
3 minutes -
Why build a site that teaches children to read?
Or: why am I spending over a year of my life developing a reading tutorial for little kids? You might think such a question invites boring platitudes of the sort that afflicts a lot of writing about education. Well, I’ll try not to bore you. With my academic training and a background developing collaborative websites,…
13 minutes -
Reading Bear launches!
All, after a lot of planning and even more work, Reading Bear is now live on ReadingBear.org. We are launching with 14 presentations, averaging around 15 minutes per presentation–in the longest of seven versions; there is an automatically-generated quiz with every presentation and an automatically-generated review every five presentations. There are various other features and…
1 minute -
The “times-are-changing, specific-knowledge-is-unnecessary” canard
I don’t know how many times I have read, “The world, and research findings, are changing so fast that it is pointless to insist on learning particular bits of knowledge. Much of it will be outdated soon. So the only really important thing to teach children is how to think.” This is dangerous nonsense. It…
3 minutes -
Unobvious concepts that are important, but rarely taught
To understand history, geography, fiction, and a whole lot else besides, it is fairly important that children be taught in considerable depth certain practical yet universal concepts about history that, I think, are rarely explained in much very depth: Gathering (as in “hunting and gathering”) Animal skins (and tanning) Nomadic life Shepherding, spinning, weaving, dyeing…
10 minutes -
My “for kids” videos
Here are some of my videos for little kids. Some of them, like “Counting to 100” and “The Moon for Kids,” are getting pretty popular on YouTube. You can also find these (accessible in schools) on WatchKnowLearn, of course! I’ve uploaded some new ones in recent weeks (they are at the bottom of this list).…
1 minute -
Response to David Wiley on an education “badge” system
Here is my response to David Wiley’s very interesting blog post about an educational badge system, similar to the Mozilla Open Badges program. David, I didn’t mean to be unpleasant in my Twitter responses to you. I’m still grateful to you for agreeing to be a WatchKnow (now WatchKnowLearn, and now in the able hands…
8 minutes -
What is the best way to teach geography?
I’m wondering: what is the best way to teach geography? I’ve started a system with H. (age 5) which seems to be working reasonably well, but I wonder if, perhaps, we should be doing some other things. Also, there are aspects of my current plan that make me wonder if I’m proposing to start something…
8 minutes -
I gih dah bah! (update about the baby’s “education”)
It’s been a while since I reported about Baby E., especially in any detail. So here’s maybe my first detailed report (he’s now 11 months) about what we’re doing with him and what’s going on with him. I guess the relevant topics are: apps; YBCR and associated flashcards; other screen-based reading programs; and books. But first, a…
14 minutes
Support the Knowledge Standards Foundation:
/larrysanger- An open reply to Jimmy Wales. He's wrong: Grokipedia won't necessarily be biased; and, obviously, the Trump article is badly biased. First of a series of replies to Jimmy's remarks in this Reason exposé: https://reason.com/video/2026/02/23/can-you-trust-wikipedia/
- I invited my X peeps to ask me questions and then "like" the various questions, and I would upload the answers in video form. Here it is! Christian identity – 1:10 "Call no man teacher" – 9:25 Role of government – 15:45 Authority & resistance – 19:15 Wikipedia labor – 24:20 Net value of Wikipedia […]