Some math ed tech links
Check out Hypernom, the new 4-D math game from Vi Hart and partners in (crime?) Andrea Hawksley (AH) and Henry Segerman. It’s pretty crazy — and beautiful. Nom nom nom. I can’t believe I missed this for so long. I got the link from a post on MathMunch, which is itself a very fun blog on […]
Some interesting pre-calculus resources
My colleague Mike Weimerskirch at the University of Minnesota has set up a nice site of precalculus resources. It’s got videos, slides, and transcripts of short lectures on a variety of precalc topics, as well as links to appropriate sections of three free online textbooks. If you’re a current teacher, this is a great resource […]
Math on the web: innovations from Khan Academy
The folks at Khan Academy are doing some very interesting things. Today I heard about an effort they’re calling KaTeX, math typesetting for the web. It is designed to be a fast alternative to MathJax, as far as I can tell — MathJax is great in some ways but can take a while to render. The […]
Privacy, education, e-texts
I found an interesting blog post recently that discusses briefly software that tracks how much and when you read your e-textbook. There’s so much nuance to this discussion. Compare the following: This e-textbook integrates seamlessly with technology designed to analyze student reading habits, allowing teachers to understand where students are having trouble with readings and target […]
Finals awareness month
Ok, it’s not that. But many students across the US are aware of finals. So are many mathematicians, those in academia who are teaching…. One way that math and science and other fields have changed with the advent of the internet is the coalescence of the blogging community. There are academics from many fields blogging, […]
One month — Math Awareness month
It’s math awareness month! It’s also a month of midterms, homeworks, projects, and articles for those in the academic milieu. And now we’re heading for the end of the semester… I have three more classes in which to cover the multivariable central limit theorem and Brownian motion. Ambitious. Check out an NPR piece on Martin […]
Last musings from JMM
To finish up on reporting from the Joint Mathematics Meetings, Eric Friedlander, former president of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), gave an address on changes in the profession. A few interesting points: Among other things, he highlighted the changes that the “open access” movement brings. In particular, journals in math used to publish papers for free […]
Putting our teaching to the test
Take a second/minute and read this article by Andrew Gelman. All teachers, and especially all teachers who are scientists (or, at least, science-y), should think about how to evaluate and improve their methodology. You could randomly assign students to different experimental groups and compare outcomes. This is logistically difficult for many of the most important […]
Mathematics outside the academy
A big concern of many mathematicians and techy people I talk to is mathematics “outside the academy.” That is, mathematicians know that math is beautiful and get to do it as part of their jobs, but math appreciation is often not that accessible to people outside the academic-industrial complex! We can all go to concerts […]
Are we revolutionaries?
A thought-provoking post by Michael Tomasson (here) discusses the idea that a forthright discussion of the trials and tribulations (and joys!) of life in academia is dangerous to an aspiring academic’s job prospects. Is this true? Should these discussions all be held pseudonymously, so that honesty can’t be held against the participants? Is having a […]
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