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I remember when I first started my mathematics teaching career, one of my supervisors said in a meeting of teaching staff: You are all English teachers. This was a defining moment for me. Since then, and after a lot of thinking about it, I felt that every educational situation is about much more than the [...]

Most higher education institutions do not keep attendance records. A recent study on attendance by University of Western Australia [link no longer available] in universities shows, not surprisingly, that those who turn up are more likely to perform better academically than those who do not. Universities, preoccupied with selecting students by cognitive ability, should attend [...]

If you are math-phobic, this would be a scary computer virus. The article is from f-secure.com: Infected CD-ROM Disks In Circulation. Two separate cases, in which a file originating from a CD-ROM disk had caused a virus infection, were discovered in October and November. In both cases, the involved disks were globally distributed shareware collections. [...]

This article from the LA Times A diploma’s simple math [link no longer available] makes a very good point: Students are too often promoted even when they didn’t understand the reading or math lessons from the year before. Not only do they fall further and further behind, until they hit a wall called algebra, but [...]

There was some very interesting stuff that came out of O’Reilly’s recent ETech Emerging Technology Conference. For educators, one of the important concepts in the conference is the “Attention Economy”. There is this realisation that the gadget providers may have shot themselves in the foot. The average attention span of teenagers is something akin to [...]

Today is Pi Day, celebrated by odd mathematicians on 3.14 (Mar 14th). If you want to really get carried away, have a party at 1:59. Or not. Pi has been calculated to millions of decimal places. Here’s the first few… 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197… Have a good day. Update: It seems that the longest URL (as claimed) no [...]

Actually, this list is not a Singapore-wide list. It is drawn from the “Top 20 Hot List” in my institution’s library. So the readership is basically 17 to 20 year-olds and then 35 to 60 year-olds. The list is based on the highest number of loans transacted for lifestyle lending, lifestyle fiction & lifestyle AV [...]

Myspace was the #2 most popular search engine term in the last 48 hours. Myspace is a “place for friends”. It is that sense of community and sharing that makes Myspace engaging and entertaining. Some of the Flash videos in there: Out of control hamster Classroom Support our troops, I hope they are not all [...]

“Weaving the Web into Teaching and Learning” Cunningham, C and Billingsly, M © 2006 Pearson Summary Review I’m not going to write much about this book because basically, I was not impressed. The problems: The book is disorganised – it is neither a coherent treatise on Web design nor on teaching and learning. It mixes [...]

An important aspect of e-learning is that the learner should be aware of what will – and will not – happen. Since it is still very new to people, there are a lot of misconceptions about what will happen. I was looking at the Discovery Channel forum just now and one user asked why there [...]