About WatchKnow
The Internet is full of useful information, but it's disorganized and often unreliable. The potential of the Internet for education is especially huge.
Imagine tapping into that potential.
Imagine collecting all the best free educational videos made for children, and making them findable and watchable on one website. Then imagine creating many, many more such videos.
Just think: hundreds of thousands of great short videos, and other media, explaining every topic taught in schools, in every major language on Earth.
Finally, imagine them all deeply and usefully categorized according to subject, education level, and placed in the order in which topics are typically taught.
WatchKnow--as in, "You watch, you know"--is trying to do this.
WatchKnow a non-profit, online community that encourages everyone to collect, create, and share free, innovative, educational videos.
WatchKnow is now available for beta-testing, although it is not yet "officially" launched (see News below). Whether you’re a teacher, a student, or just someone who cares about the education of children, you can now get involved. Please sign up--but note that you can add new videos to our system without signing up (they'll have to be approved first).
There is no better cause to support online than the future of our children. And just imagine how fantastic it would be if there were a resource online we could go to, or send our kids to, that would explain every topic they study in school instantly and reliably.
If we get together, we can create it.
You can read more about our Goal and about Participation.
See also Frequently Asked Questions, Help, and Contact.
News
The WatchKnow was made publicly available for beta testing in November 2008. It has not been widely publicized yet and will not be officially launched until early 2009.
Advance Website has recently completed Phase 1 of the coding of the project. A second phase will introduce some much-needed tools which will, we think, make the website extremely easy to use, and capable of growing very quickly.
We will be adding a browser button allowing users to add videos instantly, while they are browsing YouTube and some other websites. It will also be possible to drag and drop videos into the Directory, making categorization as easy as possible. We think that the addition of these two tools will make WatchKnow unusually easy to edit and so ready to launch.
Advisory Committee
Our Advisory Committee includes:
- Chris Dede (Harvard)
- 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.
Media Review Panel
Our Media Review Panel currently numbers over 30 members. Most are experienced schoolteachers, but there are others who are experts in educational media or library science. The Review Panel discusses and approves general project policy and their ratings are worth proportionately more than other contributors.
The project's executive director is Larry Sanger, Ph.D. (Philosophy, Ohio State, 2000), who was co-founder of Wikipedia and now Editor-in-Chief of the Citizendium project.