Media: Is This "Peak Hype" For Sal Khan?

Yes, that's Sal Khan, on the cover of Forbes magazine, featured in a 3,300-word profile (One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students) in which all the usual cliches and numbers are thrown out, by the usual self-interested (if sincere) cheerleaders, complete with a reference (Khan's own!) to the significance of being on the cover of Forbes magazine.  

The printing press. Radio. TV. Personal computers.  Laptops (Negroponte!).  Tablets. Mobile. Kahn.  There are a few tidbits I hadn't already picked up, including that Khan didn't win any investors for the first 10 months and was about to give up when the checks started finally coming in.  There's a mini-lesson on the history of education that includes the Presusian model.

But there's barely any reference to improved outcomes for kids -- just to the fact that there's so much money being spent in education, so many millions of pageviews, and growing numbers of venture capitalists interested in getting a piece of it.  And there's only a side glance at the fact that education technology has a long history of limited impact, and online education isn't even that new.

"What is missing is the recognition that a whole lot of humans don’t like to learn that way or can’t," says Steven Gilbert, president of the TLT Group, a nonprofit educational technology consultancy, towards the end of the piece. "And we have enormous historical evidence that that is the case.”