Another simple noise generation web-app that can help you drown out background noise for studying. In addition to offering white, pink, and brown noise, simplynoise.com also has rain and nature sounds. Great for a doc student who needs to focus at work, a coffee shop, or at home!

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SimplyNoise – The Best Free White Noise Generator on the Internet.
Thousands of people from around the world use SimplyNoise to block distractions, enhance privacy, aid sleep, mask Tinnitus, and melt away stress. The benefits of color noise have been utilized in clin…

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Just did a quick search for book scanners and found this really great DIY scanning project.

This inspired a few questions in my mind: What if libraries could create their own eBooks for the materials in their collections? What if OCR and TTS could be used to make any print-based book immediately accessible to the visually impaired? What if books could be merged with interactive content in realtime, enhancing learning experience?

Think I'm going to make this my summer project.

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DIY Book Scanning | A forum dedicated to book scanning, open source, DIY digitization.
The most open, friendly DIY Book Scanning community on the ‘net. We’re making book scanning and digitization accessible to everyone.

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Now the handwaving I do at my computer will finally be sanctified  It's called the LEAP Motion system and it looks really cool. The SDK is being released early (December). Might an advanced hardware release date be in the future too? I sure hope so.

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A look inside Leap Motion, the 3D gesture control that’s like Kinect on steroids
Leap Motion’s not the household name Kinect is, but it should be — the company’s motion-tracking system is more powerful, more accurate, smaller, cheaper, and just more impressive. Leap CTO……

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This is perhaps the most ingenious use of the Wii Remote that I've seen to date. Would love to see this ported over to a cross platform language like Java.

I'm hoping to at least abstract the mathematical transforms needed to make this happen, with a long term goal of moving this over into a Java language that can make use of JOGL.

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In a New York Times article by Professor Andrew Hacker of Queens College, City University in New York, he argues that requiring a pure mathematical knowledge of our students is pulling an already rising educational tide over their heads.

When I first saw the article, I assumed I was going to read an op-ed on the inefficacy of math education and perhaps even a call to lower our already abysmal math standards. As a self-proclaimed math and science nerd, this hit a nerve.

Hacker, however, is very careful to qualify that math education is critical to the support and maintenance of developed societies (a point we agree on), but he worries that the strong focus we place on pure math is what causes problems.

In my dealings with students of varying backgrounds, I have experienced that a large gap often exists between theory and application for many students. Most students cannot see the immediate applicability of a theory or model unless given some real situation it would apply to.

On this I would also agree with Hacker, although I would also question whether or not all academic education then suffers from this exact same dilemma. What then makes a theoretical knowledge of other disciplines more accessible to students in ways that math is failing? Is the problem something we should be addressing earlier on in a students cognitive path (i.e. inquiry based learning)?

As far as the theoretical nature of math education, I still believe we have to establish from a very early outset the very formal grounding that mathematics is built upon.

Math is an extension of logic, and if we were to take its formalism from education, I worry the tide would only deepen in math as well as other subjects.

Instead of worrying about the formality of notations and pedagogy, we should be challenging students with real world projects and data sets that apply what they learn in meaningful ways and give them the satisfaction of accomplishment that regurgitation cannot provide.

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Is Algebra Necessary?
As American students wrestle with algebra, geometry and calculus — often losing that contest — the requirement of higher mathematics comes into question.

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Stumbled across this cool looking software today that let's you play around with the physics of the universe.

It's evidently only PC capable at the moment, but Steam is usually good about encouraging cross-platform software and games. Let's see this happen!

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Universe Sandbox
The Universe Sandbox trailer includes clips of: Saturn, its rings, and its moons; Andromeda approaching the Milky Way in 2.5 billion years; Our Solar System with an accurate portal of the asteroid bel…

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In this article on the Washington Post, former middle school teacher and founder of Mathalicious Karim Kai Ani dives into the great debate about the direction of online education, primarily by criticizing one of its arguably biggest advocates and figure heads: Salman Khan.

Khan is the founder of the now famous Khan Academy, a collection of over 3,000 videos on math and science topics. Khan was also recently featured in Time magazine.

Ani's perspective is that Khan is not doing anything new and in fact is doing it poorly; Ani believes that Khan is building an educational empire on shoddy pedagogical ground.

What do you think?

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Khan Academy: The hype and the reality
Khan Academy boasts almost 3,300 videos that have been viewed over 160 million times. That’s a heroic achievement. But, a mathematician says, there’s a problem: the videos aren’t very good.

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This new extension authored by Google for its Chrome browser is quickly becoming one of my favorites. The concept is simple: load a webpage and the Language Immersion for Chrome extension translates it to the degree of your choosing — beginner to fluent — and you can learn a language immersively while you browse. Just as a foreword, I speak German so my analysis here is primarily based on using this tool between German-English.

Some things I love about this feature include the options to set your level of difficulty as well as the pronunciation of translated text on a mouseover. The TTS feature is of particular merit because not only are the Google voices top quality, they've actually slowed them down a bit within Google Translate ostensibly for exactly the purpose of learning.

That said, Google is the brand of beta, and there are still a few kinks to work out here. Some of these kinks lie specifically with Google Translate as a product, while others are plugin specific.

While I'm slowly starting to find Translate's translations a bit more realistic, they are still far from perfect. I still notice genders and cases getting mixed up, and of course this would be unapparent to any non-native speaker. The translated syntax also can get messy on anything other than "fluent," and that is in part just because English uses a subject, verb, object construction fairly rigidly, whereas other languages have either a different structure or are more flexible in this respect. This can lead to misplaced verbs and can alter subject-verb agreement. In German, for example, this plugin is unlikely to teach you that sentence structures like indirect object, verb, subject are common and perfectly legal, e.g. Er hat mir ein iPhone verschenkt = Mir hat er ein iPhone verschenkt.

Within the plugin itself, the mouseover feature for pronunciation is great, however the TTS voice for some reason rather than relying on the user selected language output tries to determine the language semantically. So if the voice runs across a word that exists in another language or a name that is clearly of a different nationality, it switches to the voice of that language for the rest of the excerpt. It leads to some odd results when a Spanish voice engine is trying to read German.

Aside from my minor grievances, this tool has a lot of potential for anyone looking for a cost free (take that Rosetta Stone!) way to pick up some new vocabulary in a new language.

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The joint effort between MIT and Harvard called edX was announced today. It is going to be a service dedicated to providing high calibre educational content for students around the world. Students who can show a significant level of mastery will be awarded a certificate from edX, although it will not bear the names of either institution.

This is not the first post-secondary foray into online services like edX. Similar startups with other Ivy Leagues in the early 2000s folded because the projects became too costly to produce and maintain.

Whatever edX's fate may be, I'm chomping at the bit to give it a try.

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MIT news
Joint partnership builds on MITx and Harvard distance learning; aims to benefit campus-based education and beyond.

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Great series of microlectures by the same guys who bring us TED talks. I've always been a fan of the TED lecture: it's short, concise, and it holds the viewer's attention for just the right amount of time.

This begs the question (for me) if this format could work for undergraduate lesson design, treating information as plugins of a bigger framework. The more self-contained the plugin, the more reasonable it is to reintroduce it for review and motivation of new ideas.

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Lessons Worth Sharing
Use engaging videos on TED-Ed to create customized lessons. You can use, tweak, or completely redo any lesson featured on TED-Ed, or create lessons from scratch based on any video from YouTube.

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