An interesting quote, and accurate, in my opinion (and not just because I'm now more interested in math ed than math research; I've observed it throughout my career).

" Why don't mathematicians from universities and industry belong in math education? The first reason is that it is self-destructive. The quickest way to be relegated to the intellectual dustbin in the mathematics departments of most research universities today is to demonstrate a continuing interest in primary or secondary mathematics education. Colleagues smile tolerantly to one another in the same way family members do when grandpa dribbles his soup down his shirt. Math education is certainly an acceptable form of retiring as a mathematician, like university administration (unacceptable forms being the stock market, EST, or a mid-life love affair). But you don't do good research and think seriously about education. "

Herbert Clemens, Is There a Role for Mathematicians in Math Education? Notices of the American Math Association, Vol. 36, 1989, p 545 - 544.

It's been quite a while since I last blogged here - a few months or so. Mainly because for the last month or so, I've been preoccupied with another Flash learning widget, or rather a pair of them and their accompanying webpages. But also, to a large extent, because I just haven't seen all that much worth blogging about recently.

There's a lull in the production of new ideas in online education, and people seem to be focussed on trying to make their earlier ideas work. More theoretical discussions about learning objects (we're now into the "metadata-ing the metadata" phase), yet very little on how to design them. There have been a few bits on "just where are the learning objects?" I've been reading educational psychology and math ed stuff, trying to see how it fits into math design and my general philosophy of what's important in education. I was pointed to some useful work by Richard Mayer, particularly Multimedia Learning, which does seem relevant to designing LOs, though he doesn't deal with interactivity as such - does anyone, I wonder? (I mean student-content interactivity, not student-student interactivity or content navigation, both of which have been well covered.)

Nothing much else in Academia has piqued my interest enough recently to write about it - either there really isn't much new happening or I've become jaded. I do have a "Bloggit" folder of links etc. that I collected, but most of them are things I could blog about if I really wanted to keep my posting rate up, not things I feel impelled to think at length about, much less write about.

Building math widgets and trying to figure out how to make them cognitively and pedagogically effective is more fun than blogging - at least for the moment.