> > Finally I saw that you were a Sage dev and evangelist and started > Mathrider after seeing that Sage went in the math research field instead > of the math education one. In my math department there is a believe that > "doing serious math stuff" is doing research in pure abstract math and > math education is some kind of subscience (is related with the "soft > social" sciences of education). I have been in only one Sage Days and > yes it was research focused: most of the problems were about > optimization of algorithms and so on, and I was the only one with a > educative problem (how to publish the TeXmacs + Sage off-line docs > created by students as Web Sage Notebooks), but people there were > willing to listen if the topic came out (even with my poor spoken > English). I don't think that the connector between education and > research in mathematics should be an "xor". In my grant I was telling my > educational oriented issues about Sage and Mathematics and I got it, so > I think that is a matter of being in the community and making efforts > about building the bridges, like you do. Hopefully future Sage Days will > have more people on both sides (education and research) making them. >
Just to comment on this, I would say that many of the people who use Sage for research are also very committed to making it better for education. William in particular has put in many, many hours improving things that almost certainly do not make computing L- functions of Abelian varieties easier! And there are many others. BUT you are very right that the funding mechanisms are not in ed's favor. This is because it is easy (relatively speaking) to get NSF/ others to fund making some state-of-the-art thing in a given field, but not at all so easy to get anyone to fund something that M*s already do quite well. Add to that the fact that most of the people who would be most passionate about the teaching aspects have heavy teaching loads and/or a weak computer science background, and the result is not surprising. Ted K. is probably quite unusual in coming at it from the CS side, and you can see it in that he can create something like MathRider! I couldn't imagine that in my wildest dreams. Most of the people I've talked to who really want to improve the ed side have some computer background, but not the expertise to do really amazing things. Jason G. and David J. are probably exceptions in this regard - and I'm really thankful for them! Also some of the grad students and undergrads who have worked on Sage have done quite remarkable things, though of course they don't have to teach a 3-3 (or higher) load yet ;) But I too hope for future things in this regard. See http://wiki.sagemath.org/dayscambridge2 for a tiny step in the direction you are suggesting, and thanks for your thoughts on it. - kcrisman --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-edu@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-edu+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
