Holidays…

Not that I publish a whole lot, but these days it’s even less. This is written on my iPod, in the sun, just before soccer time. Ahhhh…

How much is one million (giraffes)?

I just flipped through a book called “How much is a million” (and later found out- others exist with a similar name).
The point of the book(s) are to visualize to children how they can picture the size of a million objects of some sort.

My previous and current students and pupils more often than not amuse me with creativity and humor. Yesterday, a previous mathematics pupil of mine, Ola, seem to have fallen right into the trap of NOT being able to picture one million objects! I really hope he can prove me wrong so that all those mathematics lessons don’t turn out to have been in vein, and perhaps he will! He made a bet, claiming he can collect a million hand drawn pictures of giraffes in around two years time. At the moment of writing he has gotten a few thousand drawings, have published a few hundred and has almost six hundred days to collect them. Being the kind and useful teacher that I am (was) I have to help trying to promote his project in several ways:
- I force all my family and friends to send him giraffes
- I promote him on my twitter
- I write this blog and cross-post it to my other blogs and facebook

This is the giraffe I sent Ola

Other helpful tips for Ola:
- use the next year’s Earth hour for all that it’s worth
- I will also try to make all my new students next year draw giraffes of course… This year students faced a similar task, trying to draw a mathematics teacher the way they picture him (I say him, because around 95 % are male. The class thought was pretty strange, because in teacher education, it seems around 90 % are female!)
- How about trying to have giraffe drawing as an exercise in kindergardens, pre-school, primary school (and upper secondary schools and higher education!) all over the world?
- Publishing on the Internet is one thing (or rather, one TEDIOUS thing…), why not make a “Best of the giraffes” and turn it into a book? Or t-shirts… (Next project onemillionmousemats.com ?)
- Let people comment on eachothers drawings…
- Get interviews from those who made the bet
- Visit the Kristiansand Zoo for inspiration and giraffe info (this reminds me of Monkey news, from the Ricky Gervais show)
- Schedule interviews with Norwegian TV for children (Portveien 2, anyone?)
- Get permalinks, so people proudly can display “I’m a part of the onemilliongiraffes project!” on their blogs…
- Ask celebrities to send you their giraffes

So, head over to Onemilliongiraffes.com and upload/mms/send/mail your giraffe pictures! You can also follow the project on twitter. And while you are at it, you can listen to giraffe music on Spotify, or draw giraffes on Shidonni, that also will walk about and eat the food you draw for them…

*EDIT* Here’s one of several newspaper articles on his project: Aftenbladet.

iLearn2

Open publication – Free publishing – More technology

Embedding GeoGebra…

On my Norwegian mathematics blog, (on Blogspot.com) it was quite easy to embed a Java powered file made in GeoGebra by using GeoGebra’s built in “hosted Java archive” and the GeoGebra Upload Manager. However, I still can’t see how this can be done on WordPress, although I am sure it can! On blogspot, it looks like this: http://mattegreier.blogspot.com/2009/05/aritmetisk-middelverdi.html
Anyone with any further ideas on how to accomplish this on WordPress?

Where is the share?

Anything with the words geek and/or chart in the title is bound to be great. On the Geek Chart website, you can make your own chart that visualizes your sharing around the web. Insert your username on twitter, youtube etc., and embed the chart that shows your acticity on the respective sites. Nice one. Now, why does that visual work on blogspot and not on wordpress?

Oisteing’s Geek Chart

TweetStats :: for oisteing

This was a nice add-on to the array of twitter websites. On http://tweetstats.com/graphs/ you can see a graphic display on how often you have been twittering. Also, have a look at what times of the day you have been most active on the twitter arena. Nice! Thanks to @svendah for the tip.

My stats are here: http://tweetstats.com/graphs/oisteing

Let Live Search Do Your Algebra

Great idea from Lifehacker.com : Let Live Search do your algebra. I guess most of you are familiar with the fact that google search (even the search bar in Firefox) can do simple calculations and unit conversions. Microsoft’s latest effort goes to eleven though. It is capable of solving simple algebra problems. With symbols. So it’s one point for microsoft. Firefox and Google had thousands of points from before, but this means they are catching up

The Childrens’ machine

A small one for the kids this weekend. My daughter has reached the age of two, and it’s impossible to keep her from hacking away at my keyboard. We have yet to buy one of those small kids’ computers for learning letters and stuff – but this weekend I am installing CrazyLittleFingers. Basically it allows you remap the keyboard and taylor it to your kiddo’s needs (and it’s fathers’ needs…).

You must provide the kid yourself and download CrazyLittleFingers here: http://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?PHPSESSID=hon787djaqnnqrsthkjpflith5&topic=16131.0

Reference software

This is so hard. I am talking about committing yourself to a database of some sort, and this time it’s the reference database I am worrying about.
If you collect a lot of music or movies and catalog them extensively, you know what a drag it is when you figure you have chosen the wrong database or cataloging software. (So far I have been pleased with Mediamonkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com) for the music and it seems XBMC (http://www.xbmc.org) will do the trick for flipping through your movies with style. But I digress.
Now I want to catalog, sort and search my references, so what software should I commit to? I used to be an EndNote user as long as I got it for free, but no more. I had to look for free options (I AM the cheap researcher). First to come along was zotero (http://www.zotero.org), and believe me, it is still excellent. It is a Firefox add-on which allows you to add references from bookstores and article bases with ease. It then integrates with Word for easy use when referencing in your writing. The coming (now in beta) version includes sync to web, so that you have your references at hand at all times. Great. Converting from EndNote was a nightmare, but most of my thousands of references went along with the swap after some tinkering.
Then I got Word 2007, which had a built-in reference manager. This might have been the best option, but I found the managing capabilities a bit wanting.
Finally I have tried Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com/), a manager with a sync’ed software and web version, with capabilities to store and extract information from pdf-files.

But what to choose? This is almost a lifetime commitment (ok, it is not, but it would be nice if it was) so it’s important to chose right! Heeeelp….

Weekend before pi

Thanks, Ola, for this link.  Having endured a whole year of my mathematics teaching, you still seem rather obsessed with pi…! A fun video here, to round of the week before pi-day.