If you haven’t yet made it over to khanacademy.org you should do so, maybe right now before you continue reading. Sal Khan and his Gates-funded cohorts have done some brilliant work in creating video tutorials/exercises and offering them in an exciting, simple format.

One of my favorite aspects of the Khan Academy is its nod to video games and our innate need for progression and reward. Khan recognizes that one of the things that makes video games so addicting/exciting is that they let us win; games create obvious goals that we can work towards in an engaging format. While real life is difficult and measuring personal victories is vague and complicated, video games let us beat level after level, gain power-ups, learn new abilities, and defeat monsters.

Khan is wisely attempting to capture the gratification offered by gaming and replace the content with real-life knowledge. Instead of getting Mario safely through the pipe and into the next world, you become a master of multiplication. The Khan academy is in no way an educational video game (there are plenty of those); rather it is a progressive learning resource that translates subject mastery into video game victories.

The “knowledge map” that the Khan Academy uses to track “player” progress is the most powerful part of the program. As you develop and prove your skills in each area you move forward on the map and are allowed access to the next set of exercises. Even though my addition is pretty awesome at this point in life, I was tempted to show the knowledge map who was boss (and did).

Most students (including myself) have a difficult time identifying their weaknesses and lack a bigger picture for why they need to learn fractions. The knowledge map shows you that success in one area means progress into new realms and can help you pinpoint the exact subject matter you may have missed or failed to fully comprehend.

I have been geeking out over the knowledge map concept for a couple weeks now, imagining how expansive it could get. Picture a student in middle school who is thinking they might want to be an architect someday. If a knowledge map could be made comprehensive enough, the student could visualize every step they would need to take in order to progress into the final areas where mastery in architecture could be learned; they could establish a goal-based learning program that would take them to the land of architecture far across the galaxy of knowledge.

The knowledge map the Khan Academy has created is nicely displayed in a google maps interface that overlaps Hubble photos of the universe. As you complete knowledge areas you travel across the universe, ostensibly on your way to some grand destination. So, you want to be a computer scientist? Here’s a map to get you there.

While the Khan Academy’s knowledge map is not very extensive quite yet, I expect it will be growing consistently over the next few years. I tried some quick knowledge mapping myself in some fields I am familiar with and it is very difficult. They wisely begun with mathematic mapping as the steps of progression are fairly straightforward. I think that certain chronological knowledge steps exist for the humanities and sciences, but defining them is a qualitative process, rather than a mathematical stacking of skills. Certainly you could read Kant without reading Plato, but should you? Yes, you could study John Dewey’s theories on education, but wouldn’t it be better if you read up on the history of mandatory schooling first?

These are the types of decisions college professors make every year when they put together a class syllabus. If we are studying “The Question of the Woman in Contemporary British Literature”, which books are the most important?; what order should we read them in?; which critical literature will come to bear most powerfully on the issues at hand?; which writers’ biographies are valuable to study?

The course subject syllabus–its intellectual chronology and content–is, perhaps, the most valuable proprietary piece of informational content offered to students. Even if I knew about “the question of the woman” in the early 20th Century enough to want to study it, I would not have had a clue where to start. The majority of texts we covered in that class I had never come across, but were absolutely wonderful and valuable.

The same is true for almost any subject; even if we have the motivation to be independent learners, we need to know where to begin, where to go next, and what our goal should be. Often, we can rarely even conceive of a subject area until it is shown to us. Not only do we not know it, but we don’t know that we should or could know it.

Again, this is why knowledge mapping is so exciting. If the Khan Academy (or someone else) can stretch the knowledge universe past the realms of high school math to include a wealth of subjects, it could prove to be a tremendous resource to learners everywhere. These maps could include (like syllabi) not just content, but also suggestions for projects and action and a user could input not just correct answers on scored exercises, but a multimedia portfolio cataloging their non-quantifiable accomplishments.

In order to progress on a knowledge map towards basic proficiency in carpentry, for instance, one could complete a few scored exercises, watch a few videos, and then complete three projects of increasing difficulty. Their progress on the map would show their exercise scores and then photos or videos of their finished projects and their remarks on the process.

A more comprehensive knowledge map, or even smaller disparate ones, could function as open-source syllabi for independent learners. I am pondering what it might look like for professors at The Saxifrage School to intentionally develop their syllabi in an open-source knowledge map format. Although, initially it seemed to me that this sort of style might lead to an overly canonized curriculum, I realize now that it could also have the opposite influence. By informing students of all of the various intellectual connections between their current study and other pursuits, this knowledge mapping could encourage and enable students to become interdisciplinary learners and discover new niches. Also, a subject-galaxy on the knowledge map does not have to be a linear path towards completion, but can encourage a choose-your-own-adventure style progression with certain essential content being more mandatory and other content being more optional. “Read 3 of these 4 books; then, read 3 of these 10; then choose one of those authors and study their biography and non-fiction works”

The possibilities and discussions surrounding knowledge mapping are growing exponentially in my mind as I write this. I won’t even get into the possible ramifications it could have in terms of grading, credentialling, etc. Certainly it is not a new concept, it is merely a new way to view academic progress that is highly enabled by new technologies.

And for a properly nerdy ending: I would be remiss if I didn’t pay some credit to the game Final Fantasy X for helping me recognize the value in the Khan Academy’s idea. The system designed for this game is as close to a “knowledge map” as I have seen; instead of traditional level ups for character where they automatically gain skills, each level up gives them points which they can use to direct their character around a “sphere grid” containing all of the potential abilities and character attributes.

In the game, this sort of design was liberating because it let you really define yourself, rather than locking you into a pre-determined path. If your brawny kickboxing character wanted to be a pensive magic-user, he could do it. Similarly, I think the Khan Academy and these ideas of knowledge mapping have the ability to help students better control their academic destinies and be excited about their progress.

See sphere grid here

See knowledge map here