Yesterday afternoon we had a half-day workshop on Maple, a computer algebra system. At least that’s how we think of it, but here’s the description on their website: Maple is the leading all purpose mathematics software tool. Maple provides an… Read More ›
Technology
If you can read this, you can read at a high-school level
According to the badge that I’ve pasted into the right sidebar, this blog requires a high-school reading level. I was glad to see that it passed that test, even though only a small part of my audience actually consists of… Read More ›
Post #500!
According to Blogger, this is my 500th post! It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve written 500 of these short (and sometimes not-so-short) essays. One of my Weston students asked in class why anyone would bother keeping a blog,… Read More ›
How do you read email when there's so much spam?
Mark Bernstein has an observation and a question: I no longer trust my email. If you send me mail, I will probably receive it, but I’m far from certain that it won’t be lost in the vast deluge of spam…. Read More ›
No comment
A reader of both this blog and Adam Gaffin’s Universal Hub asked why I’ve turned off comments in my blog. Naturally he had to ask the question on Universal Hub. I replied as follows: I have comments turned off because… Read More ›
Cheating and imaginary property, Part Two
This is a follow-up to my post of December 26. There are two separate and distinct issues here: Has there been a decline in ethical attitudes and behavior among students in recent years? Are some lines that used to be… Read More ›
Adventures at Microcenter
So I’m at Microcenter on Wednesday to take advantage of their post-Christmas sale, and I walk in clutching their flyer with the descriptions of two external hard drives highlighted. These are advertised as being for both PCs and Macs, so… Read More ›
Cheating and imaginary property, Part One
David Pogue has written a fascinating article about cheating and intellectual property — or imaginary property, as some call it. Pogue is a technology writer, but his article is aptly entitled “The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality.” Nevertheless, technology has… Read More ›
Helvetica
How nerdy can you get? A movie about typography? About a font??? (Well, actually, it’s a typeface, but the ubiquity of Windows and Macs has trained people to call typefaces “fonts”; I’m sure I’ll slip up and do so here.)… Read More ›
Hiatus is over
OK, OK, I’ll start blogging again! First I ran into recent Weston alumni Sheldon and Chester at the school play, and they asked why I hadn’t posted recently. “Yes, I know,” I replied. “I haven’t posted in five months.” “Six,… Read More ›
Of course we outsource game-playing!
According to the New York Times and NPR, wealthy online gamers are outsourcing the playing of games to Chinese workers! At first glance this sounds ridiculous: surely people who play online games enjoy playing them, so it makes no sense… Read More ›
Non-violent video games?
My Saturday Course students are designing and programming their own video games. These fifth-graders participate in an intensive introduction to programming, but their “Create Your Own Computer Game” course is also billed as a class in which kids create their… Read More ›
The one worst method
All right, we know that there isn’t any “one best method” of teaching. That’s one of the reasons why teachers need to be life-long learners: aside from being models for our students, aside from the continual need to learn new… Read More ›
I, Robot
So why did I bother watching the movie I, Robot? It’s because I rarely read reviews ahead of time, since reviews too often contain spoilers. But I found this movie poorly done, disrespectful to the memory of my hero Isaac… Read More ›
Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog
How could I resist reading a blog entitled “Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog”? Yes, as you guessed, it turns out to be a blog that’s entirely written in Middle English! Anyway, take a look at it and make a serious… Read More ›
Big ideas
LCSI’s new blog, Thinkering, links to Seymour Papert’s homepage, which in turn links to a four-and-a-half-year-old press release from MIT, which reminded me of our commitment to big ideas in the Math Department of the Weston Public Schools. Such are… Read More ›
The Mexican Consulate puzzle (and cell phone cameras)
Ate lunch today at the Blue Fin, a favorite inexpensive Japanese restaurant in Little Tokyo, a.k.a. the Porter Exchange Building in Cambridge. A new sign lists the types of identification that are acceptable for ordering alcoholic beverages — mostly the… Read More ›
WoW and Second Life: follow-up
This is a follow-up to my earlier post on Second Life (SL) vs. World of Warcraft (WoW). One of my students, Dan Spector, replies to that post by writing the following remarks in an email message to me (quoted by… Read More ›
Second Life or WoW?
Would I be interested in joining a 3-D virtual world in my copious free time, which doesn’t really exist? Some of my students have been trying to persuade me to play World of Warcraft (Wow). (That was the standard acronym,… Read More ›
Maybe we should try this in high school
Rudbeckia Hirta, the pseudonymous math professor from a state university in the south, recounts a story with a delicious little idea at the end: So today I saw one of the football players in the class sending text messages on… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 