Numbers of No Escape

Off-topic. We are into maths for this post. Gotten this URL from Weisiong. Extracting the interesting beginning:

Start with any natural number, such as 69534891. Count the number of even digits, the number of odd digits, and the total number of digits. In this case, there are three evens, five odds, and a total of eight digits. Use these three numbers as digits to form a new number: 358.
Repeat the steps with the new number, counting evens, odds, and the total number of digits. You get 123. If you perform the same set of operations on 123, you get 123 again.
Try another number: 141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974. Counting 0 as even, there are 24 evens, 33 odds, and 57 digits in total. Applying the process to 243357 gives 246, then 303, then 123.
In fact, no matter what number you start with, this iterative process always leads to 123.
Michael W. Ecker describes the number 123 as a “mathemagical black hole” with respect to this particular process. “Once you hit 123, you never get out,” he says, “just as reaching a black hole of physics implies no escape.”

The full article goes here, enjoy 🙂

Recognising Learning: Educational and pedagogic issues in e-Portfolios

Graham Attwell shared the abovementioned paper which he is going to present at a conference.

Abstract:
The paper, entitled Recognising Learning: Educational and pedagogic issues in e-Portfolios, is based on developing and implementing e-portfolios in three different European projects. It is argued that insufficient attention has been paid to the pedagogy of e-portfolio development and that existing applications and implementations tend to be overly dominated by the requirements of assessment. The paper looks at the different pedagogic processes involved in the development of an e-portfolio. It considers the competences required for developing and maintaining an e-portfolio. The final section considers the challenges in developing e-portfolio applications.