Welcome to my weblog - allow me to introduce myself. My name is Ruben Puentedura, and I'm the Founder and President of Hippasus, the consulting company that hosts the weblog you are reading. After teaching for eighteen years - six as a teaching fellow at Harvard, and twelve as a faculty member at Bennington College - and after directing the New Media Center at Bennington College for nine years, I decided it was time to try something new. Hence - Hippasus - a consulting company designed to make the best use of the experience I garnered via teaching, administration, and research in the physical, biological, and social sciences, and to bring together some of the most interesting minds I have encountered in those years.
From here on, I will let Hippasus speak for itself. This weblog is designed to continue the research I have carried out over the years in the theories and practice of pedagogy, and to comment on the work done by others. I'll try to keep the tone more conversational than professorial - I've always preferred discussions in small groups to master lectures anyway. At any rate, once again - welcome.
I am intrigued by the services and resources that you offer. I was wondering, for the moment, what the name of your company means, and how it relates to what you do.
Posted by: Nicholas T. Lasoff at July 16, 2003 2:15 PMHippasus of Metapontum was a Greek Pythagorean philosopher who discovered that the square root of two cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers (i.e., as a rational number). This discovery effectively transformed mathematical thought - it required the creation of a whole new class of numbers (the irrational numbers) in addition to the previously known integers and rational numbers. The name of the company honors those thinkers who, like Hippasus, transform an entire field with subtle discoveries and observations - this is the type of thinking that we hope to bring to education.
Posted by: Ruben at July 17, 2003 7:36 AM