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Lots of food for thought in this retrospective summary of mainly MOOC and maths learning related articles from 2013 by Stanford U's Keith Devlin

I haven't really looked under the bonnet of this yet, but it seems interesting in terms of market positioning alone (though note: aimed at school level/context).

US oriented & UK relevant. 50 min talk about inequity in maths learning by Uri Treisman. Data in 36 page PDF of Treisman's slides at http://tinyurl.com/cn85gp6. Keith Devlin writes " This month's column is short, but I am asking you to set aside 51 minutes and 36 seconds to watch the embedded video. It is a recording of the Iris M. Carl Equity Address given on Friday April 19 at this year's NCTM Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado. The title of the talk is "Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize" and the speaker is Uri Treisman, professor of mathematics and of public affairs, and director of the Charles A. Dana Center, at the University of Texas at Austin. I was not able to be at NCTM, but on the recommendation of several colleagues, I watched the YouTube video. I simply cannot write a column on mathematics or mathematics education in the same month as Treisman's immensely more important, profound-and powerfully articulated-words became part of mathematics education history. As a community, we now have our own "I have a dream" speech."

An interesting (?) commentary, by implication, on the long division / quadratic equation formula debate. Argues that the reason why learning effortlessly to use "mechanical alogorithms" matters is that this (can) give learners a clear understanding of an alogorithmic approach to solving mathematical problems. Not my field enough to know whether the arguments are well founded, however.

This is a long shot, but might the IMF want to encourage some of its learners with limited maths competence/confiden to do our course first?

Designed for use in the US (mapped against the Common Core State Standards, which groups things into six concept areas: Number and Quantity, Algebra, Functions, Modeling, Geometry, and Statistics and Probability), and designed to cover the equivalent of a year-long, traditional school curriculum. Worth poking about in. Comments from IOE and OCR particularly welcome.

I'm not well placed to judge if this is "any good". Interested to know what IOE colleagues reckon to it.

Looks pretty familiar insofar as it reflects a lot of good stuff that has been going on in isolated classrooms in the UK for quite a few years or even decades. But nevertheless, it does seem to have the right sort of spirit to it. I found it odd that the first five sessions were essentially focussed on the utilities of geometry and then a probability session was thrown in at the end.

Suggestion that social networks could be instrumental in helping MOOCs extend reach beyond those who are already enfranchised and educated. Potentially relevant to Citizens' Maths?

My gut feeling is that social networking could well be really important to us. In the Scratch context, I feel the Scratch community is potentially useful.

The usual thoughtful stuff from Keith Devlin about learning maths - in this case "Quantitative Reasoning" using MOOCs.

It gets a bit proselytising towards the end but the notion of evaluating proofs could generalise to evaluating other types of mathematical statement so, although we are not interested in mathematical proof in our course, the article could still have some relevance to us.

This LA times piece seems to show little other than that the naysayers were too quick to naysay, that the case for "remedial maths" by Udacity-style MOOC is not proven, and that there are a large number of tricky variables at play.

This gives a clear sense of how (some) people might react to Citizens' Maths, if and when it turns out to get traction.

Despite her annoying vocie I found myself laughing out loud at these short videos, which came my way via Aaron Sloman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Sloman, who was an interview subject for the Scaling Up report.

Would there be scope to use Mozilla Open Badges as a core element of the Applied Maths Course? If there is, should we be investigating the practicalities?