Of course, I also emailed TED to suggest they improve their embedded player: their content *is* available as plain mp4 video after all.

I’m not sure I’m the one to fix the flash problem. Frankly, I post the TED videos because they are very easy to post and one if five creates an interesting conversation like this one. If it became one step harder I’d not do it.

But I do fully support the elimination of flash. I will take this up with TED and we will try to make this happen at a higher level.

But first tell me what the alternative would be: What type of embed code or plug in is better. It has to be simple, so a blogger can cut and paste it just like one does youtube videos and then it basically works in everybody’s computer.

Also keep in mind that the pencil and paper are merely tools to help students keep track while performing more complicated series of operations. The writing is not meant to teach at all as Wolfram suggests – it is merely a convenient set of tools. If you can come up with a computer program that allows students to express these intermediate steps and students can operate the computer much quicker than a pencil then that would be fantastic – it would be genuinely useful. Think about command line vs. GUI. For me the good thing about computer arithmetic games is that they exercise your memory as well as your arithmetic, but I would not expect many people to be able to do things like long division in their heads – for that they’d still need to express the intermediate results.

When posting video, especially when it’s Flash video, please post a link to the original video. I among a growing number of people who just deleted their Flash plugin. In most cases, this has no impact, as most sites now provide HTML5 content anyway.

Of course, using HTML5-friendly code in your post would be the best option, but at least give an outside link.

In this case I had to dig out your page HTML source code to find that the video comes from TED, then dig out the web page where I can play it from without Flash:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_math_with_computers.html

BTW, getting rid of the Flash plugin let to a very significant battery-life increase in my laptop. I can now use it for a full work day without recharging (as it happened this week when I forgot my AC charger at home when leaving for a client’s facility for a full day work).

IMO, the real teaching power comes from the students *teaching* the computer. Instead of teaching kids to use the ‘stdev’ function… you teach them what a standard deviation is, how it is useful, how to compute it, and then have them write their own function to compute it.
From that point they can just use the function and further explore / illuminate the properties.

The idea of just using Mathematica to solve algebra or calculus problems for you is not very useful for teaching. At least until after the students already understand what the program is actually doing at a conceptual level.

What he seems to be advocating here is doing bogus math by clicking and dragging sliders in a GUI. Someone would have had to program that, and he seems to imply that the programmers will be the ones “learning math” somehow. Let’s see – they’ll magically know math by doing some programming. Suuuure. Well, the click n’ drag group can design the bridges in Wolfram’s neighborhood. He completely avoids any mention of *how* humans are meant to learn math with computers. Personally I think they’re great for learning arithmetic – in the 1970s there were things like the “Speak and Math” and later some kid’s games like “Monkey Math” and I think those tools were very good for practicing arithmetic.

Wolfram seems to be advocating that people mindlessly use software like his brother’s Mathematica and so on. Personally I encounter too many people like that. Mathematica’s a good tool, but you need to understand math *before* you use it if you wish to use it effectively. Then there are other tools like Statistica which are more prone to abuse than Mathematica. People click buttons without understanding what they’re doing and they come up with 100% bullshit – worse still there are obviously so many innumerate people out there that the bullshit gets published! That is not mathematics, that is pseudo-mathematics. It’s every bit as bad as the “Bayesian Mania”. Bayes’ work was great stuff and I make use of it every few years, but there are tools out there being used by clueless people who make ridiculous claims in the mistaken belief that the claims must be true because they used a tool which mentioned Bayes.