http://qpr.ca/blog what you see is what you get Sun, 24 Jan 2010 06:16:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Stephen Downes endorses Hillary Clinton's recent comments on internet freedom. I especially appreciate his reminder that the value of the internet arises from the participation of all of us, both individually as users and contributors of content, and collectively through the publicly funded research which made it all possible http://qpr.ca/blog/2010/01/23/internet-freedom-stephens-web-by-stephen-downes/ Scott Leslie may be on the right track with another 1/4-baked idea - OER “virtual reference librarian” at EdTechPost, but I suspect that it may be less with the idea itself than with the doubt he expresses as follows: <<Is “discoverability” even actually the problem with resources getting reused, or is ... http://qpr.ca/blog/2010/01/09/online-educational-resources/ This story speaks for itself. http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/12/10/more-copyright-irony/ It is always interesting when a probability question produces a counter-intuitive result, and the following "glimpse a heart" question is a wonderful example of that:- Andy and Barb are a couple at a casino, gambling on getting two aces in a pair dealt face down from a (well-shuffled) standard deck of ... http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/11/21/have-a-heart/ hardproblemsmovie.com is the website of a documentary made about the US team in the 2006 International Math Olympiad. << Although American students on the whole rank well behind many countries in mathematics, American math Olympiad teams regularly finish among the top teams. While aiming to inspire and entertain, Hard Problems provides an ... http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/11/20/hard-problems/ From the MathForum newsletter: << David Crockett Johnson was perhaps most famous for his children's book Harold and the Purple Crayon. From 1965 until his death in 1975, Crockett Johnson painted over 100 works relating to mathematics and mathematical physics. Of these paintings, eighty are found in ... http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/11/20/mathematical-paintings/ BBC NEWS | Special Reports | Free market flawed, says survey. http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/11/09/interesting-poll-results/ A couple of recent additions to the arsenal of reasons for promoting mathematics education are this recent article by Ian Stewart in the UK Telegraph and the collection of 'Math Matters - Apply It' posters developed by SIAM (the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics). http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/11/06/why-math/ The Stanford Study of Writing provides a welcome counterpoint to some of the nonsense that has been put about regarding impact of the internet on literacy. http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/11/06/stanford-study-of-writing/ Stephen Downes points to Chad Adelman posting on Crossing the Finish Line - a recent book about university graduation rates by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos & Michael S. McPherson. I haven't read the book but am suspicious of any attempt to draw conclusions about social policy from statistical ... http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/11/06/crossing-the-finish-line/ Media Democracy Day Vancouver - November 7, 2009 | Media Democracy Day. http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/11/03/media-democracy-day-vancouver-november-7-2009-media-democracy-day/ The Back Page article by Joseph Ganem in this month's APS News suggests that nominal content and student capability outcomes in US high school mathematics are moving in opposite directions - and attributes this largely to attempts to introduce abstract topics before the students are ready. http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/11/01/a-widening-gap/ This year's Blog Action Day is devoted to the theme of Climate Change and an understanding of mathematics is certainly essential for anyone involved in making making decisions about how to respond to this issue (which in a democracy is presumably all of us). The choice of Math and Climate as ... http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/10/15/blog-action-day/ Since my institution has started using WPMu for faculty and departmental websites I had better have a look at this from bavatuesdays (which came to me  via Stephen Downes). http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/10/14/faq-for-universities-interested-in-wpmu/ xkcd - A Webcomic - Locke and Demosthenes. http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/10/08/xkcd-a-webcomic-locke-and-demosthenes/ Inventing cute mnemonics is fun, and the process of inventing and checking them may help reinforce the definitions, but beyond that they really are useless - and I believe they do more harm than good when people actually try to use them. It takes much more time (and mental effort) to ... http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/10/05/how-to-remember-trig-ratios/ Recently Facebook has been running very slow for me and even just hanging completely on page reload. I wasted a lot of time trying things within Facebook and after reading of many others with similar problems was even considered abandoning Firefox as my preferred browser, but as soon as I ... http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/09/28/facebook-problems-caused-by-skype-firefox-extension/ This interview with a recent convert to teaching math using interactive white boards includes a lot of good ideas for using the computer display but  leaves me wondering what the IWB adds over what could be done with a tablet PC and projector. One weakness of the WB is that it ... http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/09/21/teaching-math-using-interactive-white-boards/ Well I have finally got around to putting in my views at 8:50pm in Vancouver - which is still 10 minutes before midnight in Ottawa so should be within the 48 hour extension that was announced on the Copyright Consultations website on Sunday. Here are my thoughts: Fundamental Principles The safety and security ... http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/09/15/copyright-consultations/ I have always been a bit intimidated by bloggers' talk of "Trackback" and "Pingback", and am still unsure of whether they really do anything that isn't just as easy to do "by hand". I recently came across a Tutorial written a couple of years ago by Teli Adlam which helped ... http://qpr.ca/blog/2009/08/27/wordpress-trackback-tutorial/