Archive for March, 2006

The great math and reading experiment

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 […]

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s engagement, not attendance that improves performance

Most higher education institutions do not keep attendance records. A recent study on attendance by University of Western Australia [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 to […]

Read the rest of this entry »

High stakes viral math test

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. […]

Read the rest of this entry »

Click stream dating and the Attention Economy

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 […]

Read the rest of this entry »

Curriculum Webs - more homework needed

"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 […]

Read the rest of this entry »

TLAs - aka Singapore’s fetish with acronyms

I was staggered in my first months in Singapore. Almost everything becomes an acronym. On the first day in my job here, I had to try to figure what everyone was talking about, as the following flowed easily: PIE (Pan Island Expressway) ECE (Electronics and Computer Engineering) AET (Academic Excellence Team) HDB (Housing Development Board) […]

Read the rest of this entry »

New chapter - Money Math

I have said elsewhere in this blog that a lot of the mathematics that students are forced to do is of doubtful use in later life. And one of the most important kinds of mathematics, financial maths, is often left out of most academic math courses. So I figured I should put my math money […]

Read the rest of this entry »

Exam writer

It seems to me that getting students to write essays by hand in an examination situation, especially when they have all become used to writing using computers, is retrogressive. We need a device that is secure, reliable and cheap - and that allows students to type their examination answers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Full archive

See the blog sitemap for all previous articles.