Posts tagged commons
Math 2.0 at Knight News Challenge – please comment and vote
Nov 21st
The need to have a better “knowledge system” for aggregating and sharing news and information about math communities came up during many events and conversation. I summarized these ideas and submitted an application to Knight News Challenge for participatory media. They have been supporting worthy social media projects in the past, so we are in a good company there.
Please follow this link to rate the application and to leave comments.
There are many other interesting applications there, as well – please explore – though ours is the only science and math project applying.
The deadline for the final version of the application is December 1st. I very much hope to get editing suggestions until then!!!
Here is the full text of the application I submitted. I hope it may help those of you who are writing grants of any sort.
Math 2.0 Interactive Community News Map
Describe your project
Math 2.0 Interest Group is a diverse, international grassroots network of mathematicians, educators, and developers working on projects involving social media, online communities, and computer systems – as well as new approaches to math education. We started weekly online interviews with founders and leaders of mathematical communities in the summer of 2009, which are available at http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/events
While mathematics was once on the forefront of teaching with technology, with many innovative projects and ideas, it has been lagging since the mid-eighties. The integration of social media in mathematics education has been especially problematic. Few communities have created mathematically-rich social objects and most social platforms in use today do not support mathematical representations. There is still a challenge to easily produce mathematical notation online. Math has fallen behind other subjects in class-centered web 2.0 communities for children. There is an even larger lag in informal, recreational communities. Children’s mathematics remains very much confined to classes, homework, and standardized tests, or activities that closely imitate them. Most class-centered math communities are not sustainable and dissolve after the class ends. Some existing sustainable math-oriented communities are intellectually elitist and demographically exclusive.
The unique focus of the group is to address the issue described above by helping new and niche communities join forces and collaborate among themselves and with more established, larger communities. We aggregate math community news, especially recorded open and free live events with community leaders, from a particular point of view and with a particular explicit purpose. This purpose is inviting immediate collaboration, and collecting and disseminating information on the types of support communities need from the larger mathematics educator network. This focus is different from all other education media, and is a definite need in the field.
In the next few months, we plan to explicate and to visualize the rich data we, as a group, aggregated on the existing Math 2.0 communities. This project is centered on a crowd-sourced category and a tagging system for community news. In the first stage, for which we request the funding, we will closely work with member communities to define the initial categories and tags that describe them, their news items, and the essence of their social objects. Based on these data, we will build an interactive relational map of communities, news about their current projects and news about their collaborations. This project includes aggregating the software necessary for adding new communities and news items to the map. In the second stage, once the categories are defined and the system of adding tags and new items works smoothly, the tool will be opened to non-members, and will be made freely available for other communities.
How will your project improve the delivery of news and information to geographic communities?
A few mathematical communities operate purely online. Some are local with an online presence, such as math centers and math clubs that makes their materials available online, and host a discussion forum. Others support local chapters, groups or events, as well as global online projects and exchanges of social objects. By including geographic information in the tagging system, we will achieve several goals. First, it will be easier for prospective members to find local math-related communities open to participation and collaboration, which will promote their growth. Second, the rich data will situate local communities in the context of the global network of mathematicians and math educators, will make their news a part of larger stories, and will help similar communities find one another for collaboration. Third, this will encourage online and global communities to create, to support and to make more visible their local chapters and local events.
What unmet need does your proposal answer?
The math community tool we propose will help crowdsource rich descriptions and news that promote collaboration within and among mathematics communities. This need emerged from the activities of the Math 2.0 interest group, which has been doing this work “by hand” during the last year and a half. The main needs are overarching communication channels, news aggregation by categories authentic to math communities, and collaboration spaces.
How is your idea new?
There are multiple components that distinguish Math 2.0 Interest Group and the proposed interactive map tool for supporting its operations. The specific focus on community-building needs, such as news of successful uses of social media and communication platforms for math-rich projects, is unique in the field of mathematics education. The group is an open and inclusive community of practice, providing support to beginner community and project leaders, start-ups, and niche communities, yet including veteran educators and representatives of large, robust communities. The map tool will support, promote and explicate this openness, at the same time, unlike a directory, maintaining the strong focus on collaboration, co-production of content, and communication. Finally, the map tool will provide a directory based on categories that emerge from intensive, up-to-date qualitative research, crowdsourced by community members, of living communities and their daily happenings.
What will you have changed by the end of the project?
If one seeks participation or collaboration, surveying the landscape of existing mathematics and mathematics education communities currently takes individual searches of widely varying descriptions, joining communities that don’t make their discussions and news available to non-members, navigating within community structures to find right members for communication, and other labor-intensive tasks. News and valuable content that can benefit wide audiences stay within disjointed communities, because there are no accessible ways of finding appropriate target audiences. By the end of this project, some of these tasks will be accomplished with a click of a button, which will promote the growth of communities and collaboration among them. This will encourage generation of news, making content into social objects and sharing of news and content among communities. We will use snapshots of the community landscape, visualized by the map tool, to track changes in the ways communities use the system. We expect these changes to include the growth of existing small communities and the appearance of new ones. We also expect qualitative differences in the topology of collaborations among communities, viewed as a network, such as denser connections (mesh structures) that make information exchange more stable and efficient, or nodes with more connectors indicating larger inter-community partnerships.
Why are you the right person or team to complete this project?
The organizers of the Math 2.0 Interest Group have been surveying and annotating mathematical communities for a year and a half. The interactive map project we are proposing is a natural continuation of the activities of the group.
Among us, we have the skills of software developers, community managers, social science researchers, mathematicians, teachers of all levels, curriculum designers, and library scientists. This expertise will allow us to understand all types of communities comprehensively, and to develop the tools necessary for the project.
By now, many leaders of math communities are members of our network, and more join every week. We have good working relationships and open communication channels with many projects and communities open to participation and collaboration. The interviews we have recorded up to now, as well as our collective access to the news channels within communities, will allow us to map communities efficiently and authentically. The reception of presentations about the Math 2.0 Interest Group activities at national and international conferences, as well as communications from researchers, developers, teachers and parents tell us that the mathematical community at large sees the need for what we are doing, and will continue to volunteer time and support for our projects.
What terms best describe your project?
The terms we use to talk about Math 2.0 interest group in general, and the interactive map project in particular, can be grouped by several categories. The links that follow some of the terms lead to their sources, though we redefined the ideas to fit the needs of mathematics educator communities.
Community and network news
- Community of practice http://www.ewenger.com/theory/
- Central and peripheral participation, support of the long tail of participation http://www.amazon.com/Long-Tail-Revised-Updated-Business/dp/1401309666
- Flat, peer-to-peer structures
- Decentralized network
- Mesh sharing models http://www.amazon.com/Mesh-Why-Future-Business-Sharing/dp/1591843715
- Hybrid local and global participation
- Collaboration-level community, supporting sharing-level activities http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Everybody-Organizing-Organizations/dp/1594201536
Social objects
- Social objects http://www.slideshare.net/jyri/microblogging-tiny-social-objects-on-the-future-of-participatory-media
- Rich descriptions that make social objects out of community artifacts
- User-defined categories and tags
- Aggregation of news and long-term objects along multiple dimensions
- Linkable, shareable, editable, taggable, embeddable objects
Research and development
- Qualitative research including educational ethnography, case studies and emergent methodology
- Collection, analysis and visualization of quantitative data
- Co-production of research and research communications in peer groups
- Psychology of mathematics education http://igpme.org/
Mathematics education
- Collaborative material and curriculum development
- Focused niche projects: humanistic mathematics, math games, ethnomathematics, story-based mathematics, mathematical art
- Computational tools
- Peer and community assessment
- Computer tools and community support for highly individualized education
- Modeling
- Programming
Live online math ed events: A review
Sep 20th
This is a guest post for Technology Integration in Education.
This summer I taught an online graduate course, “Teaching and Assessment in Secondary Mathematics.” One goal of the course was to help future teachers to join the global educator networks. Toward this goal, one of the assignments was to participate in a live online event every week. I would like to share my list of event sources I started then. I only list free and open events, and communities that hold events somewhat regularly.
Math events:
- Math 2.0 Interest Group holds weekly events, where different math community leaders present and answer questions about their work.
- #mathchat is a weekly mathematics educator Twitter chat, meaning it’s text-only and limited to 140 characters per message. It’s an unexpectedly lovely medium, accessible from mobile devices. The events are egalitarian and highly interactive.
- GeoGebra NA Network has a calendar of GeoGebra-related events in North America, including online events
- Wolfram Education provides Elluminate events for users of Mathematica, Wolfram Demonstrations and Wolfram Alpha.
General education events that may include math topics:
- Technology Integration in Education has online seminars, surveys, meetings, and a Twitter chat with #lrnchat tag.
- LearnCentral‘s Host Your Own Webinars invites educators to post their own events. There are usually 5-10 every week, with several weekly series.
- CauseWeb has monthly online seminars about teaching college-level statistics. Participants can’t interact with one another, but can submit text questions for the leaders.
- Educator’s Guide to Innovation has 5-7 events per week, on a variety of topics including mathematics.
- Classroom 2.0 holds interviews with book authors and community leaders, virtual conferences, and a variety of other online events, usually a dozen or two per week. This is currently the most active event-centered community
- TappedIn is a text-based community with multiple weekly chats for teachers. It is one of the oldest educator communities online.
- #edchat is a weekly Twitter chat with general ed topics. It is very active, with hundreds of people following and participating, and a thriving blogger community involved.
Please add event sources I missed!
3 Large Math Applet Communities
Sep 13th
This is a guest post for Technology Integration in Education. I review three large active online communities centered on sharing applets, widgets, interactive models, and other pieces of “executable mathematics.” What other applet-making communities are currently alive, active and promising? Please add to the list!
- Scratch from MIT, the most popular descendant of Logo, currently has about 130 million applets. There are two very good reasons for this popularity. First, the programming environment itself is visual, intuitive, and so simple I used it with kids under three and they got it. It looks and feels like building with Legos.
Second, Scratch has excellent tools satisfying all principles of community building. Applets are shareable with one click of the “share” button, as you make them. Each applet gets its own linkable and taggable page with comments, information about the author, ratings, tags and other community feature. Applets are remixable, with automatic tracking of previous authors. I use Scratch to show kids what is open source software, as you can open any applet’s code in your editor with a click of a button on its web page. Also, applets are easily embeddable. Here is one of my students’ favorites:
Because Scratch community does not have any top-down taxonomies, categories, or quality controls, it may be hard to find applets that satisfy a particular set of topic, level and quality requirements – what teachers need for lesson planning. On the other hand, kids can usually find what they need, such as games with particular game mechanics.
There is also an educator community ScratchEd, and International Scratch Day celebrated in May by hundreds of local communities, and online. - GeoGebra is a powerful platform for making sketches and animations, solving problems, and supporting rapid development of math interactives. Its particular strength is the dynamic connection between a computer algebra system and geometric constructions. Drawing with Euclidian tools is automatically or easily linked with graphs, functions, formulas and tables of values. A lovable feature is the ability to remember any multi-step geometric construction as a custom tool. For example, once you build a star using Euclid’s construction axioms, your next star can be created with a click of a button.
GeoGebra community has a strong support for local groups through GeoGebra institutes and regional conferences, and has applet-sharing wikis in 27 languages. Applets are shareable, embeddable, and remixable, but community tools, such as an active forum, are not applet-specific. This promotes creation of many different communities for aggregation and discussion of GeoGebra content in groups, such as the wiki where I first met the above animation. - Wolfram Demonstrations requires software with a somewhat steep learning curve. This means every Demonstration is made by a math geek, with the obvious implications for quality. Mathematica software is not free (the viewer is), but volunteers for Wolfram used to get a free copy. Volunteer tasks are accessible to novices.
Demonstrations are linkable, and their code is available for remixing. There are no other social features, such as discussions of applets, tags or ratings. The site uses top-down categories for browsing applets. The sense of community is sustained largely through academic connections of authors, and isn’t apparent from the site.
Lectures rock
Sep 10th
I love lectures. Of certain kinds, of course. For people who don’t like lectures of any sort, like myself a couple of years ago, I have two words:
Khan
Storytelling
Storytelling should be named “fabletelling” though. What Khan does are stories, on the other hand.
Definition 1. A lecture is a non-interactive (broadcast) delivery of content that includes the voice of one person.
Definition 2. A good lecture is a lecture with the following characteristics:
- The lecture is under 7 minutes. Longer good entities have non-lecture breaks or invite the pause button, making them a mini-series of lectures.
- The lecture delivers one unit of content (story) or of meaning (fable). What is a “unit” is determined by the field and the level.
- The pace is matched to cognitive patterns specific to its content. This requires the lecturer to have strong knowledge of content and of other learners and practitioners, that is, pedagogical content knowledge.
- The voice and the other media, if any, are in rhythm and content harmonies. Rules such as, “No more than three words per slide” attempt to enforce this principle rather feebly.
- The lecture has depth and breadth, because the lecturer loves the content and is intimate with it in several ways.
There is a need to develop more good lecture types though, for different learners. Hence “not complex enough” tag here.
Tanya’s case studies in “Math Careers and Choices” are more fables than stories.
This is the house that Math 2.0 built
Sep 3rd
This is the event Sue VanHattum is hosting tomorrow at Math 2.0
This is Dan Meyer’s talk last week
That inspired the event that Sue is hosting tomorrow at Math 2.0
This is Joel Duffin’s eNLVM instance
That supports problem remixing from Dan’s talk last week
That inspired the event Sue is hosting tomorrow at Math 2.0
This is Linda Stojanovska’s folding box problem
That became a lesson in Joel’s eNLVM instance
That supports problem remixing from Dan’s talk last week
That inspired the event Sue is hosting tomorrow at Math 2.0
This is the opening of the GeoGebra-NA Network Series by Dani Novak,
Who gave the idea for Linda’s folding box problem
That became a lesson in Joel’s eNLVM instance
That supports problem remixing from Dan’s talk last week
That inspired the event Sue is hosting tomorrow at Math 2.0
This is the meeting with Markus Hohenwarter and Michael Borcherds
Who built the software featured in the GeoGebra-NA Network Series by Dani,
Who gave the idea for Linda’s folding box problem
That became a lesson in Joel’s eNLVM instance
That supports problem remixing from Dan’s talk last week
That inspired the event Sue is hosting tomorrow at Math 2.0
This is the Math 2.0 beginning at The Future of Education, with Maria Droujkova
Who organized the meeting with Markus and Michael
Who built the software featured in the GeoGebra-NA Network Series by Dani,
Who gave the idea for Linda’s folding box problem
That became a lesson in Joel’s eNLVM instance
That supports problem remixing from Dan’s talk last week
That inspired the event Sue is hosting tomorrow at Math 2.0
Abundance of choice
Aug 30th
http://www.examiner.com/gifted-education-in-fort-collins/mathcounts-bans-homeschool-teams
The two stated reasons for banning homeschool teams from entering MathCounts:
- Some people pretend to be homeschooler groups
- Homeschooler teams are not restricted geographically like schools are, so they have larger pools to select from
What I hear: homeschooling makes a lot of administrative sense, so some other entities would pretend to do that for administrative flexibility. Also, pre-industrial, of course pre-information age ideas about how to group people have been discarded by homeschoolers some time ago, which provides them with an academic advantage (duh).
I also suspect there is the third, unstated reason: homeschooler teams winning disproportionally many awards. This has been true historically of certain places (e.g. Olympiad winners coming from particular communities or schools) and certain education methods and certain cultures (e.g. Asian-American). Banning these superior education places and methods and cultures from competition designed to select superior kids seems counter-intuitive to me. While I acknowledge the move from MathCounts as a badge of recognition for homeschooling, it also feels a hostile and otherwise problematic. It also begs for an alternative all-inclusive competition to start or to accept “MathCounts refugees,” which will split the user base of MathCounts.
After meeting with HSLDA (an organization that speaks for a minority of homeschoolers), MathCounts decided to grandfather existing teams. This is a strange solution, given that some existing teams are unfair and even cheaters. I do not doubt the general good will of MathCounts organizers, though. They should just invite homeschooler volunteers to help them with the logistics. Homeschoolers are used to operating on incredibly slim administrative overhead, and can be very efficient.
Diane Ravitch’s book reviews were interesting. These talks “for” or “against” this or that choice assume a pretty scary and, given where we are in history, unnecessary scarcity of choices.
Picture: PLN by Alec Couros.
The article in LA Times is highly problematic because it singled out several particular teachers, which made the story more palatable to those of us who are not autistic enough to have fun with pure data, but at the same time hurt these people. They could have spinned it differently, too, with the stress on helping. I like the quiet database version.
Mobius metaphor
Aug 29th
Jos Leys makes great math movies, including this gem of a metaphor:
I can’t wait to use his Mobius Bloom’s footage to strengthen the point I’ve been trying to make – that the Creating tasks are not for advanced students, gifted people, or graduate school only! Actually, struggling students, young kids and noobs need Creating tasks much more.
There are always jobs for kid, teen and grown-up interns at Natural Math. You help the world, develop valuable skills, and enhance your portfolio. What’s not to love?
Yesterday Karen Mellendorf of MonarchBooks alerted me to a math t-shirt from Woot, with this design:
I was too slow to buy the limited edition, but I really admired the thoughtfulness and deep knowledge of “who’s who in math entities” that went into designing it. It’s a list of topics for two-three years of a good math club meetings, right there! Including the Mobius strip, of course.
Speaking of support
Aug 27th
Ironically, some of the more developed, well-supported and widely used community meta-currencies happen in massively multiplayer online games. Also, the name for these currencies has the word “dragon” in it, of which I highly approve. Everything is better with dragons!
I hope we can learn from Carrboro Creative Coworking. They helped a lot of lovable local projects.
I would dearly love for my webinar software to do what my laptop+projector does so well: stream whatever is on my screen and sync it with the sound. As it is, you can tell people to view a video in their browser, but you can’t view in-sync and thus point out a frame to everybody. Nibipedia-like software may provide a solution, if this “bookmarking of a moment in the video” can be done in real time. Right now any “live” media does not do well at all with “live” event software I know! Yet people like Steve Hargadon can do amazing things with tools we do have, and help others.
Off I go to the Cary Homeschoolers party. The local family educator networks have been incredibly kind and supportive toward our family.
Learnspace
Aug 25th
Career Exploration homeschool coop met yesterday. So many opportunities, and a great commons support for teens. Yay us! We may go to Rare Earth Farms (grass-fed, organic beef) soon. Modern organic farmers are Renaissance people.
“Learnspace” planning is going ahead. We are looking at models like coworking and hackerspaces. I hope to learn from places like Kid’s Museum on what to do about “the nasties” like insurance. On the brighter note, there are nine group leaders now who said they will contribute ideas and time to making this happen.
Hello world!
Aug 23rd
Welcome to Math Accent! I am Maria Droujkova, here to talk about Natural Math community projects, the Math 2.0 Interest Group, Math Clubs, math publishing, math games, and family math events.
I plan to speak and to write a bit every day. Let’s see what happens!
Math Playground, Colleen King’s site where we are moving math game discussions of our communities
Tagxedo is my neat toy of the day – thank you Ryan Goble of MindBlue for sending me his NY Times blog post “Tech Tips for Teachers” where I saw the review.
“Family Educator Commons” essay with Carol Cross was a meaningful task. We need to put it somewhere more visible and create discussions about it. A friend, for example, told me this sort of education is only possible for people dedicating all their waking hours to kids. I went and counted the hours in the described “one day in the life of a homeschooler” and it turned out the mother was spending 3.5 hours and the father 1.5 – quite doable, if more than the American average. I want more of those conversations, though.
For a few years, I wanted nothing to do with dead tree books, because it looked like they may go away completely. By now it’s clear what roles paper books, or electronic books designed after them, can reasonably play in the next ten years or so. We are busy making some paper books about Natural Math. The artwork with Natural Math characters Victoria drew over the last five years really helps.
I need to find, and put up, files with character descriptions. I remember that Jenny likes to write and Luis is a rebel. Here are these kids’ hypothetical choices about times tables, which I used to illustrate the study we are now doing:
Sonya is being an artist. The stories parents submitted so far show a greater variety.
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