Monday, June 5, 2017

Be On the Watch!


I hardly have time anymore for all the excellent, polished math videos that are showing up these days. Hopefully, anyone reading this blog is already well-aware of these wonderful presenters: 

Infinite Series (from PBS)

A few others I’ll mention are:
Singing Banana from James Grime, well-known from Numberphile, but still also going strong on his own site (similarly, another Numberphile contributor, Matt Parker, has his own site for fun math at StandUpMaths).
Mind Your Decisions, Presh Talwalkar’s less fancy and more recreational site.
PatrickJMT and ProfRobBob, teachers with plenty of basic instructional videos.

Finally, this Pinterest site has links to tons more math-related videos of varying quality/interest:

With the rapidly-rising quality of such video presentations it makes one wonder exactly what the future holds for the role of live human teachers in the classroom! Like brick-and-mortar shopping, brick-and-mortar education likely has major changes coming.

We’ve advanced a long way since Khan Academy, which continues with its own evolving site (...and give Salmon Khan credit for early on recognizing/promoting the value of free, widely-distributed learning videos). Amazing to think of the youngsters (and adults) worldwide who weren't previously exposed to good schools, teachers, or textbooks, but now do potentially have 24/7 access to entertaining and instructional resources. Sometimes I think/fear we're in a race between fascism sweeping across the globe or good education (perhaps an antidote) sweeping across the globe!

[...As if math videos weren't time-consuming enough, there are also math audio podcasts, a handful of which I list in the right-hand column to this blog, but many more available. These are usually less instructional, but still covering topics or people of interest.
One for book-lovers, that I only recently discovered, though it's been around for quite awhile, is "New Books In Mathematics."]


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