Last year I read Salman Khan's book, The One World Schoolhouse. It inspired me so much that I wanted to see if we could use his curriculum to help tutor the children of the artisans that work for our company, AHA Bolivia. I started to use some of the videos myself and then introduced them to Jose, one of my assistants. I had him read the book and asked if he would help me with this project. I think he got excited about it as he started a manic accumulation of points and developed an in depth knowledge of all things Khan.
I was going to travel to the Palo Alto area in the US in February of 2013 and decided that we should try to figure out how to talk to Salman Khan or the people in his organization in person. They did not want to be found. We tried a million different ways to get the Khan Academy people to respond to us. Nothing. Then Jose came up with a brilliant plan- since our company made crochet and knit stuffed animals, why not make little stuffed animals of the avatars on the Khan website. We made these wonderfully quirky creatures that embodied the Khan avatars, took photos of them and then added the photos to our various and sundry e-mails going off into cyber space directed at the Khan people. They responded.
When I travelled to the US, I corralled my two sons and we all went to a meeting with two of the Khan team- James and Bilal. During the meeting, Bilal took photos of the dolls while we talked about our project. What James and Bilal kept asking us was- but what do you want from us? Frankly, all we wanted was to let them know what we were doing and open a dialogue with them. We asked if they had knowledge of someone using the Khan Academy curriculum in a developing country in another language. They said that so far they had heard only rumours about some projects but did not have extensive knowledge of any of them. We asked if they would be interested in what happened with our project. They said- absolutely and please make a blog. After 5-6 months and massive amounts of preparation- our project has started and we have finally made a blog.
To finish up our US experience with the Khan academy, we can't forget the meeting with Salman Khan himself. After our meeting with James and Bilal was over, we walked into the common area where the exuberent Khan staff got very excited about the stuffed avatars. As the avatars were being thrown around the room from person to person, Salman Khan came out and in that wonderfully familiar voice and laugh said ¨"(chuckle, chuckle) not very professional." It struck me then, that more than Salman Khan's face, his voice will be an iconic voice for many American children. We all exchanged pleasantries and left with the idea that we would put together a mini Khan experience for some kids in Cochabamba Bolivia.
Anna Hosbein de Aliaga
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