anecdote

Need help with class? YouTube videos await - San Jose Mercury News

MIAMI -- When University of Central Florida junior Nicole Nissim got stumped in trigonometry, she checked out what was showing on YouTube.

Nissim typically scours the video-sharing Web site for clips of bands and comedy skits. But this time she wasn't there to procrastinate on her homework. It turned out YouTube was also full of math videos. After watching a couple, the psychology major says, she finally understood trig equations and how to make graphs.

"I was able to watch them at my own pace and if I didn't get a concept, I could easily rewind it," Nissim says. "It was a lot clearer once I watched the video."

YouTube is perhaps best known for its cavalcade of homemade performances and TV clips, but many people like Nissim are turning to it for free tutoring in math, science and other complicated subjects.

Math videos won't rival the millions of hits garnered by laughing babies, but a YouTube tutorial on calculus integrals has been watched almost 50,000 times in the past year. Others on angular velocity and harmonic motion have gotten more than 10,000 views each.

The videos are appealing for several reasons, says Kim Gregson, an Ithaca College professor of new media. Students come to the videos when they're ready to study and fully awake -- not always the case for 8 a.m. calculus classes. And they can watch the videos as many times as they need until they understand.

Viewer comments reflect that. On tutorials posted to YouTube by the not-for-profit Khan Academy, for example, reactions include: "Now why couldn't my calc instructor explain it that simply?" and "I was just about to leave my physics course. You saved me." One viewer went as far as to declare to the man behind the videos: "You are god of mathematics!!!"

What's creator Salman Khan's trick? Keeping it simple, he says. He takes a laid-back approach, focuses on a single concept and keeps the videos to a digestible 10 minutes. He says he purposely did not create clips featuring himself standing at a whiteboard. He wanted something more akin to sitting next to someone and working out a problem on a sheet of paper. He uses the low-tech Microsoft Paint sketching software, with a black background and brightly colored lines and equations as he works through his explanations.

"If you're watching a guy do a problem (while) thinking out loud, I think people find that more valuable and not as daunting," says Khan, a California hedge fund manager by day and math geek by night.

Educated at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Khan developed his tutoring hobby when a younger cousin was having trouble with sixth-grade math. As word of his knack for teaching spread among relatives and family friends, Khan got tired of explaining the same things over and over, so he created videos and posted them on YouTube. He formed the Khan Academy, currently a one-man show, with the long-term goal of starting a school that uses technology to customize learning for students.

Khan's video clips have developed a following far beyond that immediate circle of relatives and friends, and now he gets dozens of e-mails a week from around the world -- including requests for videos on specific topics and help solving particular problems. He now claims about 600 videos on subjects spanning math, physics and even the tanking economy.

Khan says the heartfelt feedback motivates him to keep churning out the clips, which he works on for about three hours a night.

University of Miami education professor Walter Secada, who specializes in how math is taught, praises Khan's personable style. But while Secada says the Khan videos he reviewed are accurate, he's concerned about how Khan uses an example to define a term, rather than defining the term more generally. Secada says he can envision some students becoming confused when having to apply a concept to a different example.

"It may seem like a small point but it lays a foundation for later problems," Secada says. "That's the strength and the weakness of this. In an eight-minute video, you can only do so much."

YouTube's potential for instruction is one reason Internet search leader Google bought the video site for $1.76 billion two years ago. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page realized that certain search requests could be better fulfilled with how-to videos than with written explanations. But they didn't have a good way of filling that need until YouTube landed in their laps. Now Google includes YouTube videos when it delivers search results.

Not all tutoring videos on YouTube are created equal, however.

Central Florida sophomore Jacqueline Boehme found that out quickly when perusing biology clips. Some had poor video quality and were blurry or too small, "so it's always useful to look at a few," says BoehmeSecada would like to see math faculty incorporate some videos in their teaching, or recommend clips that have been vetted. He cautions students not to depend solely on what they find online.

"There's a point at which kids do need to double-check with their textbook" and professor, Secada says. "Before you need to quote this in your test, you need to look at this and check if it's right."

jeopardy?

Newsweek

The United States, like many countries, has a bad habit of committing wartime excesses and an even worse record of accounting for them afterward. But a remarkable string of recent events suggests that may finally be changing—and that top Bush administration officials could soon face legal jeopardy for prisoner abuse committed under their watch in the war on terror.

In early December, in a highly unusual move, a federal court in New York agreed to rehear a lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft brought by a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar. (Arar was a victim of the administration's extraordinary rendition program: he was seized by U.S. officials in 2002 while in transit through Kennedy Airport and deported to Syria, where he was tortured.) Then, on Dec. 15, the Supreme Court revived a lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld by four Guantánamo detainees alleging abuse there—a reminder that the court, unlike the White House, will extend Constitutional protections to foreigners at Gitmo. Finally, in the same week the Senate Armed Service Committee, led by Carl Levin and John McCain, released a blistering report specifically blaming key administration figures for prisoner mistreatment and interrogation techniques that broke the law. The bipartisan report reads like a brief for the prosecution—calling, for example, Rumsfeld's behavior a "direct cause" of abuse. Analysts say it gives a green light to prosecutors, and supplies them with political cover and factual ammunition. Administration officials, with a few exceptions, deny wrongdoing. Vice President Dick Cheney says there was nothing improper with U.S. interrogation techniques—"we don't do torture," he repeated in an ABC interview on Dec. 15. The government blamed the worst abuses, such as those at Abu Ghraib, on a few bad apples.

High-level charges, if they come, would be a first in U.S. history. "Traditionally we've caught some poor bastard down low and not gone up the chain," says Burt Neuborne, a constitutional expert and Supreme Court lawyer at NYU. Prosecutions may well be forestalled if Bush issues a blanket pardon in his final days, as Neuborne and many other experts now expect. (Some see Cheney's recent defiant-sounding admission of his own role in approving waterboarding as an attempt to force Bush's hand.)

Constitutionally, Bush could pardon everyone involved in formulating and executing the administration's interrogation techniques without providing specifics or naming names. And the pardon could apply to himself. Such a step, however, would seem like an admission of guilt and thus be politically awkward. Even if Bush takes it, civil suits for monetary damages could still proceed; such cases, though hard to win, are proliferating. Yet most legal scholars argue that a civil suit would not the best approach here. Neuborne calls it an "excessively lawyer-centric" strategy and says judges are extremely reluctant to award damages in such cases. Conservative legal experts like David Rifkin (who served in the Reagan and first Bush administrations) argue that no accounting is necessary, since the worst interrogation techniques, like waterboarding, have already been abandoned and Obama is expected to make further changes.

A growing group of advocates are now instead calling for a South African-style truth and reconciliation commission. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, says that although "we know what went on," "knowledge and a change in practices are not sufficient: there must be acknowledgment and repudiation as well." He favors the creation of a nonpartisan commission of inquiry with a professional staff and subpoena power, calling it "the only way to definitively repudiate this ugly chapter in U.S. history."

But for those interested in tougher sanctions, one other possibility looms. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and author of "The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld," points out that over 20 countries now have universal jurisdiction laws that would allow them to indict U.S. officials for torture if America doesn't do it itself. A few such cases were attempted in recent years but were dropped, reportedly under U.S. pressure. Now the Obama administration may be less likely to stand in their way. This doesn't mean it will extradite Cheney and Co. to stand trial abroad. But at the very least, the threat of such suits could soon force Bush aides to think twice before buying plane tickets. "The world is getting smaller for these guys," says Ratner, "and they'll have to check with their lawyers very carefully before they travel." Jail time it isn't—but it may be some justice nonetheless.