LOGIN Wednesday February 15 at 3pm Eastern US time: http://tinyurl.com/math20event
During the event, Dr. Keith Still of SaferCrowds.com will introduce his Crowd Sciences work and explain the relevance of mathematics in it: "If you don't do the maths, you could end up in court on a manslaughter charge!"
All events in the Math Future weekly series: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/events
The recording will be at http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/CrowdSciences
Pose questions and comments for Keith before the event
Math Future wiki: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/message/list/CrowdSciences
LinkedIn group: http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=33207&type=member&item=94871153&qid=b29a6dbc-6474-425f-865a-b319bd33dcb9
Email group: http://groups.google.com/group/mathfuture/browse_thread/thread/931328aab6d87b03
How to join
Follow this link at the time of the event: http://tinyurl.com/math20event
Wednesday, February 15 2012 we will meet online at noon Pacific, 3 pm Eastern time. WorldClock for your time zone.
Click "OK" and "Accept" several times as your browser installs the software. When you see 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.
Crowd Modelling + Crowd Monitoring + Crowd Management = Safer Crowds
Crowd Modelling is the scientific approach to the development of safe, robust, crowd management plans. This can be achieved without the need for expensive, complex, time consuming computer simulations. In simple terms Crowd Modelling is understanding how, where, when and why crowds arrive, move around and leave an events/venues. The majority of this can be accomplished using tried, tested and simple to apply methodologies.
"Keith Still is what I term an intuitive mathematician. He is one of the most creative and original thinkers that I know. He adds drive and determination, as well as considerable intellectual power to any group of which h
Does your child have difficulty in school, especially when it involves math? Is it time to call in reinforcements and get a little bit of help? Have you considered online math tutoring ? Wait! Before you answer, consider how far technology has come since you were in school. Today, traditional methods may not be the answer to your questions. Step into the future of education with online math tutoring.
From the abstract (full text requires subscription): "Many organisms can predict future events from the statistics of past experience, but humans also excel at making predictions by pure reasoning: integrating multiple sources of information, guided by abstract knowledge, to form rational expectations about novel situations, never directly experienced. Here, we show that this reasoning is surprisingly rich, powerful, and coherent even in preverbal infants. When 12-month-old infants view complex displays of multiple moving objects, they form time-varying expectations about future events that are a systematic and rational function of several stimulus variables. Infants' looking times are consistent with a Bayesian ideal observer embodying abstract principles of object motion. The model explains infants' statistical expectations and classic qualitative findings about object cognition in younger babies, not originally viewed as probabilistic inferences."
LOGIN: http://tinyurl.com/math20event
Mind the Daylight Saving Time!
Geoff Roulet and Jill Lazarus will discuss their use of wikis, GeoGebra and Jing with students, and invite participants for an extended DIY exploration. More details concerning the software required are below.
All events in the Math Future weekly series: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/events
The recording will be at: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/SupportingCollaborativeMath
Your time zone: http://bit.ly/z69yzS
About Blended Mathematical Collaboration using a Wiki, GeoGebra and Jing
This discussion centers on the use of computer tools in a high school class. The goal was to develop a "math-talk learning community" to establish mathematics communication and collaboration as a classroom norm. In support of this we have combined the use of a wiki, GeoGebra, and Jing.
We would like to invite educators who have experience with wikis, GeoGebra and screencasts, or who would like to learn more, to discuss our project and share their ideas.
Event Hosts
Geoff is the skipper of and Jill a crew member on Jeannie, a J35 racing yacht. When not sailing, they are mathematics educators.
After graduate work at the University of Waterloo, Geoff Roulet began teaching mathematics, computer science, and chemistry at Roland Michener Secondary School in Timmins, northern Ontario. In the late 1970s, when personal computers for computer science were placed in the back of his classroom, Geoff began using these to support student learning in mathematics. Since then he has been involved in ICT use in teaching and learning at all grades and in all subjects, but with a particular focus on mathematics. Teaching was followed by a short spell of curriculum development and support work with the Ontario Ministry of Education and then in 1990 a move to the Faculty of Education, Queen's University at Kingston. Along the way Geoff completed M.Ed. and D.Ed. degrees at the Ontario Institute for Studies
LOG IN February 22, 2012 at 2pm Eastern US time: http://tinyurl.com/math20event
During the event, John Mason will lead a conversation about multiplication as scaling, and answer questions about his books, projects and communities.
All events in the Math Future weekly series: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/events
The recording will be at: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/JohnMason
Your time zone: http://bit.ly/wQYN1Y
Event challenge!
What good multiplication tasks about scaling do you know?
Share links and thoughts!
John writes about elastic multiplication: "It is often said that 'multiplication is repeated addition' when what is meant is that 'repeated addition is an instance of multiplication'. I have been developing some tasks which present 'scaling as multiplication' based around familiarity with elastic bands. Participants would benefit from having an elastic (rubber) band to hand which they have cut so as to make a strip; wider is better than thinner if you have a choice."
About John Mason
John Mason has been teaching mathematics ever since he was asked to tutor a fellow student when he was fifteen. In college he was at first unofficial tutor, then later an official tutor for mathematics students in the years behind him, while tutoring school students as well. After a BSc at Trinity College, Toronto in Mathematics, and an MSc at Massey College, Toronto, he went to Madison Wisconsin where he encountered Polya's film 'Let Us Teach Guessing', and completed a PhD in Combinatorial Geometry. The film released a style of teaching he had experienced at high school from his mathematics teacher Geoff Steel, and his teaching changed overnight.
His first appointment was at the Open University, which involved among other things the design and implementation of the first mathematics summer school (5000 students over 11 weeks on three sites in parallel). He called upon his experience of being taught, to institute active-problem-solving sessions, w
Abstract:"Prime Climb is an educational game that provides individual support for learning
number factorization skills in the form of hints based on a model of student learning. Previous
studies with Prime Climb indicated that students may not always be paying attention to
the hints, even when they are justified (i.e. based on a student model's assessment). In this
thesis we will discuss the test-bed game, Prime Climb, and our re-implementation of the
game which allowed us to modify the game dynamically and will allow for more rapid prototyping
in the future. To assist students as they play the game, Prime Climb includes a pedagogical
agent which provides individualized support by providing user-adaptive hints. We
then move into our work with the eye-tracker to better understand if and how students process
the agent's personalized hints. We will conclude with a user study in which we use eyetracking
data to capture user attention patterns as impacted by factors related to existing user
knowledge, hint types, and attitude towards getting help in general. We plan to leverage these
results in the future to make hint delivery more effective."
From the abstract: "The purpose of this study was to find out from current high school math teachers, of geometry specifically, what their views of technology are. The goal of the study was to ask these teachers which technologies they use and whether they believe technology has beneficial effects on student learning. Data was collected for the survey by asking teachers to take brief electronic surveys and conduct in-person interviews. All questions in both the survey and interviews were focused on the effects of technology that they see in their classrooms. The scope of the participants was restricted to Columbus, Ohio, and thus, generalizations for any classroom or any school building cannot be made. However, this study did find a consensus among the participants as to which technologies they felt were the most beneficial in their classrooms, as well as those that might not be needed at all in a classroom. The three technologies that these teachers claimed to be the most beneficial were SMART boards, TI-nspire calculators and Geometer's Sketchpad/GeoGebra. Again, this study cannot make solid conclusions, but it is safe to say that this study gives insight into teachers' viewpoints, which, in a sense, are more important than those of outside researchers. The teachers agreed on a few technologies that are the most beneficial and thus future studies should focus on really studying the effects of these technologies as well as focus on getting a wider range of teachers' opinions on this topic."
Your students' future and education needs are not like yours and mine. For the most part, we are a product of an education system heavily influenced by the industrial age - lectures and rote memorization. This style of teaching was primarily designed to produce factory and skilled trade workers.
Interesting article from Britain regarding computational fluency. I don't disagree that being fluent with computation increases a students future capabilities, but there is not necessarily causal effect that 'traditional' approaches to teaching computation make stronger mathematics students. It's the rigorous approach that I think needs to be emphasized.
Published by University of Chicago Press, July 2012. "Math and science hold powerful places in contemporary society, setting the foundations for entry into some of the most robust and highest-paying industries. However, effective math and science education is not equally available to all students, with some of the poorest students-those who would benefit most-going egregiously underserved. This ongoing problem with education highlights one of the core causes of the widening class gap. While this educational inequality can be attributed to a number of economic and political causes, in Empowering Science and Mathematics Education in Urban Communities, Angela Calabrese Barton and Edna Tan demonstrate that it is augmented by a consistent failure to integrate student history, culture, and social needs into the core curriculum. They argue that teachers and schools should create hybrid third spaces-neither classroom nor home-in which underserved students can merge their personal worlds with those of math and science. A host of examples buttress this argument: schools where these spaces have been instituted now provide students not only an immediate motivation to engage the subjects most critical to their future livelihoods but also the broader math and science literacy necessary for robust societal engagement. A unique look at a frustratingly understudied subject, Empowering Science and Mathematics Education pushes beyond the idea of teaching for social justice and into larger questions of how and why students participate in math and science. " Excerpts in Google Books
Why use Web 2.0 tools in science and math classes? The primary reason is they facilitate access to input and interaction with content through reading, writing, listening, and speaking.
These tools offer enormous advantages for science and math teachers, in terms of helping their students learn using Web 2.0 tools. For example:
* Most of these tools can be edited from any computer connected to the Internet. Teachers can add, edit and delete information even during class time.
* Students learn how to use these tools for academic purposes and, at the same time, can transfer their use to their personal lives and future professional careers.
* RSS feeds allow students to access all the desired research information on one page.
* Students learn to be autonomous in their learning process.
From the abstract: "This research examined the effects of the objectifying gaze on math performance, interaction motivation, body surveillance, body
shame, and body dissatisfaction. In an experiment, undergraduate participants (67 women and 83 men) received an objectifying
gaze during an interaction with a trained confederate of the other sex. As hypothesized, the objectifying gaze caused decrements
in women'smath performance but notmen's. Interestingly, the objectifying gaze also increased women's, but notmen's,motivation
to engage in subsequent interactions with their partner. Finally, the objectifying gaze did not influence body surveillance, body
shame, or body dissatisfaction forwomen or men. One explanation for themath performance and interaction motivation findings is
stereotype threat. To the degree that the objectifying gaze arouses stereotype threat, math performance may decrease because it
conveys that women's looks are valued over their other qualities. Furthermore, interaction motivation may increase because
stereotype threat arouses belonging uncertainty or concerns about social connections. As a result, the objectifying gazemay trigger
a vicious cycle in which women underperform but continue to interact with the people who led them to underperform in the first
place. Implications for long-term consequences of the objectifying gaze and directions for future research are discussed." (Full text available online (.pdf) )for now) ) (Winner of the 2011 Georgia Babladelis Best Paper Award)
Enter your zip coade to see US census data and comparisons with neighboring zip codes. Great data site for data that is engaging to students, can be represented in multiple ways, and potential for predicting future trends.