John Resig, the creator of jQuery made an announcement that he will be joining Khan Academy as the Dean of Open Source and head of JavaScript development. He previously worked at the Mozilla Corporation.

This is really great news for the Khan Academy and also for the whole field of education technology. I hope this move motivates other geeks out there to join and revolutionize the field of education. Also checkout the discussion happening on hacker news.

Lessons from a serial entrepreneur.

Yesterday we made upgrades to the basic architecture of Ednode to make site more faster. We also made UI look better with -

A better default avatar for the users

If you haven't signed up for the Ednode . Do so immediately! Connect with people having similar interest, have great conversations and choose to help other people by selecting yourself as a mentor.

And if you have already, please give your feedback by clicking the little feedback button in the left on Ednode.com or just click - http://ednode.idea.informer.com/

We will continue to make improvements as we get more user feedback.

Happy EdNoding! And Don't forget to drop a message on my bulletin while enjoying the great weather!

As many of you might have heard, there are some troubles with Amazon EC2 has brought down many websites such as quora, foursquare, reddit etc. as reported by thenextweb.

This brings a lot of questions to be answered. Oh wait, quora is down so no more question and answer!

This article in the New York Times explains how a curriculum created by John Mighton, "Jump Math," is being used by teachers in England and Canada to teach math. The idea is to break each mathematical step into micro steps. In the words of Mighton - "No step is too small to ignore. Math is like a ladder. If you miss a step, sometimes you can’t go on. And then you start losing your confidence and then the hierarchies develop. It’s all interconnected.”

After the great breakfast at a place in front of our hotel this morning, Jo and I headed towards our poster session (which we thought was on a Tuesday afternoon, surprise!). The poster session went really well and people were really interested in talking about the iPad reading apps and many people working in the field of iPad development and researchers trying to find ways to introduce iPads in learning programs showed their interest. We were also able to attract peoples attention to our poster due to innovative iPad format poster designed by Jo (an iposter!).

Overall we had a great discussion with people who visited. And it made me think that this is the good time to venture into the ipad app development and research.

I attended this session in the morning but there was no internet to live blog. Before the session I had no idea what homeschooling is but by the end of the session, I came out with a good understanding of what it is and was very intrigued by the concept. The presenters were really pressing in support of homeschooling and one of their key points was that there is literally no statistical or research evidence other than rhetorical about why homeschooling does not work. I will be very interested in learning more about this and will go through the papers but If anyone know about any other good resource to learn about homeschooling please let me know.

Here are some of my notes from the session -

Dean of SUNY school of education is the chair

On average homeschool students are scoring above average

what about socialization? social emotional and psychological development

home educated students are doing better in these terms

how about adults?
they are doing good as adults too

I just completed reading the book "The Pragmatic Programmer." I came to know about this book from this stackoverflow thread.

It's a nicely written book from Andrew Thomas and David Thompson.

The main take away for me was the number of ways in which a programmer can go wrong and how cautiously we should be while writing our code. While the book is mostly written from the perspetive of the desktop software, I think many principles stated in the book still hold for web projects. Here is what I think are the three most important pieces of advice from the book,

As a whole, the book has been really helpful and I have already found myself using some of the concepts while coding.

I am at a NLP talk in the CS department.
The topic is - "New Approaches to Evaluation in Topic Models"

Here is the abstract:

Topic models provide a useful method for describing the contents of large text collections. In practice, however, models often combine semantically unrelated terms or hide meaningful variability. If they are noticed, such problems reduce user confidence. If they are not, they may actively mislead users. In this talk I will present several evaluation methods that improve our ability to detect bad topics and better characterize the structure of good topics. In addition I will demonstrate how to apply Bayesian model checking techniques to provide the equivalent of confidence intervals for topic models. Finally I will present a new model that specifically tries to avoid semantic mismatch.

I recently came across this HTML5 Video Framework.

It allows you to embed maps, Twitter feeds and other resources at certain points in the video. They have a fascinating demo video on the home page. I think this has a lot of potential in terms of making videos more understandable and as they say, this helps video and the web play nicely together.