Cubicle Freakout

I was enjoying Michelle Malay Carter's blog this morning. She has a link to the Wii Remote SmartBoard Video, suggesting it makes the Wii a business expense! She also has a nice collection of funny YouTube videos and a link to a Flash game, quite unlike the CLIPs ones, called Cubicle Freakout.

Incidently, PhD graduate student Johnny Lee's Wii Project page lists some other neat things to do with the Wii Remote. They might even make a cool Science Fair Engineering project.

Here is an example of one of the YouTube videos she features:

Underestimating Children?

The New York Times reports the following conversation between a child and a contender for the U.S. presidency:

“Who is your favorite author?” Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.

Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.

In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.

“My favorite author is C. S. Lewis,” she said.

Sometimes truth is funnier than comedy.

See Knowledge being created and negotiated in real time

Tim Hawes' recent blog post references a site where you can watch anonymous Wikipedia edits being made. Read the FAQ to see the various databases and APIs that are being used to create it.

Man fired for posting a Dilbert Cartoon

I think that I may need more than one blog so that these posts aren't so unrelated to one another. But I got a kick out of this posting to the Dilbert Blog.

Disclaimer: No one I have ever worked with or for in any way resembles a drunken lemur.

Comparison of E-Learning Screen Capture Tools

I have been involved with a group looking at the pros and cons of using Techsmith's Camtasia, Adobe Captivate and Adobe Presenter. A wiki with some youtube videos and a preliminary comparison chart is available for editing.

Mathematical Poetry Blog

I set up a RSS feed, using blogsearch.google.com, of new pages that reference The Geometer's Sketchpad. The first useful result is from a blog about Mathematical Poetry. The blog is featuring artistic works currently and mentions one mathematical artist's use of Sketchpad.

Here is one fascinating example of Mathematical Poetry from an earlier post:

My first Flash Game

This is Dropball!

What is the role of memory in schools?

Father Guido reflects...

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

What is the machine?
A great video to describe the shift in thinking that comes with Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 Tools

I am spending the day with Will Richardson exploring some Web 2.0 tools.

Among the neatest things have been

• Google Reader where RSS feeds can be aggregated including
• other people's blogs
• google blog search
• people's del.icio.us tagged links
• photos from flickr e.g. html://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/math
• videos from youtube etc.

Tim Hawes shared a site with tutorials in plain English for these tools.

John Taylor found an interesting Adobe Connect Video

Yet Another Computer Algebra System

I have been exploring Yacas for a little while now. It is extremely powerful and is free. Students can download it or run it directly from its web site. There is an interactive tutorial available from the main set of tabs.

On the related links page, there is a link to mavscript, which uses yacas to perform calculations directly in text or OpenOffice Text documents. Maybe I am a geek, but being able to differentiate, graph and factor directly inside a text document warmed a cockle in my heart!

Flash Graphing Tools

As part of the CLIPs project, we have been developing learning objects in Flash to support work in the Grade 11 Functions courses. Fortuitously, we came across a set of robust tools created by Doug Ensley, Shippensburg University and Barbara Kaskosz , University of Rhode Island, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, which include fantastic documentation. We have learned a lot about programming in Flash by using the tools.

There has been some functionality that we wanted to add, including labeling of axes and adding control points to graphs that necessitated creating our own version of the classes. Examples of our work and the original examples are available here.

A new arrangement on an old idea

Perhaps you have seen a proof that the cardinality of the set of fractions is the same as that of the natural numbers. It relies on creating an ordered list of all the fractions. If you can talk about the nth fraction, then there must be as many as there are natural numbers.

If you order the fractions and arrange them in the following way, you get a Pascal's triangle - like deal with just as many patterns and interesting features.