I just submitted my abstract for the 2011 Joint Mathematics Meetings to be held January 6–9 in New Orleans. I found a contributed paper session that was right up my alley: "Harnessing Mobile Communication Devices and Online Communication Tools for Mathematics Education."

Mashups for course websites with Yahoo! Pipes

Abstract: RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you ask. Many websites publish a rich set of RSS feeds, which can be processed by other websites as a form of syndicated content. But the regular structure of RSS as an XML application means that feeds can be easily edited (``munged'') and combined (``mashed up''). Programming libraries exist for processing feeds, but Yahoo! Pipes makes this easy with a graphical user interface and no coding. We will discuss methods and applications of RSS feeds which might be suitable for a course website---for instance, combining feeds from SlideShare and scribd and publishing them to Facebook, or publishing your office hours on your blog automatically.

I'm also an editor for the MAA's Joint Mathematics Meeting Wiki, and one of the twitter evangelists who will be tweeting at #JointMath.

In the recent issue of MAA Focus Ivars Peterson gets a look at Integral House, the home of James Stewart, aka the man who wrote the most popular calculus book in the world.

The house features sweeping curves (natch) and is custom even down to the door handles:

My friend and U of C classmate pointed out to me an interview in a recent issue of the Chicago Maroon with Paul Sally, Professor of Mathematics and mentor to generations of mathematicians and mathematics educators. He has a few good words about the practice.