Life notes

How lectures help my understanding

Oct 30th

Posted by MariaDroujkova in Life notes

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Richard Hake wrote today:

It is 40 years since the first publication of Donald Bligh’s classic work “What’s the Use of Lectures?” (London, Bligh, 1971). It was a devastating critique, based on thorough empirical research, of the use of the lecture as the main method of teaching in higher education. It had been established that the only educational function lectures were capable of achieving was the transmission of factual information, and even then they were no better than other methods, and lecturers wildly overestimated the amount of information students were capable of remembering.

I use lectures to get a holistic representation of the lecturer. The voice, the style, mannerisms – everything! For some strange reasons, I understand texts and other media of people I’ve seen live much, much better than just texts. Because of this effect, I try to catch presentations by people whose books or articles I frequently read. Recordings work for the same purpose; interacting, such as asking a question in person, works significantly better. That’s why I always recommend my kid to approach any presenter after the presentation and ask something significant.
This may explain the popularity of webinars or YouTube videos of popular book authors, for example, the Future of Education series. I think people are intuitively trying to achieve this bonus to understanding books!
It’s not clear how many minutes of a lecture (and how many conversations) one needs to achieve this effect. Speaking for myself, about 15 minutes of a lecture and a five-minute live exchange provide a good start for me. I strongly prefer longer live interactions (hours) with people with whom I collaborate, for example, to write an article together. Though I do collaborate with people I’ve never seen and heard, too.
Here is a quick webcam video of me reading a few sentences from this post – see if it helps to understand where I am coming from…

Example spaces and the hedonic change

Oct 21st

Posted by MariaDroujkova in Life notes

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I think about instructional design as an art. So its rules must be open and few, to allow emerging systems. One of the top rules is The Rule of Many – namely, “The Harvard rule of three” since three is many. Any math entity children experience needs an example space of three or more things, some of them made by children.

For example, if you are offering kids operations, don’t just stop at addition – show several different ones and invite kids to make up their own. Exponentiation is fun – here’s a hands-on example of it: http://youtu.be/TR_8SDNQ0ks

I just read a blog post by Seth Roberts illustrating the importance of The Rule of Many.  Seth writes:

The Willat Effect is the hedonic change caused by side-by-side comparison of similar things. Your hedonic response to the things compared (e.g., two or more dark chocolates) expands in both directions. The “better” things become more pleasant and the “worse” things become less pleasant. In my experience, it’s a big change, easy to notice.

I discovered the Willat Effect when my friend Carl Willat offered me five different limoncellos side by side. Knowing that he likes it, his friends had given them to him. Perhaps three were homemade, two store-bought. I’d had plenty of limoncello before that, but always one version at a time. Within seconds of tasting the five versions side by side, I came to like two of them (with more complex flavors) more than the rest. One or two of them I started to dislike. When you put two similar things next to each other, of course you see their differences more clearly. What’s impressive is the hedonic change.

I sent this post to Dor Abrahamson, who recommended an article that indicates “connoisseurship” may be more complex: Learning Concepts and Categories: Is Spacing the ‘‘Enemy of Induction’’? by Nate Kornell and Robert A. Bjork

ABSTRACT—Inductive learning—that is, learning a new concept or category by observing exemplars—happens constantly, for example, when a baby learns a new word or a doctor classifies x-rays. What influence does the spacing of exemplars have on induction? Compared with massing, spacing enhances long-term recall, but we expected spacing to hamper induction by making the commonalities that define a concept or category less apparent. We asked participants to study multiple paintings by different artists, with a given artist’s paintings presented consecutively (massed) or interleaved with other artists’ paintings (spaced). We then tested induction by asking participants to indicate which studied artist (Experiments 1a and 1b) or whether any studied artist (Experiment 2) painted each of a series of new paintings. Surprisingly, induction profited from spacing, even though massing apparently created a sense of fluent learning: Participants rated massing as more effective than spacing, even after their own test performance had demonstrated the opposite.

Kornell.Bjork.2008a

There is probably a flow channel between massing and spacing, but it’s not clear what features of learning this particular balance involves. It can be noticing similarities vs. differences, or inductive vs. deductive thinking, or more esoteric balances within emotional and beauty responses (“the hedonic”).

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How I imagine change

Oct 19th

Posted by MariaDroujkova in Life notes

4 comments

The discussions, collaborations and collective actions aimed at change are continuing to increase in intensity, depth and scope. It makes me want to clarify how I imagine change. In my mind, it’s a two-step process.

Step 1. Deep inside, say good-bye and get detached from the system you want to replace. Withdraw creative and social currencies such as attention from it.

  • “One who should inspire and lead must be defended from traveling with the souls of others.” So, progressors need to share a “magic circle” such as a game (D&D?), abstract math, spiritual practice (40 days in a desert?) or a sci-fi universe (Babylon V?). Their third place has to be sufficiently out-of-this-world.
  • “Scales, times and places are declared largely irrelevant.” It matters little anymore if the old system involves millions of people, has been going on for decades and is happening where one lives. This makes it somewhat easier to be brave.
  • “Don’t seek legitimacy from dominant institutions.” We can seek resources from them, if it does not mess up the emergent economy of the new systems. Just don’t make that grant from an old system one of the main promotion points.
  • “Reject the act of labor required for everyday production.” Well, not all of it – don’t starve – but a lot of labor should go into creating new systems rather than participating in the old ones.
  • “Nothing is created until something is destroyed.” The destruction here is purely informational. Shift attention to new systems, and stop caring for and discussing the old ones. Attention is an incredibly strong currency. Criticizing a system only makes it stronger, by investing the attention currency into it.
  • “Don’t equate the detachment with disappearance.” Be visible and welcoming to people participating in any system, especially during Step 2. As an aside, this increases the personal safety, since it’s harder “to disappear” visible people.

Step 2. Build.

  • “Tell me, do you stand up and speak out when you encounter a moment of unexpected joy, warmth, beauty or compassion in your life?” Be a support activist for good people. Pay attention (place the attention currency) in new systems, and spread the word.
  • “Don Quijote didn’t ship.” Take on tasks that can finish successfully and quickly. Don’t discuss redoing all k-20 curriculum “come the revolution” – help a next door family appreciate a math topic, today, and share the know-how with colleagues.
  • “Think globally, act locally.” Make working prototypes that work well and grow. This means making a lot of prototypes that don’t work or don’t grow, and discarding them quickly.
  • “Ragtag bunch of misfits” is a trope about unlikely heroes winning the day. It’s heartening to believe it.
  • “Loving one another in the context of Perl.” Don’t fight within the bunch, just because fighting big old systems is too frustrating and hopeless. Actually, don’t fight, love. In the context of the new systems.
  • “Do small things with great love.” Because new systems will be small at first. Love is the engine of growth. Don’t let that love stand in the way of discarding prototypes as needed. It has to be a non-attachment love.
  • “Unlimited self-generated morale.” As well as other self-generated and emergent entities: DIY structures and sustainable economies. Collaborations within networks are fine, but dependencies on the systems being replaced are problematic.

When in this process do we fight the old systems? In my picture, never: the new systems just recruit and grow until they are as strong as necessary. Old systems can then die from the lack of recruits, continue to support those who love them, or evolve into something new. It’s none of my business what they do. The only type of fighting I support is the immediate defense of projects from hostile takeovers. This is, for example, the tactic of homeschoolers. Homeschooling, the second-fastest growing education system, normally pays little attention to school systems. But news of any action that would restrict homeschooling freedom spreads through the networks within hours, and meets a very strong response that is usually enough to prevent it. Online education, currently the fastest growing method, does not directly fight any old systems either. It just grows by hundreds or thousands of percents a year.

So:

  1. Let go of old systems, in the heart and in the mind
  2. Build new systems
  3. …
  4. WIN!
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Curriculum as a platform

Oct 16th

Posted by MariaDroujkova in Life notes

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I spent a good part of this weekend reading and talking about discussions of Steve Yegge’s escaped internal letter to his colleagues at Google, called “Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant.” You can find one of the discussions here, for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876 It has been spreading in programmers’ circles.

It provoked a revelation for me – words and images I can use to explain what my work is all about. Natural Math motto: “Make math your own, to make your own math” means curriculum as a platform, rather than a product. The platform has curated content created with an open API, so to speak. The community of practice co-producing the system needs a flat structure – a rather distributed, fractal network.

Features of curriculum as a platform:

  • Materials are extensible, so users – students, study groups, developers – change them continuously
  • User groups are peer-to-peer partnerships or co-ops, helping everybody to contribute
  • Contributions are transparent, acknowledged, honored and commented upon
  • Groups have tools for sustaining the flow by tracking individual tasks, time, and progress, possibly in playful ways
  • Tracking tools help creative, social and monetary economies of the system to stay sustainable
  • The platform has starter high-quality content: “killer apps” created on the platform
  • Ways to contribute are simple, open and creative: neither rocket science, nor worksheets
  • With special tools, users curate the content based on shared values within user groups: they make collections, distill most useful parts, sort, and tag

For example, we are building “Moebius Noodles” as a platform for advanced young math. During the crowd-funding campaign in September, we announced “Moebius Noodles” as an extensible, live and open system. This invited a very heartening stream of content offers, both from excellent veteran educators and authors, and from parents who wanted to share, for the first time, what they are doing with their kids. I consider this fact an early proof of concept. I can’t wait to see the system in action.

Apple Math at Problem of the Month

Oct 14th

Posted by MariaDroujkova in Life notes

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First of all, if you have a math circle or club, submit ideas to Problem of the Month by emailing David Auckly auckly@msri.org

Also, if you would like to discuss the program with other math circle leaders, let me know on Skype (maria_droujkova) and I will add you to the discussion group.

The first Problem of the Month set features an “apple math” problem from our Natural Math club – estimating the number of cuts for shapes.

Yesterday after the club, I found this unsigned haiku on my fridge. I love it! Thank you, Anonymous!

Maria’s kitchen
Small hands slice the air and grasp
Apples feed the mind

A photo of small hands, as kids look at a prism Kaya brought for “Show and Tell” and figure out the number of slices it takes to make a prism out of an apple: http://www.flickr.com/photos/26208371@N06/6240656492/in/photostream

David writes:

Howdy!

I’m writing to introduce a new NAMC program called Problem of the Month.

We are trying to increase communication between math circles around the
world.
We are looking for groups of people or math circles to submit problems.

Every month we will publish a short collection of these problems. These
problems will often be suitable for group work or math circle sessions.

We will then collect and publish solutions to the problems. Solutions can
include pictures of interesting models, more questions, whatever seems
appropriate. People can discuss the problems and solutions.

These problem sets will often be suitable for use as a math circle
lesson.
You can read more about the Problem of the Month at

https://www.mathcircles.org/content/problem-month

The first problem of the month is a good excuse to cut up some apples and
carve some pumpkins. Thus it could be a wonderful math circle activity for
the Fall. You can create math and healthy snacks at the same time.

********************************************************************************
Look at this set at

https://www.mathcircles.org/content/problem-month-october-2011-fruit-cutting
********************************************************************************

You will be able to find all the Problems of the Month by searching for
Problems of the Month in the problem set section of the NAMC website:

https://www.mathcircles.org/content/problem-set-list

We are constantly updating and improving the site. We welcome your
suggestions. New ways to print and search for problem sets will be coming
later this year.

Moebius Noodles Photo Game: Math hearts!

Oct 9th

Posted by MariaDroujkova in Life notes

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The newest submission for the Moebius Noodles photo game comes from Planetary Mom – and three Planetary kids! Check out the excellent activity write-up, with many fun details about family math. Cut the Knot! description of the double strip activity (high WOW factor) makes an appearance.

What to play with us? Take some photos with Moebius Noodles and post them on your blog or site or photo album, or just email them to me. Drop me a note if you post.



Games and revolutions

Oct 8th

Posted by MariaDroujkova in Life notes

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Games devoted to fluency rather than creative mastery or exegesis of the subject matter are tools of continuity. They attempt to maintain a firm, secure grip on the generational transmission of information. The grip is slipping in the digital, co-produced, post-book world.

Kids These Days (TM) write and otherwise author several orders of magnitude more than kids used to author.

Can drill games maintain the continuity? Is this one of the reasons it’s sort of hard to find financing for games that can teach kids to lead interesting lives through developing a subversive attitude toward the status quo?

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My favorite photo and thought of Steve Jobs

Oct 6th

Posted by MariaDroujkova in Life notes

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My rules for judging learning games

Oct 3rd

Posted by MariaDroujkova in Life notes

4 comments

This is a comment at a LinkedIn conversation in Game-Based Learning (a closed group).

I have a few criteria I use. If game designers get these things right, most of the time everything else is good, too.

  1. “No Jeopardy” rule: Game mechanics are intrinsically related to target concepts.
  2. “No drill” rule: Players can make better or worse strategic choices with engaging in-game consequences, rather than being told they answered a question wrong.
  3. “Conceptual reward” rule: Players understand something bigger, better and at a whole different conceptual level about the target concepts from the strategy of the game, than they do from the tactics (individual steps).

99% of learning game designers can’t manage to pass these criteria.

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My September

Sep 27th

Posted by MariaDroujkova in Life notes

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I just sent this update to the Symbiotic Learning list where we share what we do, monthly. Here is how my September looks like…

At Natural Math, we just successfully finished a crowd-funding campaign for Moebius Noodles, a Creative Commons project about young advanced math. We will be doing research and development on what helps parents of young kids. The response from the community was fantastic! We now need a system to manage all the volunteers we got for content development, data collection, modeling behind the social interactions, editing and so on. Info: http://www.naturalmath.com/blog/tag/moebius-noodles/

At Math Future, we are starting the third year of webinars after a summer break. Tomorrow is our 107th (not counting special events). Info: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/events

I will be in Europe for a P2PU meeting and Wolfram Computer-Based Math Summit at the beginning of November, and I am starting to prepare. Send your computer-based math wisdom my way and I will spread the word! http://computerbasedmath.org/

I finished two big curriculum dev projects, for NASA (high school STEM and arts) and Umigo (2-8yo math). These occupied me for most of this year. “Flat curriculum design” is now on my mind.

I am a Co-PI on a grant for a computer game, in the steampunk style I may add, for elementary math teachers, called PlatinuMath. It’s a lot of fun.

With another group, we just got a mini-grant from MSRI to support MathTrek, a photography and movement math game we play outdoors. A local videographer will be making a short web movie about it this weekend. I am excited! We are also half-done with the first draft of a book about it. http://naturalmath.wikispaces.com/MathTrekResearchTriangle

With a colleague, we are working on “Math Sieve” – a project that will be like Pandora Radio Music Genome, but for math problems. It’s very exciting, but in the early stages yet.

So, it all comes together as:
- Creating content that is lacking and aggregating content from other creators
- Creating taxonomies, tagging and other “smart online curation” for the content
- Creating time, task and communication management systems for users of the taxonomies, including gamification

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