Recent reading

We recently had a (small) in-person LIMIT institute meeting, and a big topic of discussion was Making Math. This is a company that came out of the work UIUC has been doing in online and distance math education, discussed briefly in a previous post. I owe you all a longer write-up about this.
If you’re interested in wider issues in education, consider putting Hack Education on your blogroll.
An interesting site aimed at teaching math outside the academy is Better Explained. The site has some very pretty and interesting explanations of math concepts like limits, Bayes’ theorem or Fourier transforms. One of the promises of technology that MOOCs are half-fulfilling is this access to non-book learning outside academia. Better Explained seems to be trying for a different niche and I’m interested to see how it’s going.
Another site with some cool articles about math is Math $\cap$ Programming, which has longer-format articles on topics like martingales or computing homology.