Does ukulele music appeal disproportionately to geeks?

One early morning this week, when I definitely had better things to do, a blog post at Inside the CBC, led me to this video by Tim Tamashiro:



So then I decided to see what else was on youtube using infinitube.net. The leading video there now is the one that Greg liked so much. My pre-dawn surfing, however, led me to the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

If, as I hypothesize, these performances appeal more to geeks than the general population, maybe you will like these videos. There are lots more there.

Comment Moderation

I have reluctantly turned on comment moderation since the spam comments outnumber by far the real comments. I don't like doing this, but it seems more time efficient.

Is anyone else being plagued by spam comments? Has there been a rash of them in the last six weeks or has some evil blog directory been updated to include mine?

Happy 2nd Birthday

My blog is now into its third year and although I have plenty of ideas for posts, I seem to have placed writing them at a very low priority. Most of my ideas for posts require more concentration and research than I think I can muster. I often check my Feedjit traffic - about 15 visits a day for topics closely related to my interests or as far away as the visit by someone searching for "dream about number 127". Recently, I noticed for the first time a visit by someone from a Google Doc (that I don't have access to) and someone leaving the page from my embedded delicious feed at the left of the screen. That was a link to what I thought was a fair-minded and well-written piece in the Washington post about a teacher trying to encourage Math talk in her classroom.

If you are looking to follow a blogger who is more prolific, may I again suggest Doug Peterson. Just one day of his delicious feed is inspiring.

It has been two years full of learning and thinking about the effect of Web 2.0 on education, much of it chronicled at http://mathfest.wikispaces.com. /Web2.0+For+Math+Educators. Thanks for your part in it.

Where are the Math Project sites?

Neil Munro shared a spreadsheet with me of the medal counts by country at the 2008 Olympic Games. You may know that the press in Canada was critical of the performance of the Canadian team, especially prior to a run of medals toward the end of the games. If you adjust the medal count for the population of the country, Canada does better than the United States and much better than China. Others have adjusted for a nation's GDP. Depending on the method used, Jamaica, the Bahamas and Zimbabwe fare very well.

It struck me that the question is a good one for a mathematics exploration - especially since the source data is available in lots of locations, including wikipedia and there are media reports and analysis all over the web. Vancouver 2010 is fast approaching too.

I went looking for a repository of good open-ended questions like this and came up with the square root of 0.

Surely, there is some interested wikiphile who is compiling such things. Isn't there?

If you know of some good resources, please let me know.

A Mathematical Search Engine?

There has been a fair bit of buzz about Wolfram Alpha and even comparisons to Google, but I don't think I really started to get it until I saw Maria H. Andersen's Picasa Web Album via Teaching College Mathematics.

Now the wheels are turning. How is Math education going to change with tools like these available to students? CAS tells students answers, this tells students questions.

Representations of Linear Growing Patterns Cluster Launched

It is with a lot of pleasure that I am able to announce the launch of a new cluster of CLIPS.

Representations of Linear Growing Patterns is based on research conducted by Ruth Beatty at the Institute for Child Studies in Toronto. Although it does not flesh out the experiences that students would have in Grades 4-6 with concrete materials, it certainly alludes to them. Students take pictorial representations, based on coloured tiles, of a pattern and develop graphical representations and algebraic rules. They then explore the role of the constant and multiplier in the pattern rules. One Near North teacher blogged about the change it made in her understanding and about her experience trying it in her classroom.

Among the material created for the cluster are a graphing tool and an open-ended tool to explore the relationships between the representations, including stories and the algebraic equation. The graphing tool is described carefully in Clip 2, Activity 4: Practice Graphing. The Rainbow DSB is conducting a "book study" of this cluster. I hope that soon we can feature some innovative ways to use the Exploring Representations tool resulting from their work. I am hoping to engage the Web 2.0 math teacher community to address the question "What can we do with this?".



The cluster movie is quite different from the "Who Cares?" movies developed for Fractions and Periodic Functions. The overview movie, which should be viewed after working through the development, summarizes the cluster nicely.

There are several improvements to the CLIPS "wrapper", including the ability to set a volume level or mute that is respected throughout navigation and a new scene selector. The major videos can be viewed fullscreen without downloading a huge source file. Trish Steele narrates a new 12-minute introduction to the wrapper that is well worth the time.

Since the activities are primarily flash animations (SWF) with embedded narration, the files are relatively big. The design of CLIPS does not depend on any server technology. Teachers or students who wish to use the activities, but don't want to depend on an internet connection, can download the entire thing and point to the index.html file at the root, for local use.

We thought it would be done earlier and there are still some rough edges (please use the Feedback link at the top right to record anything that you notice) but we are very happy to now have the work officially in circulation.

OAME Banquet

I am just back from the OAME Conference in Ottawa, the city of my up-bringing. As usual the conference was a great experience and I even stayed a day and enjoyed scaling the Gatineau Park on a bicycle.

I helped to nominate Joel Yan for a well-deserved OAME award. At the banquet, he told a hilarious story about being fired from a volunteer job for his love of Math. It turns out that he was volunteering at the bingo hall selling tickets and the like when his big break came. The caller was leaving and they needed someone who could talk loudly, read numbers in English and French and be enthusiastic. Joel fit the bill. He correctly called B8, but when B9 showed up next he called "Add one". There was a lot of confusion and an official warning to "just call the numbers". Joel behaved for a night or two, but when 32 rolled out of the machine, he couldn't help but call "two to the fifth", thus ending his stint as a Bingo caller.

The OAME banquet featured some comedians from Absolute Comedy. The first comic had trouble following Joel, since he had a paucity of exponential humour. Rick Currie came up next cracking jokes about assessment, government workers and the like. My favourite was his ending song about Billy Bob Thornton. You can find some of his other bits on Youtube, but I have his permission to post this bit here.

If you haven't seen the interview - it is worth seeing just for the cringe value.

Once you have watched that, the song below will make more sense.



Here is a photo of Joel and I.