Posts tagged Math 2.0
Special Pi Day event at Math 2.0 – “Blockhead”
Mar 14th
Meet author Joseph D’Agnese and discuss ways to use his mathematical picture book, Blockhead: The Life of FIbonacci, to teach not only about the Fibonacci sequence, but a variety of other math concepts.
How to join
- Follow this link at the time of the event: http://tinyurl.com/math20event
- Monday, March 14th (Pi Day!) 2011 we will meet in the LearnCentral online room at 5:00 pm Pacific, 8:00pm Eastern time. WorldClock for your time zone.
- Click “OK” and “Accept” several times as your browser installs the software. When you see Elluminate Session Log-In, enter your name and click the “Login” button
- If this is your first time, come a few minutes earlier to check out the technology. The room opens half an hour before the event.
All events in the Math 2.0 weekly series: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/events
About “Blockhead”
In this presentation, author Joseph D’Agnese will discuss writing a mathematical picture books and ways to use his book to teach not only the Fibonacci sequence (fascinating as that is), but also such topics as what is a number, comparing different numeral systems, using an abacus, the value of place values, and more.
You can enter to win a free autographed copy of the book by sharing the title of your favorite math-related picture book in the comments of this web page at the Teaching Your Middle Schooler blog.
To get an idea about the beautiful graphics in this book, please watch the two-minute video trailer for the book:
Event Host
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Joseph D’Agnese is is an author and journalist whose work has been published extensively in Discover magazine, and also in Seed and Wired. His work has twice been named to the renowned annual anthology Best American Science Writing. In addition to his books for adults and children, he has also published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Child, Parents, Reader’s Digest, Saveur, Money.com, Sports Illustrated and other publications. He is also a regular contributor to This Old House magazine. |
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 Carol Cross, this event’s organizer, is a homeschooling mom with a background in educational policy, philosophy, and social activism. |
Anki: Flashcards 2.0
Mar 8th
“Companies fail and die until their corpses form a bridge to the future”
Tycho, Penny Arcade
This weekend, I researched a genre of social media community platforms: systems for long-term memorization of large groups of facts, based on flashcards. Hundreds of people had the bright idea of making computer-based flashcards. For example, you can see 250+ memorization platform reviews at Quingle.
Most of these tools make sets of virtual cards that have pairs of facts (“sides”), with one shown first and the other shown next. This provides a small convenience compared to paper-based cards, namely, storage and mobility. Most flashcard software stops at this step, where it fails and dies to form a bridge to the future.
Once flashcards are electronic, they can be copied free. So, not hundreds, but dozens of platforms allow users to exchange their card sets, for example, FlashCardExchange. This and a few other platforms, however, take flashcards to the whole new level by helping users track their success.
My top pick for these sophisticated fact learning systems is Anki.This is a powerful open source tool, and a thriving resource exchange community. In addition to making and exchanging sets of cards, Anki automatically schedules cards for review, based on each person’s card-by-card data and psychology of memory. And this is a huge boon for users, compared to paper cards.
Behavior tracking and statistics-based decision making is something humans do incredibly poorly without a computer. This is where software developers should focus their efforts!
I like the interface a lot, as well. I am using the tool for my “Times tables in a week.” In this case, card sets are patterns found in times tables, such as the times nine pattern of digits, or off-diagonal “one less than square” pattern (e.g. 4*6=5*5-1).
Shareable sets of cards can become powerful social objects for peer groups.
Read more
- Anki review from Jeffrey Thomas, a math teacher
- More detailed flashcard software reviews, with the stress on Asian language learning needs, at Fool’s Reviews.
- Articles about spaced repetition – the memory theory behind most flashcard learning systems – at SuperMemo
- Even more articles and links at Wikipedia – Spaced Repetition
Where in the world is math?
Feb 27th
So, the world sends two million emails every minute. This counter is mesmerizing! It’s also fake, in that it does not REALLY count emails as they are sent.
For MathSeeker, we not only need to count, but analyze, categorize, tag, aggregate and display the flows of mathematical interactions online. Web searches do it very poorly. Just try to use Google to answer some of questions I get:
- Where can pre-service teachers from my program start building their personal networks?
- How can I approach good guest math bloggers for our new math and science project?
- What is an appropriate forum for my eight-year-old who loves to talk about calculus?
- Who can help visitors of my open courseware depository with a question about a particular topic?
- How can I invite readers to collaborate on making my book draft?
Google Books for publishers: O’Reilly online event review
Feb 15th
I am exploring the book component of math content aggregation, since several of us are working on community book projects, including Sue’s anthology of informal mathematics, Dani’s GeoGebra, and my math clubs. Content aggregation is what we are doing at the moment; the next steps are packaging, distribution, and co-production of open content around the books, which is a part of their overall “campaign.” This letter is about the distribution step.
Last week, O’Reilly, a good book-centric community role model by the way, organized an interview with people from Google Books, which you can view here: http://post.oreilly.com/rd/9z1z1rfsahrh14rvf71o4blhp13pqkkl88cb5194s8o
I took notes for our book projects:
- These days, people find the majority of books they eventually buy through internet searches. Therefore, the key component of any book venture is supporting online content discovery.
- Google Books indexes 100% of the text, which is searchable, without necessarily making it available for preview beyond the phrase found. Some of us will want 100% preview or Creative Commons license and others will want smaller previews.
- Meta-data further adds to convent discovery. It includes information on where to buy ebooks and paper books, and Google Books can sell ebooks and paper books then and there as people find them through the browser. In this, they are competing with other programs like Kindle.
- They answered my question about co-production with readers with, “we are planning for reader content in the next major update” which tells me we need to plan for it separately for now.
- They support partnerships with local paper booksellers and can guide people to them. This was important for Sue.
- The cloud model means that ebooks are accessed from anywhere online (like your Google Docs) and on smartphones. People can also download ebooks with or without DRM – the ability to disable it is important for me).
- If the book is “high design” (non-standard page layout, fancy backgrounds) there is a choice for this original view or “reflowed” view for smartphones and such.
- The starting page for publishers is here http://books.google.com/support/partner/
CO11: Connecting Online conference, February 4-6, math presentations
Jan 24th
The theme of the conference is connecting online for instruction and learning that goes beyond the classroom. Presenters from around the globe will discuss the following topics:
- Connecting online to improve instruction and learning: Online learning and instructional experiences
- Experiences with the use of technology in face-to-face and online classes. What worked and what didn’t work for you?
- How do you use technology to promote your online workshops, consultation, and communities?
- Research conducted on e-learning
- Books written on e-learning
The conference takes place in WiZiQ. There are 41 sessions and 3 of them are on mathematics education. At the time of the event, click the “join” button at the event’s page to enter the webinar room.
Here are details about the three math sessions, in the chronological order.
CO11: Intellectual consumerism in mathematical learning Dr. Maria Droujkova
Friday, February 04 2011 | 8:00 AM (EST)
February 4th, 8am Eastern Time
Focusing on mathematics, I invite participants to discuss how pure learning promotes intellectual consumerism. Multiple social forces, such as child labor laws, formal schooling, institution and extension of adolescence, and more recently degree inflation, are preventing students from meaningfully participating in productive endeavors until relatively late in life. Online communities hold the hope of change, supporting healthier balances of consumption and creation, as I show using examples of online mathematical communities.
CO11: SubQuan: A cross-reality solution to understand mathematics by Dream Realizations with Daniel Cooper Patterson, Rebecca Reiniger, and Anna-Marie Robertson
February 4th, 11am Eastern Time
We will demonstrate the necessity of connecting online to improve instruction and learning. We will be using the new field of visual mathematics as our case study which will show the need for a cross-reality solution.
CO11: Integrating Math Art and Music in a computer language by Dani Novak
February 6th, 4pm Eastern Time
This session will introduce a new piece of software called MuMart (Music Math Art), programmed and developed by David Rosenthal with help of Dani Novak and support form Ithaca College. It can be used to create Dynamic Mathematical Art and to teach kids Mathematics in a meaningful way.
Math games and anti-social behaviors
Dec 2nd
This blog post originally appeared on Technology Integration in Education, where I am a guest blogger. More interesting is Colleen King’s response – she’s the author of the widely stolen games.
I am absolutely thrilled when new math resources that include interactives appear online. Cataloging, annotating, tagging and making collections can add value to interactives. These jobs don’t necessarily have to be done by the same people who program math games or applets.
Right? Right?!
Here is an altogether positive example of a resource catalogue: MathForum’s Internet Math Library, the Software page. It provides tagged, searchable short reviews of sites with math interactives. One big minus of the library is that it does not deep-link individual games.
Deep-linking even many resources can be done appropriately. Take a look, for example, at MathsOnline blog. It links and categorizes several hundred math games created and hosted everywhere. Each game has a short (original?) review, a screenshot, tags, and the link to the site where it is hosted. Here is another example of such a site.
Some people object to deep-linking to their sites, especially if no content (no value) is added by the process. I confess it is annoying to find the same interactives, with the same descriptions, indexed by the same category and tag set, in gazillions of places. Instead of providing service to educators, this practice wastes time when people click link after link only to find the same content.
Then there is outright stripping of credentials. I don’t want to call this “theft” if it is done to something that is already freely available to anyone. It is not about property. It is, however, a deeply anti-social, anti-community behavior.
Consider an example that recently came up in a discussion of math games. “Percent shopping” is a game Colleen King created for her site Math Playground. It features a kid shopping at a store called “Troy’s Toys.”
There are automated content-aggregating sites, apparently dozens of them, that not only embed the game without any attribution to the author, but also offer its embed code to their visitors. Some examples:
http://www.wordfreegames.com/game/percent-shopping.html
http://www.home-games.org/game/116/Shopping-at-Troy_s-Toys.html
http://www.freekidsmathgames.org/game/18/Shopping-at-Troy_s-toys.html
The sites sell ads. Using other people’s content. Without adding value to the content. This is bad.
The problem is also self-propagating, because new aggregating ad-selling sites, which are built automatically, simply take content from old aggregating ad-selling sites. Also honest but newbie site builders may take content from these “free and nameless” collections without realizing anything is wrong.
A consolation: math is now so hot that thugs break laws for its sake.
One may be a strong proponent of the Pirate Party on the grounds of making content available to people in need. But this situation is different: the content is already available. The only other freedom some of these sites provide is making the content embeddable – but they strip the credentials in the process! Cory Doctorow recently wrote, in his Guardian column:
In my world, copyright’s purpose is to encourage the widest participation in culture that we can manage – that is, it should be a system that encourages the most diverse set of creators, creating the most diverse set of works, to reach the most diverse audiences as is practical.
Piracy, arguably, can encourage wider initial participation – but discourage large and expensive projects. In my mind, games that are already available for free, on a well-organized site without ads, don’t require any further liberation. Or do they?
Is easy embedding such a big deal? Here, I took a screenshot of Colleen’s game and linked it to her site. Is this significantly worse for promoting wide content creation than the ability to embed the game right here?
Colleen King’s response to the original post
It isn’t often that I’m mentioned in a blog post so I was very curious to read this. I wonder if people are aware of just how prevalent this problem is.I agree with your description of this practice as “deeply anti-social, anti-community behavior.” And I agree that it’s not about property. And while this isn’t theft in the traditional sense, since I am still in possession of the original games, I think the consequences of such actions are more destructive than people may realize.
I’m going to describe a fictional but more real world example that depicts what is taking place and the potential harm it may cause.
Imagine that a group of people decide to organize a community theater. The idea is to create original, short films and show them free of charge to people who enjoy such productions. The group writes stories, builds sets, licenses music, rehearses, records the action, edits the film, and finally presents its work to the community.
Everything is wonderful. The theater group is doing what it loves to do and the community is enjoying the films.
Eventually, the theater group must face the economics of providing a free service. There’s rent and utilities, licensing fees, and editing software to consider. And demand has become so great for these films that the theater group is working practically full time without any compensation.
The group considers its options. It could begin charging the public to view its films. The group argues that doing so would prevent some members of the community from seeing the films for financial reasons. That didn’t seem like the right thing to do. Then someone suggests asking local businesses to sponsor the community theater. The group would place ads from local businesses in its brochures and show ads to the audience before viewing films. This seems like a win-win situation. The community theater covers its expenses and can even pay its members a small salary. Local businesses are gaining new clients and customers. And the community is enjoying wonderful films free of charge.
Flash forward.
Mr. X has been watching the success of the theater group from afar. He thinks this is something he’d like to do. However, Mr.X doesn’t know how to make films and doesn’t wish to spend any time learning. Besides, he rationalizes, the theater group already created a good product. And Mr.X is really only interested in the profit potential of the community theater. Providing a service is just a secondary benefit.
Mr. X finds some low cost space for his theater, comes up with a catchy name, and makes the theater attractive and comfortable. He then pays a visit to the original community theater group. Mr.X finds copies of all the films the group has ever produced and proceeds to take one of each. He wastes no time adding the films to his own theater’s list of events. The idea is working! Mr.X is earning money while providing a terrific service. Businesses are doing better than they ever have and the people in Mr. X’s community are thrilled to have such wonderful films to watch free of charge.
Meanwhile, Ms. K, one of the members of the community theater group decides to do some traveling. And in her travels, she stumbles upon Mr. X’s theater. Enjoying films as she does, Ms. K decides to go to an afternoon show and, much to her surprise, the film is one she made some years ago! Ms. K looks through the theater’s listings and finds nearly every one of her films on the list. But there is no mention of her work or anything at all about the community
theater group she founded all those years ago. Then Ms. K finds something even more disturbing in the brochure. Mr. X is giving away copies of the films! She tries to contact Mr.X but he is nowhere to be found. Feeling somewhat helpless, Ms. K returns to her theater group to discuss the matter.They view a graph showing the number of people attending the theater over time and spot a disturbing trend. Traffic has been diminishing. People no longer think it’s necessary to visit the original community theater since the films can be viewed elsewhere. The group then looks at profit charts and observes a similar pattern. When traffic declined, local businesses no longer saw any benefit in sponsoring the community theater. The theater began earning less and was struggling to cover its expenses. It could no longer afford to produce new films thus depriving the community of its unique and innovative work.
The story of the community theater is a sad one but I wonder if it had to be so. Could the community theater story have a different ending?
How can organizations protect themselves from unauthorized distribution of their creative works, apart from invoking the law? Would the community theater prosper if it had decided on its own to distribute its work under a creative commons license? I can see how that might return control of creative works to the organization but I wonder if it would eliminate or even reduce the attribution problem. Is it beneficial to have copies of creative work available in hundreds of locations? Online, the concept of location is mostly inconsequential. There are exceptions but generally we have access to the original work and every location that stores a copy. What’s the benefit of multiple copies?
This is a very interesting problem with many subtleties to discern.
I’m really like to hear what others think.
Math 2.0 Newsletter December 1st 2010
Dec 1st
November was a busy math at Math Future community, and December promises to be even more fun. Here is what we did and what we plan to do…
In November, we submitted two proposals for projects. The first one is the Knight Foundation News Challenge, where our group is the only one that has ever submitted a STEM news proposal, named Math 2.0 Interactive Community News Map. The second proposal is for the International Commission on Mathematics Instruction’s conference. It is called Notations Across Cultures for Teaching.
Many members participated in the Global Education Conference, the largest peer-run online unconference on education. You can view their presentation recordings following the links:
- Scott Laidlaw – Breaking Through the Emotional Resistance to Math
- Donald Cohen – Calculus By and For Young People-ages 7 and up
- Linda Fahlberg-Stojanovska – Screencasts, Captions and your Global Audience
- Linda Fahlberg-Stojanovska – GeoGebra in Math Education – Global Community
- Maria Droujkova, Ihor Charischak, Colleen King, David Weksler – Math 2.0 Interest Group
- Linda Fahlberg-Stojanovska – Classroom Wikis and GeoGebra
The weekly Math 2.0 online events in November included:
- November 17th, 2010. “Math without words” and other Thinking Mathematics projects Host: James Tanton, Interviewer: Sue VanHattum
- November 10th, 2010. Mathalicious Host: Karim Logue
- November 6th, 2010. MathPlace.net and other projects Host: Tom O’Brien
- November 3rd, 2010. Imagine Education – Teaching Math through Stories and Games Host: Scott Laidlaw
December collaboration plans include the super-secret book club, planning open courses for P2PU, a model for interactive teacher communities proposal, and the computer game group proposal to build a collaborative cross-indexed repository of math game mechanics. Because of the holidays, we only have two open online community events in December:
- December 8th. SubQuan: A cross-reality solution to finally understand mathematics Hosts: Daniel Cooper Patterson/Cooper Macbeth (SL), Rebecca Reiniger/Ute Frenburg (SL)
- December 4th.APGS programming language: Transforming the Spiral of Life into the Crystal of Life Host: Dani Novak
The December 4th event is in Elluminate, provided by our sponsor LearnCentral.org, and the December 8th event is in Second Life. Please join the fun!
Math 2.0 wiki membership grew by more than 10% in November. Members contribute to web pages and receive news about all upcoming events.
Math groups on Flickr
Nov 23rd
This is a guest post for Technology Integration in Education.
Math is beautiful. A tangible proof: there’s a lot of mathematics on the premier social site for sharing beauty. Check out the newest shared images from a few of 700+ Flickr groups that have “math” in their descriptions. Aggregation of similar content is one of the more accessible ways to move from sharing to collaboration (Shirky). Once a large example space is collected and tagged by the community, it becomes a valuable learning object.
Members of Math World, a general math group with about eight hundred members, have collected about three and a half thousand computer and physical models, and photos of found mathematics.
Credits: antarctica246, ~RND Modelshop, dkuropatwa
Seven and a half thousand members of Geometric Beauty are prolific, having shared more than a hundred thousand images. This is an example of collecting pictures by academic subjects.
Credits: mikhailovat, Agnes.L, craig h1
There are many groups devoted to more narrow areas within mathematics that are particularly beautiful. About a thousand groups have the word “fractal” in their descriptions.
For example, the group simply named Fractals shares computer art and fractals from nature.
Credit: 4everMiku
The group Fractal Spirals is more narrow in its focus.
Credit: Thomaniac
Fractals Transformed is devoted to collages and other transformations of fractal images.
Credit: Cal KT
Some groups focus on particular type of spatial transformation. If a picture is worth a thousand words, thousands masterpieces created with each transformation answer the question, “What is this math for?” with an incredible power.
Credits: Duncan C, Lyle58, fotobananas
Credits: Vincent Montibus, helen sotiriadis, Michael LaPalme
Software-centered groups collect images where, to quote the description of Algorithmic Abstracts, “the code is the art.” In image comments, members discuss finer points of programming and arrange to exchange source files for building upon previous work.
Algorithmic Abstracts requires members to write the code for their images themselves. “Obviously the use of frameworks is expressly allowed.”
Credit: Kim Asendorf
Structure Synth is a generative art application, and the group shares images made with it. Focus on a particular tool is a typical principle of collecting pictures.
Credit: wsanter
On the other hand, members of digital flower can use any piece of software, as long as they generate images of flowers with it.
Credit: Marina0195
Math clubs, Olympiads and other events sometimes make Flickr pools for their members. For example, MEMO 2007 is a collection of Middle European Mathematical Olympiad pictures, organized as a group.
Credit: Memo 2007, Eisenstadt
Other collections are organized by tags. For example, I store my math club photos under the tag naturalmath.
Credit: Natural Math
Organizations create Flickr accounts devoted to their work, such as Center for Science and Math Education.
Credit: Center for Science and Math Education
How narrow can a focus of a Flickr group become? You’d be surprised! For example, consider Hyperbolic Crochet. Understandably, it’s not a large group. But isn’t it marvelous that there are 44 people in the world who openly agreed to collect photos of their crocheting projects devoted to hyperbolic surfaces? And that I can not only admire the photos, but comment, ask for tips, and join the project?
Credits: DETEXO, daisymae cs
Multiples of 37 members have collected almost two thousand pictures featuring you-guessed-what. It leaves one sort of speechless. It helps their collecting cause significantly that 666 is a multiple.
Credits: Rodent Badcock, SARK S-W
From Decorative stars to Origami Tesselations – intersections of sets defined by shape, color, technique, software and other qualities make for wonderfully quirky image collections.
Credit: cinderella.girl63, LidyaDiard
This is a sampler, not a comprehensive review. There are very interesting math-rich Flickr communities devoted to 3d modeling, animation, data visualization, networks and so on. If you like math, Flickr is the place to find it by users, groups, galleries and tags.
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
Traveling with the souls of others
Nov 20th
I have to correct what I said above. Some geeks I know don’t like sci-fi or fantasy, but use math for their otherworldly needs.
The Global Education Conference 2010 is done. Linda Stojanovska compiled the list of links to recordings of math sessions below. When I followed the Twitter stream of Kevin Simpson, the volunteer moderator of my presentation, his first message read: “Silent and Listen are spelled with the same letters.” So I thought it would be nice to animate it. These days, if you can formulate your software requirements as a web search phrase, you will probably find a free tool that does what you want. The search for “anagram animator” brought up this instrument from WordSmith.org which I shared with Kevin.
I will use this for “Magic Lantern Math” guided visualization activities. Long silent pauses are the key component there.
Monday, November 15th
15:00 – 16:00 KEYNOTE: Hall Davidson – Three Classroom Projects that NEED the World
18:00 – 19:00 Dr. J. Gail Armstrong-Hall – A New Spatial Theory.
20:00 – 21:00 Patti Duncan – Developing Essential STEM Skills Through the Use of Digital Media
Tuesday, November 16th
14:00 – 15:00 James Gerry – Web-Based Collaborative Innovation: Beyond Web 2.0
16:00 – 17:00 KEYNOTE: Jim Brazell – The Future is Here: The Role of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (TEAMS) in Global Innovation
17:00 – 18:00 Scott Laidlaw – Breaking Through the Emotional Resistance to Math
21:00 – 22:00 Donald Cohen – Calculus By and For Young People-ages 7 and up
Wednesday, November 17th
08:00 – 09:00 Lisa Johnson – The 180 Degree Mathematics Classroom
11:00 – 12:00 Richard Snow – Teaching High School Mathematics Curriculum using TI Nspire CAS
11:00 – 12:00 Linda Fahlberg-Stojanovska – Screencasts, Captions and your Global Audience
12:00 – 13:00 KEYNOTE: Dr. Linda Fahlberg-Stojanovska – GeoGebra in Math Education – Global Community
14:00 – 15:00 Corey Nascenzi – Engage and Motivate Math Students with CYBERCHASE PBS Online Resources
20:00 – 21:00 Maria Droujkova – Math 2.0 Interest Group
21:00 – 22:00 John Sowash – Collaborative Projects for the STEM Classroom
Thursday, November 18th
08:00 – 09:00 Iftikhar Husain – Visual Math with Geometer’s Sketchpad
18:00 – 19:00 Linda Fahlberg-Stojanovska – Classroom Wikis and GeoGebra
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