Greetings all,

After several quiet weeks, it's my pleasure to share with you the product of  our internal development. It isn't - quite yet - a new tool. It is (we think!) a much more profound evolution. 

As you all know, our deep vision is to develop educational tools that help learners comprehend all the most difficult math, science and infolit skills they must learn. What we recognize, and must address, is that effective instruction and technological integration is a critical part of this equation. 

Greetings all,

Last December, we were excited to announce we received a grant from the Harbus Foundation, which supports the work of education, literacy and journalism nonprofits. The support Harbus provided to PLML was significant in that, in addition to funding, we gained assistance from a volunteer consulting team. 

 Greetings ipad-hypers and ipad-naysayers,

Today, Albert Liau and I wanted to bring you something a bit different. It would be hard to miss the talk about Apple's new iPad; and there has been a lot of positive spin about its game-changing potential.

Greetings, mathaholics and mathphobics,

At PLML, we're very lucky to have assistance from Nan Ding, a Graduate student at Harvard whose expertise is - surprise! - math.  She is sharing her insights as we develop our understanding and strategy around math, and helping us develop a system that we can use to identify critical math skills for teaching and learning. 

I asked her to break down two perspectives on what makes math hard to learn - an American perspective, and a Chinese perspective. Here's her response, which I think you'll find fascinating:

Greetings, digital and in-personable educators of future generations, 

This evening, I had the pleasure of attending the Harvard Ed School's Askwith Forum, "Classic College Meets Online Opportunities: Whither the Future of Higher Education?"

Greetings, multipliers!

We invite you all to try out the Multiplication Tool, which represents the first in a series of  Math-related tools that we will be developing over the next several years. 

Greetings, knowledge-searches-and-sifters!

I wanted to let you know what we just released Boolify version 2.2, which brings some additional power to the engine.

Although the release was primarily focused on bugfixes, we also have added the ability to search additional content types (videos, blogs, books) and to utilize either strict or moderate filtering (keeping in mind that although unfiltered brings about the best range of results, Boolify is used primarily in schools). 

Greetings, confounded-cereal-buyers!

On the off-chance that you were unable to decide about what to do with the next hour, or the cereal to buy, I suggest you spend a bit of time watching a lecture by  Jonah Lehrer, which is a fine summary of the difficulty we humans have with decision-making.

Greetings, private citizens!

This post is a commentary addendum to a Slashdot note about a comment made by Mark Zuckerberg at the Crunchie Awards in San Francisco: 

"In the last five or six years, blogging has taken off in a huge way. People have really gotten comfortable sharing more information and different kinds but more openly and with more people," Zuckerberg said.