[mrr54]

Most of those channels you mention aren't really teaching anything beyond general knowledge and trivia.

You could watch every video on every one of those channels and you might know a lot of random facts but it won't make you a physicist or a mathematician or a biologist.

>That's a parenting issue not a computer issue. Teach your kids what's allowed and what's not, and check their browser history until they learn how to manipulate it, then check your router logs

Ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. There are things I saw on the internet as a child that I still cannot unsee. My parents having seen that I saw them afterwards would not have changed that.

[jacobolus]

There is a lot of excellent inspiring youtube content (including well presented secondary and undergraduate level math and physics lectures) buried in mountains of dreck.

People can learn all sorts of useful things from youtube, but they can also easily waste huge amounts of time, become radicalized by extremists, ....

[mrr54]

I'm not saying it can't be inspiring. I'm sure youtube videos about mathematics have inspired quite a few young people to pursue mathematics! They can foster an interest, inspire people to learn, etc. But that doesn't make them educational.

[mcqueenjordan]

A video recording of the MIT OCW courses is absolutely educational.

Many science/technology focused YouTube channels absolutely produce educational content.

You don't need to receive a title or a credential to have received education.

I'm deeply sorry that you've struggled with bad things you saw on the internet. That can be a compelling reason to limit access. But that doesn't redefine education.

[mrr54]

>there are many great youtube channels packed with scientific content, like Smarter Every Day, Veritasium, Mark Rober, CGP Grey, VSauce, engineerguy, Physics Girl, Captain Disillusion, Mathologer, Numberphile, ...

That's what I was replying to. And those videos are not educational. They're 'interesting facts' or 'wow science is so coooooool!!!!!111 yeah science!!!11' channels.

>You don't need to receive a title or a credential to have received education.

Fun interesting facts are great for getting people interested in science, but they are not science! People coming away from a Mathloger video interested in maths? Brilliant. People coming away from a Mathloger video thinking they know maths? Not brilliant.

[jacobolus]

There are lots of university lectures, worked example problems, videos of people demonstrating and teaching every type of manual skill, .... on youtube

> those videos are not educational

This kind of thing is absolutely “educational” under any reasonable definition of the word https://youtu.be/0KjG8Pg6LGk https://youtu.be/8KmVDxkia_w https://youtu.be/Ku8BOBwD4hc https://youtu.be/k8Rxep2Mkp8 https://youtu.be/1VPfZ_XzisU https://youtu.be/IcrBqCFLHIY

Of course it’s not (and not supposed to be) a substitute for students working problems for themselves, running experiments, conducting interviews, doing research in the stacks, writing papers, writing code, putting each-others’ art through critique, or the like.

Nobody “comes away from a Mathologer video thinking they «know math»” (whatever that is supposed to mean).