BlogDale

How is ICT changing lives? Sure, the technology and all that it gives us is great. It makes things easier and gives accessibilty to more things, in the way that things that used to be hard are now easy. But that’s always been the case - technology’s always made things easier and that’s how we’ve advanced.

There’s a dimension, though, to ICT that I had been considering recently. It’s given us something more than just making things easier; it’s allowing us to do things we never could do before. A conference call between continents was never possible until recently; I’d never spoken to someone in another timezone but now I have a Skype contact list that includes people from all over. And this is getting to my point - that the technological growth is now not as important as the network growth, we’re now in a position where the growth is that of the organic network of people and their contacts. This is how there is now an explosion in the spread of human knowledge, and the potential for more is huge. Read the rest of this entry »

From Pito’s blog, I just found this. It’s a ranking of all the words in the English language, in their order of use. Who’d have thought that “componential” was 70542nd in popularity of use? I use it every day (he lied).

For a guy who used to read the dictionary as a kid (I still do on quiet days) this is a godsend (33279). Anyone having the sense of discovery (3323) to find out what a new word means will clearly (637) enjoy this site.

The development of children’s mathematical symbology and their use of language in describing and coming to terms with mathematical abstraction in early years is discussed in this research from Elisabeth Carruthers and Maulfry Worthington of the Children’s Mathematics Network.

the essential reason for teachers to encourage children to represent their mathematical understanding on paper, in their own terms, is that children will come to understand the abstract symbolism of mathematics at a deep level.

Nye sings a lullaby to his sister most nights.  (This is just a cheap way of showing that I’ve included a podcast).