Background: doing a freehand macrame project with a craft circle. Kids kept asking whether or not an object could be tied in. When I started to explain the general principles of how one can decide this… Whoohoo!
We had a good start last week with “Where is Math 2.0?” web event at the Future of Education series. Logs will be available shortly. People said they’d like to see a social meeting place for those interested, a regular Twitter chat, a regular LearnCentral voice/multimedia meeting, and a Diigo tag group.
Visit The Future of Education
Toward these goals:
Here is a start of a Wiki called “Math Future” (not “math 2.0″ since it’s somewhat silly, and also in case we progress beyond 2.0) http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/ There, you can add events you organize or attend to the calendar, tell people about your projects, find collaborators, and work toward some common language (math 2.0, math social objects, learning disintermediation and so on).
Twitter chats will be on Wednesdays, July 15th, 6-7pm Pacific / 9-10pm Eastern, with #mathchat tag used. Please volunteer yourself or colleagues to host! I’d like to see 5-7 rotating hosts. This Wednesday, Colleen King of Math Playground (@colleenk) and I (@mariadroujkova) will host it.
Diigo group we will use is Math Links with “Math 2.0″ tag. If any of your bookmarks relate to the topic, can you please add “Math 2.0″ (in quotations) to them? To add tags to other members’ links, click “save” and then select “save to the group” option.
LearnCentral events will start in August (the NECC debriefing is still going strong).
Here are some ways I use Twitter for education:
1. Hashtag aggregation for topical conversations at online events, conferences and so on
2. A way to communicate about face-to-face events as they go on, with other attendees, without breaking up the oral presentations flow
3. Ongoing conversations about particular topics with “whoever may tune in” - check out #math for example or #educhat
4. Aggregation of tweets for web sites or blogs using widgets
5. News: all global and most local events are trending, and often you can learn personal information from participants
6. Learning what colleagues are doing, such as events, conferences, projects, meetings, communal documents. Following people I like to their events, which tend to be interesting because these interesting people choose to participate.
7. Quickly publishing my short thoughts before they go away. This promotes creativity, somehow. People should seriously look into the effect.
8. The feeling of being close with colleagues. It’s like living in a small town and bumping into someone at the grocer’s and the drug store and the park. You communicate with the same person on LinkedIn and their blog and then Twitter too, and it strengthens the neighborly feelings.
Here is an excellent presentation by Tom Barrett, or @tombarrett:
And here is a cute cartoon on some of Twitter dangers:
And here is a great blog post on using backchannels, including Twitter, for your events, from TwitTip.
Update: a clever way to use Twitter to support doctoral dissertation writing!
This parking meter is a contribution to What Can You Do With This, or WCYDWT, project. Dor Abrahamson sent it to me, together with this story for WCYDWT people:
“I’m co-teaching w/ Prof. Alan Schoenfeld an undergraduate course for future teachers, at UC Berkeley. It’s a problem-solving based course, and the problems are often based on mundane situations. We used this authentic document - a Berkeley parking meter - to explore multiplicative structure and rational numbers. Rate, I guess. Basically, we show this picture and ask what the best bang for the buck is. To our great surprise there was much confusion in terms of concepts, notation, vocabulary. Diverse approaches, some we couldn’t make sense of.
Judging by your blog, I need not demonstrate what a talented math teacher could do with this material. The mind reels, right? One of the interesting angles here is that some kids calculate min/cent, and others go for cent/min. We all wish to equalize the “denominator” so that we can compare the “numerators” directly. However, for me the min/cent feels intuitive, b/c I want to know how much bang I get for the buck. And yet, think of those ‘value’ numbers we see in the supermarket, which help us choose between comparable products that come in different volumes — they tell you, e.g,. 39c/ounce. So the equivalent here would be cent/min, right?
And so on. We played with polynomials so as to figure out what exact minute totals we could produce and how much they would cost us.
Time is money.
Oh, and the person whose image we can just discern in the display area of the parking meter is Becky Blessing — this is her, errr, reflection piece.”
UPDATE: Becky already submitted this picture in February, and there is a very nice discussion there at dy/dan blog.
In an overview of the Natural Math project, an audience member asked why we are doing such diverse things. Why work, all at once, on mathematical art, programming-based math, algebra for toddlers, meta-cognition and quite a few other directions we pursue at the same time? These are necessary tools for a gradual, gentle cultural change we are making.
The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. The future where toddlers and their parents play with algebraic ideas, where kids contribute to real work as apprentices, where everybody is able to create or improve mathematical conjectures, definitions and metaphors. We are working on inviting more and more people to work and play in this future, now. This mind map shows some of our tools.
Shirky: “The internet runs on love.”
Shirky’s message is summed up in the subtitle of his “Here comes everybody” book:
The power of organizing without organizations
Definition: social mathematics is mathematics organized primarily by network means, without organizations.
As I now realize, some of the examples in my Social Math: Where? slide show don’t strictly satisfy this definition. They exist because of organization-run events, like classes.
This is a growing slide show with examples of social mathematics web projects. It goes with a study of children participation in social math. If you know more good examples, please comment. Click on the “menu” in the lower right corner of the presentation to embed it into your blog or site.
Trackbacks
Connectivism in Education ning: “How about creative writing? We were taught to write creatively even when we were young. So can we have creative Maths?”
Great Expectations blog: “An excellent collection of math-rich sites built around user-generated content,are found in the form of a slideshow presentation,compiled by Maria D of natural math blog.”
Bizmo Diaries blog: “If you think math is boring, maybe you’re not being “social” enough. Think of math as a contact sport — doesn’t have to mean rough, although when life gets that way, math can help sometimes (or call it computing).”
LETSI - learning, education, training and systems interoperability blog: “Social Mathematics. I mean, that’s just one of those areas that makes my head turn in ways I never thought it could turn. Maria’s got me pegged — even as a former math teacher, and a person who “sees the Matrix” with regularity ( // I nerd out when it comes to programming, logic and math), the picture in my head of social learning is largely driven by practices in social media — and they are almost entirely language/narrative-based scenarios.”
Mathematics 24×7 ning: “Earlier I was also under this impression that children cannot do or learn Math outside Math classroom, but after experimenting with them and with selected projects I really found it useful . On students network they ask queries, answer to assignments by uploading their presentations/files etc. I have seen a positive impact on students who are shy in asking problems in a class. I have used blog/wiki/podcast features in my Math class for not only teaching learning Math but also eradicating a phobia of learning the subject.”
I need your help to research an urgent question: is math lagging behind other human endeavors on the social web? If you can, please distribute this to blogs, mailing lists and other forums.
The goal is to collect answers from at least two hundred parents or teachers of children who are active on the social web. Some examples of social web sites include: blogs, wikis, nings, email groups, multi-player online games, forums, Facebook, My Space, Twitter, Flickr, and Youtube. The purpose of this study is to investigate how much math can be found in the user-generated content on the web, that is, pictures, videos, texts, software and other entities created by children as they participate in the social sites. The social web has led to an explosion in authoring, empowering our children as never before. Does it empower them in mathematics as well? Let’s find out!
Copy and paste these questions to answer them:
To participate, post answers to the Natural Math blog post at:
http://www.naturalmath.com/index.php?option=com_jd-wp&Itemid=88888917&p=88,
or email them to Dr. Maria Droujkova at droujkova@gmail.com,
or reply wherever you find these questions posted.
You can see study progress updates and some examples of social mathematics in comments at the study post on the Natural Math blog.
Thank you in advance!
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