We at WatchKnow.org feel that potential geniuses are everywhere, from small, rural towns to giant, sophisticated cities. But their potential may go to waste if they are not given the right educational opportunities. We at WatchKnow.org want to help make these opportunities available to everyone.
We believe that everyone is created equal, and we take the American Dream seriously. One of the best ways to make these ideals a reality for everyone is to offer free online educational material to our youth.
This is the vision behind the non-profit WatchKnow.org. WatchKnow has indexed over 15,000 online educational videos for children, putting them into a directory of over 3,000 categories. The videos are available without any registration or fees to teachers in the classroom and to students at home 24/7. You can dive into our innovative directory or search by subject and age level. Video titles, descriptions, age level information, and ratings are all edited for usefulness. The site invites broad participation in a new kind of wiki system, guided by teachers. We have had a tremendously positive response from educators to the website.
WatchKnow is a project of the non-profit 501(c)(3) Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi, and is directed by Dr. Larry Sanger, best known as co-founder of Wikipedia, and edited by a group of editors and assistants, all trained as educators.
WatchKnow plans to index over 50,000 educational videos by the end of 2010. Imagine, in the long run, cataloguing and creating millions of short videos, so that one can quickly and easily find a top-quality video on absolutely anything a child is studying. If we come together, we can great such a resource.
WatchKnow has additional plans. We want to give everyone a boost in learning, even from the earliest years. We are thus presently sponsoring early childhood reading in daycare centers in Memphis, Tennessee, and are helping to arrange a study of the effects of this program. Sanger is also drawing on his experience with online encyclopedias to plan an innovative multimedia encyclopedia for early childhood. Additionally, WatchKnow is in the start-up phase of a program to enlist top tier private and public schools to capture their classrooms on video. The videos will be hosted by WatchKnow.
Please sign up! WatchKnow needs everyone's help. We need you to find the best free videos and embed or link to them here, we need excellent schools to video their classrooms, we need governmental and school districts help to make these educational videos possible in the classrooms, we need the support of parents and teachers, and of course we need students to use our website.
WatchKnow.org Press Release
In 2007 and 2008, a Memphis-area philanthropist began conversations with his local network, and especially the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi and its president, Tom Pittman. Eventually they tapped Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger to plan a new, non-profit educational video service. Sanger became Executive Director of the project, directing the development of the new system.
In fall of 2008, Phase 1 of the coding of the project was done, and there was a quiet “beta launch.” This version of the system underwent a very stringent evaluation, and much was learned from it. Rather than launch what was only a rough draft, the partners decided to defer launch until after Phase 2 was finished.
In summer and fall of 2009, the partnership of NURD Inc. (led by Jason Pijut) and Business Edge (led by Brandon Spilove) came on board and finished Phase 2, completely revamping the system. They created, to specification, a drag-and-drop categorization tool, a bookmarklet allowing users to add videos instantly, an edit queue, and a variety of user tools. They also did a redesign of the site.
Also in mid-2009, many teachers, and some librarians, were hired to add videos and edit the Directory. Their work in particular—adding over 10,000 videos—has led to some very positive early “buzz” in the blogosphere and on Twitter from teachers and ed tech people.
By spring 2010, WatchKnow.org could boast over 15,000 hand-selected videos, with hand-edited information, in over 3,000 categories. WatchKnow hired several new subject editors to refine and greatly add to our content, and adopted a new vision statement that specifies some new project aims (you can read it above).
We hope that students, parents, teachers, librarians, and everyone interested in the education of children will use and help further build this system. While we have launched with thousands of videos in thousands of categories, there are many more out there to be found.
Our Advisory Committee includes:
- Chris Dede (Harvard)
- Alan Haskvitz (award-winning school teacher)
- Bob Hoffman (San Diego State)
- Jack Koumi (leading educational video expert and consultant)
- Larry Lessig (Stanford and Creative Commons)
- Tom Pittman (Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi)
- Larry Sanger (Citizendium)
- Chareen Snelson (Boise State)
- David Wiley (Brigham Young and opencontent.org)
The Advisory Committee publicly supports and offers advice about the project.
Our Media Review Panel currently numbers a few dozen members. Most are experienced schoolteachers, but there are others who are experts in educational media or library science. The Review Panel serve as community moderators, discuss and approve general project policy, and their ratings are worth proportionately more than other contributors.
The project's executive director is Larry Sanger, a Ph.D. philosopher who has become an "online knowledge organizer."
He was co-founder of Wikipedia and founder of the Citizendium, among other knowledge-related projects.
There are about a half-dozen subject editors, chosen for their subject expertise and educational experience, and a number of assistant editors, paid to manage and build up the site's offerings.
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And links to videos from many more sites that do not permit embedding, or that we do not yet support.
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