Re: [IAEP] Etoys or Scratch?
I would not use these programs. I would actually use Prezi. The simple answer to Why is the professional look of end product. Scratch and Etoys apps look childish (on purpose!!!) - like their names imply, the idea is to mess and play with things. I just would not take disaster preparedness info seriously if it were presented in such way. However, if you are thinking specifically about GAMES about disasters (and humor), I would go with Scratch. Mostly because of the ease of upload and remix, and large user base. Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 1:22 PM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi Folks… If you were going to build an educational piece about disaster preparedness for possible *cross platform* worldwide distribution would you prefer to do it in Scratch or Etoys and why? The end product would need to be able to have animation, sound, possible narration, interaction and all that sort of thing. The text and sound in the end product would be translated into many target languages. The project might be done by youth with little or no prior programming experience. I am tending toward Scratch because it is easier to get started and I really like the ease and quality of animation and the sound capabilities. What do you all think? And please, no simple +1s. I am very interested in the whys. Caryl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Etoys or Scratch?
I am very concerned about undue professionalization of every aspect of the life, versus the maker/DIY/crowdsourcing approach. Kids need to share their very imperfect ideas about serious life issues - disasters, health, parenting, science... They need to share openly, and in a space where discussion can happen. They also need to learn to check and re-check anything they see in open spaces. Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 7:27 PM, Samuel Greenfeld greenf...@laptop.orgwrote: Although I cannot recommend a platform, I recommend being highly cautious about who generates and who edits material for a program which teaches disaster preparedness. Legal disclaimers will not be able to protect the author(s) if the information is blatantly incorrect, or even slightly misinterpreted. Even the experts cannot always agree about what is best and the best way to present it. For a United States based example, compare www.ready.gov www.reallyready.org. On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 6:27 PM, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.comwrote: I would not use these programs. I would actually use Prezi. The simple answer to Why is the professional look of end product. Scratch and Etoys apps look childish (on purpose!!!) - like their names imply, the idea is to mess and play with things. I just would not take disaster preparedness info seriously if it were presented in such way. However, if you are thinking specifically about GAMES about disasters (and humor), I would go with Scratch. Mostly because of the ease of upload and remix, and large user base. Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 1:22 PM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.comwrote: Hi Folks… If you were going to build an educational piece about disaster preparedness for possible *cross platform* worldwide distribution would you prefer to do it in Scratch or Etoys and why? The end product would need to be able to have animation, sound, possible narration, interaction and all that sort of thing. The text and sound in the end product would be translated into many target languages. The project might be done by youth with little or no prior programming experience. I am tending toward Scratch because it is easier to get started and I really like the ease and quality of animation and the sound capabilities. What do you all think? And please, no simple +1s. I am very interested in the whys. Caryl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Moebius Noodles Improv, free and open online class: advanced math, birth to five, starts November 1!
Hello! We are Yelena and Maria, the founders of the Moebius Noodles community and mathusiastic moms. We are inviting you to join “Moebius Noodles Improv,” a parent and educator online class, during the first three weeks of November. Click Participate button to sign up: http://p2pu.org/en/groups/moebius-noodles-improv/content/full-description/ In our previous classes, we showed quite a few games for teaching advanced math concepts to young children in a relaxing and fun way that engages the entire family. This time around, we will teach you how to create your own games that fit your child’s unique interests and learning preferences. We will give you the confidence to improvise and create math games on the fly. The class is a cooperative, peer-to-peer gathering of adventurous grown-ups who want to enjoy advanced math with babies, toddlers and young kids. Think of it more like a get-together at your favorite coffee shop than a “prim and proper” class. Here is the plan for each of the three weeks - On Tuesdays and Thursdays, you will get your improv prompt - a story or a video of a young math game, and ways you can vary it. - On Wednesdays and Fridays, you will improvise with your kids - we hope it will be a fun five or ten minutes for the whole family! You will send photos or videos of the improv to the class, and comment on others improvs. - Every photo, story, question, video you send will get a response from Yelena and Maria, as well as other class members. - We will have live online jam sessions on the first Tuesday of the class (November 1st) and also after the class ends (November 22nd), for those whose schedules allow to attend at 9:30pm Eastern US time. Why join? - *Learning: *exchange smart game know-how with like-minded parents - *Reduction of doubts and fears:* See how young math really happens in the families (worth a thousand books) - *Peer support: *Have your math parenting questions answered by peers and veterans - *Make a difference:* Each math improv story, video or photo you send, each question you pose contributes to a free and open (Community Commons) resource, for educating millions of kids (and their parents and teachers) all over the world Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Fwd: [Math 2.0] Launch of the UNESCO OER Platform and the UNESCO/COL OER Policy Guidelines
-- Forwarded message -- From: Caine, Abel a.ca...@unesco.org Date: Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 8:36 AM Subject: [Math 2.0] Launch of the UNESCO OER Platform and the UNESCO/COL OER Policy Guidelines To: mathfut...@googlegroups.com [image: Description: En_Fr_temple] ** ** *UNESCO OER LAUNCH* To all members of the global OER Community, ** ** On Tuesday 1 Nov, Ms. Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO will be officiating the launch of: ** ** 1. The UNESCO Open Educational Resources Platform 2. The UNESCO/COL Guidelines for OER in Higher Education ** ** The UNESCO *Open Educational Resources Platform* is a first-ever, innovative online Platform offering selected UNESCO publications as open educational resources allowing our global community of stakeholders to freely use, copy, adapt, and re-share. ** ** The OER Platform will be launched with an OER version of the UNESCO *Model Curricula for Journalism Education* with shared OER adaptations from the Polytechnic of Namibia and the University of Namibia. ** ** The UNESCO/COL *Guidelines on Open Educational Resources in Higher Education * outlines key issues and suggestions for integrating OER into higher education to support quality teaching and learning. The aim of this document, prepared by the Secretariat, is to encourage educational stakeholders to invest in the production, adaptation, and use of OER, and to improve the quality of curricula and teaching. ** ** The Launch is scheduled for 6:30pm Paris time (GMT-1) and will be live-streamed in: English - mms://stream.unesco.org/live/room_10_en.wmv Français - mms://stream.unesco.org/live/room_10_fr.wmv ** ** Please refer to the UNESCO OER Programme site ( www.unesco.org/webworld/en/oer) for more information. ** ** We'll be tweeting the Launch on #oerlaunch and would greatly appreciate it if you would please forward this message to all your OER colleagues, and to tweet and retweet. ** ** Please excuse the cross-postings and don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. ** ** Regards, *Abel CAINE* ** ** UNESCO OER Programme -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups MathFuture group. To post to this group, send email to mathfut...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to mathfuture+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mathfuture?hl=en. image002.jpgimage001.jpgimage003.jpg___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Math 2.0] Re: Join Oleg Gleizer, the author of Modern math for k-2 October 20th at 9:30pm ET
On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 1:21 AM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: The license is too restrictive, permitting no changes whatsoever, and forbidding use of this material in any other work. Only ShareAlike CC licenses are usable in my work. I cannot read this pdf or join this public session without exposing myself to charges of copyright infringement, since I intend to create something quite like it, based on Ken Iverson's book Arithmetic, now available under CC-BY-SA. Come on, Ed! Be brave, read it :-) We will spring you from the jail if the need arises. But seriously, let's discuss this issue as a part of the conversation today. However, I would note that Oleg Gleizer cannot copyright any of the math he covers, only the specific presentation. My first questions to teachers are, What is a number? and What is a variable? There is no such thing as a variable. There are variable names, behaving like pronouns whose essential function is to refer to something or someone different as often as we like, using several different methods for indicating the current referent, or their use as generic names without a specific current referent. Variables are not restricted to naming single numbers of whatever kind, but can refer to entire mathematical structures, including all of those listed above plus topologies, algebras, function spaces, categories, set theories, toposes, and much more. What do you call a thing here (in the phrase no such thing), as opposed to a name? I would like to explore your definition further. Naturally, we do not want to dump all of this on children of any age, but we need to know that this is all there waiting for those who become ready to advance. We must not limit our children's imaginations to just what is conventionally taught in schools. In my experience, kids love to play what if? games that extend numbers. What if you divide three by six, instead of the other way around? Just try to tell a kid you can't take square roots of negative numbers... Kids like new things, and also they like to name things, and (less so) to learn fancy names others made up. That's one reason I am interested in your definition of things and names. Other than that, the little I have read (the Table of Contents and Introduction) is excellent. On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 23:08, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.comwrote: Modern math for elementary students: An innovative, open book This is not the meaning of Open used in the Open Source Software movement. I consider it a misrepresentation of the work. I call all Creative Commons licenses open http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_content#Licenses I appreciate the fact that some movements may use different definitions of the word open. I now added the specific license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) to the description of the event, to be clearer on the matter: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/ModernMathOlegGleizer Thank you for bringing this up. Cheers, MariaD ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] How can we help kids get into the habits of looking for all possible causes and counter examples to problems?
On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 5:59 PM, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: Maria wrote: Looking back at my life, I have never had to do anything with REASONS for seasons or phases of the moon, outside of curriculum design. Have you? No, I doubt that 0.001% of us have any reason to understand these things. The reason to teach about these things is that in practicing developing and testing hypotheses, it builds up our skills to understand other systems. So this kind of material should not be rote learned, it should be investigated. As Maria suggests, it might be even better practicing hypothesis testing on systems more relevant to us. The seasons probably made more sense a century ago as a system on which to practice understanding. We were much more affected by the seasons then and lived in a far simpler world. Today, maybe we should practice understanding on the internet or television or whether the moon landing was an elaborate hoax on a sound stage. The point I am making: learning tasks, and learning questions, should have some built-in means for students testing reasonableness of their hypotheses. For example, students may plan settling Mars and investigate the role of eccentricity in seasons there and on Earth. The question, Why are there seasons? should be answered with, Why do you need to know? - which allows students to investigate the matter in some context, for themselves, and check their answers for REASONable-ness within that context. The challenge for teachers is to share our love of understanding things, not so much a love of learning but a love of understanding. The joy of building robust hypotheses of how things work. Tony, the pure joy of building robust hypotheses of how things work, just to understand, is mostly a male thing. The joy of figuring out reasons why things work, so as to make sense of personally and socially relevant contexts, is mostly a female thing. I call for balance, and for accommodations to students who prefer one over the other. PS Another challenge: why is it colder in the mountains? Tony Can you pose this as a contextualized challenge? Where understanding WHY is relevant and important to know? Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] How can we help kids get into the habits of looking for all possible causes and counter examples to problems?
On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 12:58 AM, nanon...@mediagala.com wrote: *On 02/10/2011 09:07 a.m., Maria Droujkova wrote: ...I have never had to do anything with REASONS for seasons or phases of the moon, outside of curriculum design. Have you?* --- One reason to think about phases of the moon on our normal life is the fact that people on the north hemisphere see the moon upsidedown. Or the opposite: people on the southern hemisphere see the moon upsidedown. We can use that knowledge on our normal life: On the calendar we can see the icons of phases of the mooon, but those icons were designed by northern people, with the crescent moon like a D and the Waning Moon like a C, but in the southern hemisphere is the opposite, crescent moon is a C and waning moon is a D. (the people that designs calendar on the south repeat like parrots the things that northern people designs, so they draw the moon in the opposite way) In northern hemisphere the mooon is liar, because she is a C when she is de-crescent, and she is a D when she is Crescent, but here on the south the moon tell us the truth. First of all, I did not even know this fact, let alone finding use for it. Second, why do we need to know REASONS for this fact, other than idle curiosity? I am playing devil's advocate here. I am a curious person myself, and I think pure intellectual play is a valuable thing. But it does not answer the question about the NEED to know REASONS behind moon phases. So, they work differently in different hemispheres. Duly noted... why do we need to know WHY? - For example: a child in Uruguay could take a picture of the moon and send to a child in Canada, the same day, so they can compare that fact. and maybe another child on the equator can send another picture that shows the moon on the middle, like an U. That is an exercise that children have to think, not only repeating something like parrots , things that they hear from the teacher. --- * Another fact about seasons and our normal life:* if you are on the same longitude, you don't have the sunset at the same time, ¿why is that And why are you asking? (Again, this is a curriculum design prompt; I am not questioning your motives here). ANd more interesting: on some dates of the year the sunset is on the same hour, but not all the year... ¿why? There are only two days on the year that this happens. For example, the longitude of boston is almost the same as Chile, and now the sunset on both places are almost at the same time, children can control that sending them an e-mail, o chatting. That is because it began the spring on the south and fall on the north. If you make the same experiment on Christmas, the sunset on Boston is 2 hours before that the sunset in Chile ¿why is that? If a child on BOston chat whit a child on Chile, the child on chile have the sunset, but the child on boston had the sunset 2 hours ago. the answer is the same as the answer about the season Whoa, is this obvious from the above experiments? I don't think so. I don't think seasons come into them at all, actually. : the tilt of the earth. That kind of experiment was theoretical some years ago, but now it's a normal thing with the internet and the XOs. That fact is very clear if you see it on Google earth, with the sun turned on, and you look the earth thousands of Km away, like a satellite. If you move the timeline you can see it very clearly. These are cool activities, but do they pose or answer any WHY questions? Do kids NEED to know WHY in order to successfully finish the activities? I think these activities are just prep for other, why- related activities we still need to design! Paolo Benini Montevideo ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] OLPC computers spotted on a photo from 2015
http://www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2015.htm [image: 2015 laptop technology future timeline millenium development goals africa developing world] Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Why is Scratch more popular than Etoys?
Scratch looks a bit more sleek (modern?) and is a bit easier to use. I think these bits add up. I think Scratch has easier media tools, but I may be mistaken there - maybe I just don't know how to use Etoys media tools. Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 10:04 PM, Steve Thomas sthom...@gosargon.com wrote: I have taught both Scratch and Etoys to kids and hands down most kids prefer Scratch. I also prefer Scratch for certain things, but prefer Etoys for most learning and teaching. What can we learn from Scratch (and TurtleArt et al) to improve Etoys? And vice versa what can be done to improve Scratch? . I have ideas, which I will share later, but I am curious to hear the thoughts of others (as mine add nothing to my current understanding and repeating them will simply further ingrain incomplete and incorrect assumptions and prejudices ;) Stephen P.S. I fully believe kids should learn multiple languages and am not looking for the one ring to rule them all. Each language/environment has its advantages and we need multiple. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Math 2.0] Calculize!
Wow, what a neat interface! I love how you can run the program in the same
window (see the screenshot attached). It will be extremely useful for
beginner programming courses. They also included the first three Project
Euler problems as their examples. Nice touch.
Michel Paul, do you know people who made it? We need to interview them for
the Math Future series!
Cheers,
Maria Droujkova
919-388-1721
Make math your own, to make your own math
On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 11:20 PM, michel paul pythonic.m...@gmail.comwrote:
Check out calculize.com. I discovered it a little while ago.
To define a function: f = (x,y) - x^2 + y^2
To evaluate: show f(3,4).
If you exclude the arguments: show f
you get: *function (x, y) { return add(pow(x, 2), pow(y, 2)); }*.
That's really cool.* *Provides a great way to discuss functions both
mathematically and computationally.
- Michel Paul
attachment: CalculizeGraphicsSample.png___
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Re: [IAEP] [NaturalMath] Looking for Concrete Fraction Experiences
On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 9:55 PM, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.comwrote: I think scaling can correspond both to addition and to multiplication. Correction: to DIVISION and to multiplication. Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] multiplication and division as scaling (was Re: [NaturalMath] Looking for Concrete Fraction Experiences)
On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 12:04 PM, David Corking li...@dcorking.com wrote: Maria Droujkova wrote: I think scaling can correspond both to division and to multiplication. You can scale up and down - also by numbers over and under one if you think more algebraically. Absolutely. In my observation, many 7-year-olds are able to think algebraically about multiplication and division of natural numbers (1,2,3,...). Since they simultaneously discover common fractions, place value, and decimal money, it won't be long before they have all the building blocks in place to confidently multiply by various kinds of fractions. And with babies and toddlers, you can introduce scaling qualitatively or semi-qualitatively - especially with software. The plus is that they explore grounding for multiplication, division and fractions all together, within one connected conceptual field. This can be easily extended into place value systems (as a way to keep track of exponentiation) and then decimals. The minus is they won't get the big surprise in their life from their first multiplication makes smaller example :-) Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [NaturalMath] Looking for Concrete Fraction Experiences
I think scaling can correspond both to addition and to multiplication. You can scale up and down - also by numbers over and under one if you think more algebraically. Cheers, Maria Droujkova 1-919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math On Jul 15, 2011, at 9:28 AM, David Corking li...@dcorking.com wrote: Rebecca Hanson wrote (at http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath/msg/8fa9efef95a1dd68 ) : Essentially I think there are 3 common primative structures for division: Splitting/how many each (for one) (e.g. to do 486 divided by 2 - most people woudl split 468 into two parts) Chunking/how many of the divisor in the divident (e.g. in calculation 39 divided by 13 most people would think - how many 13s in 39) I agree. I read that the terms that some teachers now use are partition (sharing equally among a given number) and quotition (splitting into groups of equal sizes.) I found this Australian explanation very helpful: http://www.education.vic.gov.au/studentlearning/teachingresources/maths/mathscontinuum/number/N22502P.htm Scaling (insights into equivalent divisions - badly neglected in much western teaching). I feel quite strongly about this, but I won't defend it further here: scaling is Multiplication. Division is the Inverse of Multiplication, so it is the inverse of scaling. For me, I am afraid I am far too old to recall my childhood perceptions of multiplication and division. That said, for me, scaling is the most powerful concept to guide me in extending multiplication, and division, from natural numbers (1,2,3) beyond fractions to all real numbers. Regulars at naturalmath and iaep are probably already familiar with Keith Devlin's 2008 column that inspired my strong feelings: http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_09_08.html ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Looking for Concrete Fraction Experiences
On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 3:38 AM, moku...@earthtreasury.org wrote: Special bonus points for anyone who can come up with an example of division with fractions (ex: 1/3 divided by 1/2) 1/2 goes into 1 twice. When the divisor OR the quotient are whole, people do use fraction division in life. Many people will conceptualize How many halves are there in three pizzas? or even How many quarters are there in three halves? (the last one is a stretch) as division. However, after messing with fraction division for about a year (see http://naturalmath.wikispaces.com/Divide+a+fraction+by+a+fraction ) I believe people who don't have PURE MATH purposes avoid conceptualizing division of a fraction by a fraction, when it's not immediately clear the result is a whole number. Instead, they conceptualize it as TWO operations (multiplication and division) where at least one number is whole. The pure math purposes have to do with extensions of operations. In mathematics, figuring out how operations work for all types of numbers and even non-number entities is a very strong value. As such, we want to subtract greater numbers from smaller ones, take square roots of negatives, and multiply anything whatsoever (zeros, ordered arrays, transformations, etc.) This extension value definitely tramps any muggle values such as cognitive accessibility or ease of calculation. There are strong mathematical reasons for holding the extension value dear. We just have to realize these reasons don't necessarily apply to eating pizzas, or even to math-rich professional practices such as nursing (let me know if you want Proportional Reasoning in Nursing Practice study). In fact it goes into any whole number N by dividing N objects into 2 pieces each, giving 2N pieces. Similarly, it goes into 1/3 twice 1/3 There - you conceptualize it through whole-number steps. These steps are entirely sufficient for dividing pizzas. You only need to re-conceptualize these steps (at a significant cognitive cost, as my teaching experiments indicate, if you go beyond the example of 1/2) as division by a fraction if you are going for the mathematical value of figuring how fraction division works. There are no utilitarian or artistic purposes, that I could find in more than a year of looking for them, in conceptualizing the separate steps as division by a fraction. In practice, nurses, pizza cooks, carpenters and so on don't really divide by fractions - they work with numerators and denominators separately. I would suggest exploring reasons behind the math value of stretching operations, for example, talking about how inefficient it would be to program operations separately for different types of variables. Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math. , or 2/3. If you divide a circle into sixths, you can easily see that a third of the circle (two pieces) is two-thirds of half the circle (three pieces), in just the same way that, for example, two beads is 1/4 of eight beads. It has been done in detail, and is available on various OER sites, some of which are given at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Open_Education_Resources ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [NaturalMath] Re: Looking for Concrete Fraction Experiences
On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 9:46 AM, David Corking li...@dcorking.com wrote: In practice, nurses, pizza cooks, carpenters and so on don't really divide by fractions - they work with numerators and denominators separately. This may not be the case when dealing with decimal fractions or percentages, when they might wish to crank a formula, or hit the division key on a calculator. I agree completely, and I should have specified this case. People conceptualize decimals as single numbers for all operations, unlike fractions that are considered pairs of numbers for many purposes. Therefore I think it is worthwhile to give students a chance to develop a mental picture of division by a fraction, even if they choose to forget it later, and rely on the algorithm. Do you teach division by decimals through division by fractions? Maybe some parts of it, e.g. why division by 0.01 is the same as multiplication by 100? I see from your wiki page that you might not agree with me that percentages and decimals are special cases of fractions. However, at least in some curricula, fraction arithmetic is taught first, and the others follow. A couple of examples: (1) if a toy car completes a five foot track in three-quarters of a second, what is its speed? (2) if you want to take 20% sales tax, or value added tax, off an invoice to find the pre-tax price, then you divide by 1.2 (3) devise a formula to convert lap times measured in problem (1) into speeds in miles per hour, or kilometres if you prefer. I think we will find numerous other examples in science, engineering and finance. Yes, grown-ups divide by decimals (as you said, usually using computers) all the time. Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Please review E-Book Enlightenment
to software and hardware for making books. Screenshots and photos of key steps make guides quick and easy to use. Thank you, James! Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math. On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 11:05 AM, James Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: I think I have the book E-Book Enlightenment in a pretty good place to think about publishing it on the Internet Archive and on the Kindle Store. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] another book
On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 12:32 PM, Steve Thomas sthom...@gosargon.comwrote: Thank you. In your book (Davis chapter) you write: The following anecdote captures the root of the problem. A teacher who had taken part in a workshop on discovery learning came back almost in tears complaining that the students had discovered it wrong. Bob Davis himself and his virtuoso disciples could work with a class of children, sensitively guiding the discovery process. In particular, they could pick out the germs of good insight in what the less understanding teacher saw as simply wrong. The problem is deep: People brought up with a view of mathematics as discrete facts to be mastered do not easily discard this view. The reformer is faced with the problem: We cannot tell teachers all they need to know about teaching—we must choose. Indeed, we must choose not merely content, but also the kind of content, and in fact even the media by which and form in which this knowledge is presented. The problem is compounded by what happens in the next year with untrained teachers. Do you know where I can find copies of the scripts Bob Davis used as part of the Madison project? The Robert Davis center has a grant to make their incredible resource library available online. I am not sure if these transcripts will be a part of it, but it would make sense. I think kids need to discover enough to believe they could, given enough time (200k years?) and support, discover everything. Deciding just when this enlightened state is achieved is very tricky and a part of the virtuosity of teaching. Cynthia, thank you for the book - I am sending information on to my groups! Cheers, Maria Droujkova Make math your own, to make your own math. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Keith Devlin's open online QA on math games: Monday at 8pm ET
Mathematics Education for a New Era: Video Games as a Medium for LearningJoin Keith Devlin in a question and answer session about his math game projects and the new book. *How to join* - Follow this link at the time of the event: * http://tinyurl.com/math20eventhttps://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.FCAF787B38E30D58F943EB7232EE27 * - Monday, April 11th 2011 we will meet in the LearnCentral online room at 5:00pm Pacific, 8:00pm Eastern time. WorldClock for your time zone.http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=4day=11year=2011hour=20min=0sec=0p1=207 - 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 the book [image: MathematicsEducationForANewEra.jpg] Stanford mathematician and NPR Math Guy Keith Devlin explains why, fun aside, video games are the ideal medium to teach middle-school math. Aimed primarily at teachers and education researchers, but also of interest to game developers who want to produce videogames for mathematics education, *Mathematics Education for a New Era: Video Games as a Medium for Learning* describes exactly what is involved in designing and producing successful math educational videogames that foster the innovative mathematical thinking skills necessary for success in a global economy. Keith writes in his March 2011 MAA columnhttp://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_11.html : One problem with the majority of math ed video games on the market today that will quickly strike anyone who takes a look, is that they are little more than a forced marriage of video game technology and traditional mathematics pedagogy. In particular, the player of such a game generally encounters the math in symbolic form, often by way of a transparent screen overlay on top of the gameworld. But video-game worlds are not paper-and-pencil symbolic representations; they are imaginary *worlds*. They are meant to be lived in and experienced. Putting symbolic expressions in a math ed game environment is to confuse mathematical thinking with its static, symbolic representation on a sheet of paper. It's like the early would-be aviators who tried to fly by building * ornithopters* - machines that added flapping wings to four-wheeled cycles. Those pioneers confused flying with the only instances of flying which they had observed - birds and insects. Humans achieved flying only when they went back to basics and analyzed the notion of flying separately from the one particular implementation they were familiar with. Similarly, to build truly successful math ed video games, we have to separate the activity of *doing*mathematics, which is a form of thinking, from its familiar representation in terms of symbolic expressions. Event Host [image: KeithDevlin.jpg]Dr. *Keith Devlin* is a co-founder and Executive Director of the university's H-STAR http://hstar.stanford.edu/institute, a co-founder of the Stanford Media X http://mediax.stanford.edu/ research network, and a Senior Researcher at CSLI http://www-csli.stanford.edu/. He is a World Economic Forum Fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His current research is focused on the use of different media to teach and communicate mathematics to diverse audiences. He also works on the design of information/reasoning systems for intelligence analysis. Other research interests include: theory of information, models of reasoning, applications of mathematical techniques in the study of communication, and mathematical cognition. He has written 30 books and over 80 published research articles. Recipient of the Pythagoras Prize, the Peano Prize, the Carl Sagan Award, and the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics Communications Award. In 2003, he was recognized by the California State Assembly for his innovative work and longtime service in the field of mathematics and its relation to logic and linguistics. He is the Math Guy on National Public Radio. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] TODAY is the correct day Re: OER Glue online event Wednesday, March 30th at 9:30pm ET
Hello, Sorry about the typo - the correct day is today, March 30th, 9:30pm Eastern US time. Cheers, Maria Droujkova Make math your own, to make your own math. On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.comwrote: Join Joel Duffin and Justin Ball, creators of the OER Glue platformhttp://www.oerglue.com/, in discussing the latest in open course design architecture. *How to join* - Follow this link at the time of the event: * http://tinyurl.com/math20eventhttps://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.FCAF787B38E30D58F943EB7232EE27 * - Wednesday, May 30th 2011 we will meet in the LearnCentral online room at 6:30pm Pacific, 9:30pm Eastern time. WorldClock for your time zone.http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=3day=30year=2011hour=21min=30sec=0p1=207 - 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 OER Glue [image: external image chalkboard.jpg] OER Glue is a *uniquely open approach* to online learning that lets content be used where it already resides rather than requiring it to be copied into a new system. OER Glue can be used to *efficiently assemble courses* and teach online by “glueing together” open education resources (OERs) and integrating with popular online services including Google Documents, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and discussion and assessment tools. OER Glue’s web browser add-on approach allows it to wrap context and navigation tools around online content and to *integrate content and services from multiple sources in a coherent manner*. In order to ensure that resources remain available, OER Glue integrates with services such as internet archive. The following scenarios describe the experience of using OER Glue: Student Use of OER Glue http://blog.oerglue.com/student-use-of-oer-glue/| Teacher Use of OER Glue http://blog.oerglue.com/teacher-use-of-oer-glue/ Key aspects of OER Glue are: - *Student engagement* – OER Glue increases student engagement and satisfaction by supporting online instruction that utilizes timely, authentic content and popular Web 2.0 tools. - *Instructional effectiveness* – OER Glue supports effective instruction by helping teachers find and develop learning activities and assessments that are aligned with their instructional goals. - *Teacher efficiency* – OER Glue helps teachers efficiently assemble, deliver, and update online courses. - *OER* – OER Glue helps authors easily find and adapt relevant high quality free online resources for their courses. - *Glue* – People are frustrated with the poor user experience of existing systems that require you to copy your content into them, but enthusiastic about the new Web 2.0 tools that continue to emerge. OER Glue lets you use content where it already is and to easily integrate third party tools in a coherent manner to teach online. Event Hosts [image: Joel_Duffin.jpg][image: justinball.jpg]*Joel Duffin*, CEO of OER Glue, is a entrepreneur and software developer with a love for designing software and understanding how people learn. Joel enjoys scheming about how to design and leverage software systems and online content to encourage youth to engage in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Joel blogs http://www.joelduffin.com/ about technology and STEM education. *Justin Ball*, CTO of OER Glue, is an entrepreneur with several successful startups and one major failure under his belt. He became involved in the OER space under the direction of David Wiley at OSLO and then COSL and participated in the construction of the various projects generated there. He used to write C++ and .Net then moved to python and finally found Ruby. In the rare moments when he isn't writing code, talking about code or measuring his code productivity in profanity per hour, you can find him on his bike in the mountains or on the roads surrounding Cache Valley. Justin can be found pontificating at http://www.justinball.com ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] OER Glue online event Wednesday, March 30th at 9:30pm ET
Join Joel Duffin and Justin Ball, creators of the OER Glue platformhttp://www.oerglue.com/, in discussing the latest in open course design architecture. *How to join* - Follow this link at the time of the event: * http://tinyurl.com/math20eventhttps://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.FCAF787B38E30D58F943EB7232EE27 * - Wednesday, May 30th 2011 we will meet in the LearnCentral online room at 6:30pm Pacific, 9:30pm Eastern time. WorldClock for your time zone.http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=3day=30year=2011hour=21min=30sec=0p1=207 - 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 OER Glue [image: external image chalkboard.jpg] OER Glue is a *uniquely open approach* to online learning that lets content be used where it already resides rather than requiring it to be copied into a new system. OER Glue can be used to *efficiently assemble courses* and teach online by “glueing together” open education resources (OERs) and integrating with popular online services including Google Documents, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and discussion and assessment tools. OER Glue’s web browser add-on approach allows it to wrap context and navigation tools around online content and to *integrate content and services from multiple sources in a coherent manner*. In order to ensure that resources remain available, OER Glue integrates with services such as internet archive. The following scenarios describe the experience of using OER Glue: Student Use of OER Glue http://blog.oerglue.com/student-use-of-oer-glue/ | Teacher Use of OER Glue http://blog.oerglue.com/teacher-use-of-oer-glue/ Key aspects of OER Glue are: - *Student engagement* – OER Glue increases student engagement and satisfaction by supporting online instruction that utilizes timely, authentic content and popular Web 2.0 tools. - *Instructional effectiveness* – OER Glue supports effective instruction by helping teachers find and develop learning activities and assessments that are aligned with their instructional goals. - *Teacher efficiency* – OER Glue helps teachers efficiently assemble, deliver, and update online courses. - *OER* – OER Glue helps authors easily find and adapt relevant high quality free online resources for their courses. - *Glue* – People are frustrated with the poor user experience of existing systems that require you to copy your content into them, but enthusiastic about the new Web 2.0 tools that continue to emerge. OER Glue lets you use content where it already is and to easily integrate third party tools in a coherent manner to teach online. Event Hosts [image: Joel_Duffin.jpg][image: justinball.jpg]*Joel Duffin*, CEO of OER Glue, is a entrepreneur and software developer with a love for designing software and understanding how people learn. Joel enjoys scheming about how to design and leverage software systems and online content to encourage youth to engage in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Joel blogs http://www.joelduffin.com/ about technology and STEM education. *Justin Ball*, CTO of OER Glue, is an entrepreneur with several successful startups and one major failure under his belt. He became involved in the OER space under the direction of David Wiley at OSLO and then COSL and participated in the construction of the various projects generated there. He used to write C++ and .Net then moved to python and finally found Ruby. In the rare moments when he isn't writing code, talking about code or measuring his code productivity in profanity per hour, you can find him on his bike in the mountains or on the roads surrounding Cache Valley. Justin can be found pontificating at http://www.justinball.com ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] When teaching restrains discovery
On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 5:03 AM, Yioryos Asprobounitis mavrot...@yahoo.comwrote: I do not know if anyone did read the actual scientific paper in the journal Cognition that initiated this discussion (needs subscription) but it basically provides quantitative evidence that: a) preschoolers, if they are formally taught only one function, also assume this as _evidence_ that other functions are missing(!) and b) that the instructions can be direct (to them) or indirect (to other kids) but are _ignored_ if they are towards adults ( a very interesting point, I think). I would like to note that there is very strong evidence that these types of behaviors depend on the culture and the family. For example, in families that practice attachment parenting (and these kids are unlikely to attend a preschool) children are much more adult-oriented. Nurturing cultures and warrior cultures (those that isolate babies from parents, for example) produce different effects in child-adult relationships. A kid who's attended a Reggio Emilia preschool for a while will have very different behaviors from a kid who's attended a Japanese test-prep preschool. Cheers, Maria Droujkova Make math your own, to make your own math. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] When teaching restrains discovery
On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 5:59 AM, Yioryos Asprobounitis mavrot...@yahoo.com wrote: The study involved 149 (American) preschoolers (mean age: 60 months, range: 48–72 months) (that) were recruited in a metropolitan Science Museum. Most children were white and middleclass, but a range of ethnicities resembling the diversity of the population was represented. This does not describe a meaningful population for such a study. There are huge differences, for example, between home-grown kids and institution-grown kids that can both come from middle-class families. Cheers, Maria Droujkova Make math your own, to make your own math. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Live Math 2.0 event with Alan Kay: Important Questions in Education Research, Saturday 2pm ET
*Important Questions in Education Research* [image: Viewpoints_Research_Institute.png] During the event, we will discuss the list of education research questions Alan Kay considers fundamental, ways questions can be addressed, and reasons why few researchers try. ** Login All Math 2.0 events are free and open to the public. Information about all events in the series is here: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/events Saturday, August 7th 2010 we will meet in the LearnCentral public Elluminate room at 11am Pacific - 2pm Eastern time. *WorldClock for your time zone.http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=8day=7year=2010hour=14min=0sec=0p1=207 * [image: webinar_buttons.png]https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.FCAF787B38E30D58F943EB7232EE27 *To join:* - Follow this link: *http://tinyurl.com/math20eventhttps://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.FCAF787B38E30D58F943EB7232EE27 * - 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 - You will find yourself in a virtual room. An organizer will be there to greet you, starting about half an hour before the event. If this is your first Elluminate event, consider coming a few minutes earlier to check out the technology. The room opens half an hour before the event. Agenda During the event, we will discuss Alan's list of important questions in education research, and his vision of how to address the questions. Partial list of questions: - Should various levels of a child's society be able to choose some of what a child should learn? If so, what and why? - What kinds of learning are we going to try to help the child accomplish? Case-based recognition of situations, and actions to take? Deep understanding and fluency that resembles practitioners in a subject area? Etc. - What is the spectrum (or the dimensions) of children's abilities to learn a wide variety of subjects (e.g. from sports to physics)? - What is the similar spectrum (or dimensions) of internal and external motivations for putting effort into learning various subjects? - How can we ascertain what kinds of help are needed by the different kinds of children? - What are the trade-offs and pathways of teaching children how to learn vs. teaching subject matter? - What are the best kinds of situations/environmens/processes to help children learn difficult to learn ideas? ReferencesAlan Kay's reading list http://procod.com/preda/kay.html The Power Of The Context http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf - Alan Kay's tribute to his research community [image: pov-cover-smaller.png] Points of View: A Tribute to Alan Kay book http://vpri.org/pov/ Event Host *[image: Alan_Kay.jpg]Alan Kay* is one of the earliest pioneers of object-oriented programming, personal computing, and graphical user interfaces. His contributions have been recognized with the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering “for the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers,” the Alan M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery “for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing,” and the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation “for creation of the concept of modern personal computing and contribution to its realization.” This work was done in the rich context of ARPA and Xerox PARC with many talented colleagues. He has been a Xerox Fellow, Chief Scientist of Atari, Apple Fellow, Disney Fellow, and HP Senior Fellow. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at UCLA. In 2001 he founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to children, learning and advanced systems research. http://www.vpri.org At Viewpoints Research Institute he and his colleagues continue to explore advanced systems and programming design by aiming for a “Moore’s Law” advance in software creation of many orders of magnitude. Kay and Viewpoints are also deeply involved in the One Laptop Per Child initiative. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Fwd: CSCL 2011 Conference Announcement Call for Papers
-- Forwarded message -- From: Gerry Stahl ge...@gerrystahl.net Date: Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 10:12 AM Subject: CSCL 2011 Conference Announcement Call for Papers To: Cc: Gerry Stahl ge...@gerrystahl.net, Naomi Miyake nmiy...@p.u-tokyo.ac.jp, Hans Spada hans.sp...@psychologie.uni-freiburg.de, Nancy Law n...@hku.hk *International Conference of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL 2011)* *July 4-8, 2011, in Hong Kong -- http://www.isls.org/cscl2011* *“Connecting computer-supported collaborative learning to policy and practice**”*** Host: University of Hong Kong, Centre for Information Technology in Education (CITE) Conference Location: University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China - *July 4-5, 2011*Pre-conference workshops *July 6-8, 2011*Main conference sessions *July 10-15, 2011*Post-conference organized travel to educational sites in Mainland China *== Paper and Poster submission deadline: November 1, 2010 ==* Further information and proposal submissions: http://www.isls.org/cscl2011 - *** CONFERENCE VENUE *** - Since 1995, the CSCL conference has provided a stimulating and friendly venue for people interested in the multi-disciplinary issues of computer-supported collaborative learning to meet in a relaxed atmosphere with a variety of formal and informal events. Structured activities and social occasions promote interpersonal relations and knowledge building. The conference’s human size and structure facilitates getting to know people and learning about cutting-edge ideas in educational practice, technology design, CSCL theory, and diverse research approaches. Hong Kong is an exciting crossroads of the world, a bridge between East and West. It is easily accessible from Europe and the Americas by direct flights. The culinary capital of Canton, it offers hotels for every budget. The University of Hong Kong—one of Asia’s premier universities—is located within walking distance of the heart of Hong Kong. A former British colony, Hong Kong uses English widely. CSCL 2011 is designed to offer an affordable global experience, including a post-conference group tour of educational and tourist sites in Mainland China—bring your family and students. - *** CONFERENCE THEME *** - The CSCL 2011 conference theme, “*Connecting computer-supported collaborative learning to policy and practice*,” builds on CSCL 2009 to examine whether and how CSCL practices can bring deep changes to formal and informal educational practices at all levels, and contribute to educational improvement at a system level by informing education policy. This theme will be addressed by keynote talks, symposia, trips to schools, and other events. - *** IMPORTANT DATES *** - · *November 1, 2010*: Long Paper, Short Paper, Poster Symposium submissions due · *December 15, 2010*: Pre-conference Workshop, Tutorial, Interactive Event Demonstration proposals due · *February 15, 2011*: Early Career Doctoral Consortium applications due · *July 4-8, 2011*: CSCL 2011 Conference in Hong Kong Details on submission requirements and formats are posted at the CSCL 2011 web site, http://www.isls.org/cscl2011. CSCL uses a computer-supported proposal submission and review process. - *** PAPERS *** - Conference submissions are welcome on all topics of CSCL research. To be considered for inclusion in the conference, all long papers, short papers and poster papers must be submitted by November 1, 2010. They must be complete and properly formatted when submitted. Long papers are limited to 8 pages; short papers are limited to 5 pages; posters are limited to 2 pages. The Program Committee reserves the right to determine whether a submitted paper is accepted for presentation as a long paper, short paper, or poster. All accepted papers will be published in the proceedings. Long papers will be presented in paper sessions. Short papers may be presented in an interactive format, with brief presentations and then round-table discussions. Poster papers will be displayed in large interactive poster sessions. - *** SYMPOSIA *** - Symposia are welcome on all issues of CSCL. To be considered for inclusion in the conference, symposia proposals must be submitted by November 1, 2010. They must be complete and properly formatted when submitted. Symposia are limited to a total of 8 pages. Symposia should be interactive, collaborative events about a specific issue. Discussion among members of a panel and with the audience should be moderated to focus on certain
[IAEP] Alexandre Borovik's collaborative book, Shadows of the Truth
I came across Alexandre's project via Alex Bogomolny of Cut the Knot. I am reading the current version http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~avb/ST.pdfwith growing fascination. Please help Alexandre make it even stronger by contributing to his inquiry. From what is already in the book, there are all indications it will powerfully support families and educators who want to help their kids work on advanced math early. Here is Alexandre's request. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. ~*~*~*~*~* I send this request to every person interested in mathematics or mathematical education and who I have managed to get in contact with, personally or via networking. I am writing a book on mathematical thinking, and I ask you to kindly pass to me your recollections of challenges you encountered in your early learning of mathematics. Such stories provide a fascinating insight into the psychology of mathematical thinking. One example of what I am looking for: A girl aged 6 easily solved “put a number in the box” problems of the type 7 + [ ] = 12, by counting how many 1’s she had to add to 7 in order to get 12 but struggled with [ ] + 6 = 11, because she did not know where to start. Worse, she felt for years that she could not communicate her difficulty to adults. This example is one of many from my forthcoming book “Shadows of the Truth: Metamathematics of Elementary Mathematics”, available for free download from http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~avb/ST.pdf It is a follow-up to my recent book Mathematics under the Microscope, AMS, 2010, available from http://www.mrlonline.org/bookstore-getitem/item=MBK-71 Please also give me the following details: [*]Your gender. [*] Your age when a particular episode happened. [*] What was the language of mathematical instruction? Was it different from your mother tongue? Please send your stories to boro...@manchester.ac.uk. My warmest thanks! Alexandre Borovik ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Cut the Knot! creator Alexander Bogomolny live Wednesday, May 19, at 9:30pm
anxiety I hope to create a resource that would help learn, if not math itself, then, at least, ways to appreciate its beauty. Working in reverse, if it's hard to forget an unpleasant experience, it's as hard to forget a pleasant one. Learning starts from wondering, and another purpose of this site is to serve as a resource for things, simple but curious, related to Mathematics. I do not intentionally classify topics according to their simplicity. There must be an element of discovery involved to enhance a learning experience. This site is a Miscellany. A few topics are so related that they cannot be treated independently. Make your own selection that, I hope, may lead to other discoveries. ~*~*~*~*~* Event Host: Alexander Bogomolny is the principal at CTK, a software development and consulting company maintaining Cut the Knot web site. This project combines his professional interests in mathematics, mathematics education, and software development. In the past, he worked as a professor of mathematics at Rutgers, University of Iowa, and Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Alexander also wrote a monthly Cut the Knot column for the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) Online. Alexander also worked as the Vice President of Software Development at CompuDoc, NJ and senior software developer at Lake Kinneret Research Laboratory and Ben Gurion University, Israel. His research career started in the early seventies at Moscow Institute of Electronic Control Devices, where he worked on numerical methods and nonlinear programming. ~*~*~*~*~* Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Response to Intervention - Is this being used outside the US?
On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 1:48 AM, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: The strongest argument against is that any easily administered testing is biased towards lower level skills (as defined in Bloom's taxonomy). That would be OK, depending on how the data is used. Any attempt to modify teaching in response, biases the teaching towards the lower level skills. In the Australian case, schools will be forced to confine their teaching to lower order skills to maintain their ranking, preserve enrolments and avoid criticism and funding cuts. In the case of RTI, it risks defining student progress by a narrow subset of education skills and overly concentrating teaching on this narrow subset. Tony Tony, This is my perennial response to the existing programs of this sort. When I plan interventions, I start with meaning and significance of math in the life of the person, their family and their social networks. Then some major concepts areas that can support and advance these meanings become apparent. From there, skills and tasks within concept areas can be mapped and developed. What is highly problematic is that all the existing mainstream heavy testing machinery is at the level of skills. And what I am doing on the individual basis is not currently scalable. I can't even explain many parts of this highly intuitive, expertise-based process. To address this problem, I just started to work on a crowdsourced rubric that will probe personal meaning and significance of math, and later used during interventions to help people track growth of math's significance in their lives. I am now polling local parents who work with me, with some very fruitful initial brainstorming happening among them. I am also meeting with several people who have large QA sites or projects that can be used to aggregate sparse info for crowdsourced projects. This may not happen fast, because of my other tasks such as the math game design project, but we will see what happens. I want this tool to measure the impact of my projects, which we currently observe in a purely qualitative, case-study manner. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Response to Intervention - Is this being used outside the US?
On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 8:30 AM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.comwrote: On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 8:08 AM, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.comwrote: On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 1:48 AM, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: The strongest argument against is that any easily administered testing is biased towards lower level skills (as defined in Bloom's taxonomy). That would be OK, depending on how the data is used. Any attempt to modify teaching in response, biases the teaching towards the lower level skills. In the Australian case, schools will be forced to confine their teaching to lower order skills to maintain their ranking, preserve enrolments and avoid criticism and funding cuts. In the case of RTI, it risks defining student progress by a narrow subset of education skills and overly concentrating teaching on this narrow subset. Tony Tony, This is my perennial response to the existing programs of this sort. When I plan interventions, I start with meaning and significance of math in the life of the person, their family and their social networks. Then some major concepts areas that can support and advance these meanings become apparent. From there, skills and tasks within concept areas can be mapped and developed. What is highly problematic is that all the existing mainstream heavy testing machinery is at the level of skills. And what I am doing on the individual basis is not currently scalable. I can't even explain many parts of this highly intuitive, expertise-based process. To address this problem, I just started to work on a crowdsourced rubric that will probe personal meaning and significance of math, and later used during interventions to help people track growth of math's significance in their lives. I am now polling local parents who work with me, with some very fruitful initial brainstorming happening among them. I am also meeting with several people who have large QA sites or projects that can be used to aggregate sparse info for crowdsourced projects. This may not happen fast, because of my other tasks such as the math game design project, but we will see what happens. I want this tool to measure the impact of my projects, which we currently observe in a purely qualitative, case-study manner. Maria, I am going to shift the conversation back to reading because there just isn't enough data on math yet to talk about it. But I'm making the assumption that the neurology has an analog in math. Although I of course agree with the need for meaning and significance there is also a risk in your approach. As a dyslectic let me tell you how painful this type of approach can be. When you can't read or spell or remember things the way other people can and you really are motivated, want to, understand why you should etc. Then people keep over and over again talking and working with you on motivation, understanding of meaning and significance etc. let me tell you first hand this is very hard on the child's self image. You are sending the message that if only you wanted to you could do this just like everyone else. The science says that isn't true for all children. The fMRIs show that dyslectic children are not using their brain in the same way and that these difference continue into adulthood and continue to have effects even after the child has learned to read using different pathways. So one approach has the risk of ignoring higher level thinking and reasoning. The other approach has the risk of ignoring actual malfunctions in low level brain based thinking. And if caught at an early age, and the correct interventions are done, these issues can be mitigated significantly. To me its clear that we need to stop arguing about which approach is better and put on our engineer hats and figure out how to efficiently do both. Caroline, This is an excellent point and a great personal story to go with it. I am going to refer to that image when talking about the issues. Good BALANCE between three directions is crucial. The three directions for math are meaning and significance; conceptual understanding; and procedural fluency. I believe similar directions exist for other areas, as well, though they may have different names. For math, there are plenty of tools to measure procedural fluency AND effects of interventions on procedural fluency. There are also some tools for measuring conceptual understanding, though fewer, most significantly problem solving tools, project-based rubrics, and essay-type tools (explain why...). There are motivation tools and anxiety tools, as well, somewhat reflecting on meaning and significance. I am now working on this particular meaning and significance measure tool not because I consider it more important than other tools, but because I'd like it to exist so I can use it together with other tools. Thank you for the engineering hat reminder. I will try my best to always talk about the balance
Re: [IAEP] Math on Web
Gerald, I talked to Nibipedia people about this. Here is the reply: --- On Sugar. Our hope all along was that we would build a giant semi automated aggregation tool that would make a giant video/text database that would work in Sugar. We're much closer than we've ever been to opening up for crowdsourcing. If you know some folks at Sugarlabs, we definitely would like to talk to them. In particular, we'd love to show them our upcoming iPhone App. Troy CEO Nibipedia 612 747 2730 --- I am CCing Troy and Terry, as well. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:47 AM, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.comwrote: Gerald, Check out Nibipedia for that sort of software. The creators may be open for collaboration. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 7:53 PM, Gerald Ardito gerald.ard...@gmail.comwrote: Caroline, Something else that may be worth considering is the development of an activity like Info Slicer, where teachers can provide annotations for the videos, and/or prompts for notes or reflections. Gerald On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 3:41 PM, Caroline Meeks solutiongr...@gmail.comwrote: On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 12:22 AM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.comwrote: Anybody know about this? I wonder whether he would be willing to let us adapt his materials to laptops. Good idea! What ideas do you have about how we would adopt it? We could start by asking him if he would make them CC license. I'm traveling to the Bay Area next month. If we can get some good ideas I'm happy to maybe team up with Cherry take him out to coffee and ask. Caroline ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] (fwd) Open Source Schools Think Tank [March, in the UK]
Interesting you should mention this just now, Sascha. After yesterday's meeting, am working on the community page for the Math 2.0 Interest Group at the moment. I can get a picture and a description from the site. What I need from the Sugar community members: Names of contact people: leaders and other community members responsible for, or habitually responding to, communications from the outside Keywords or tags describing the project's relationships with math. Maybe a few active people can respond to this email. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 6:17 AM, Sascha Silbe sascha-ml-ui-sugar-i...@silbe.org wrote: Hi! There are a lot of projects listed we cooperate with (GCompris, Scratch, Ooo4Kids, ...), but I can't see Sugar mentioned anywhere on their page. Maybe someone should tell them about us? CU Sascha -- http://sascha.silbe.org/ http://www.infra-silbe.de/ -- Forwarded message -- From: Bill Kendrick n...@sonic.net To: Tux Paint tuxpaint-de...@lists.sourceforge.net, Schoolforge Discuss schoolforge-disc...@schoolforge.net, Tux Math tuxmath-de...@lists.sourceforge.net Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 13:19:38 -0800 Subject: [Tuxpaint-devel] Fwd: Open Source Schools Think Tank [March, in the UK] Caroline Ford of Tux Paint received this, and I suggested passing it along to the T4K lists to see if anyone in the neighborhood would be interested in attending. (Also including Schoolforge). Miles -- I hope that's ok! Thanks for contacting us good luck! -bill! (in California) - Forwarded message from Caroline Ford - From: Miles Berry mi...@opensourceschools.org.uk Date: 28 February 2010 16:33:30 GMT To: caroline.ford.w...@googlemail.com Subject: Open Source Schools Think Tank Dear Caroline, The Open Source Schools team would be delighted if you could join us for a cross-sector 'think tank' event on open source in schools on Friday 26th March. We would like to bring together a few of the key members of our own community, including both teachers, technical staff and those with more strategic roles together with representatives of the wider open source world to explore a few common concerns from a range of perspectives, and would be very pleased if you were able to participate in this meeting. We'd like your input on what could and should be done now to support and extend the use of open source applications in education, at a range of scales from handheld devices and open source on Windows, to region wide web-based services. We'd also appreciate some input on the future direction of the Open Source Schools community, in particular addressing why you chose to become involved and what could be done to increase participation amongst those in a similar role to yourselves. Our intention is that the day will result in a set of practical recommendations to Becta for how to strengthen the position of open source in the schools technology ecosystem, together with some idea of the role that the Open Source Schools community might play in this. The 'think tank' will meet at the British Academy, Carlton House Terrace, in their Council Room. We're confident that venue will be conducive to convivial conversations. We have in mind running the meeting from 10 am to 4:30 pm. I do hope you'll be able to attend. Best wishes, Miles. PS - we've been using TuxPaint with our undergraduate and PGCE teacher training students at Roehampton - it's been universally popular, and I suspect more than a few will be taking it into school with them. Many thanks! -- Miles Berry Senior Lecturer, ICT | Roehampton University | roehampton.ac.uk | 0208 392 3241 Community Manager | Open Source Schools | opensourceschools.org.uk | 07779 628656 Blogger | milesberry.net Twit | twitter.com/mberrys, Miles. - End forwarded message - -- -bill! Sent from my computer -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Tuxpaint-devel mailing list tuxpaint-de...@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tuxpaint-devel -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJLj5arAAoJELpz82VMF3DaVLEH/RlCb7KCj4Tn4tOxnMIib1Oh 1yuRjNkehegwA+jnyapNDal2xd9cFFqffsFbk+Ctq2b93K2s9er1TcjyY7IQPgA2 lo1RZa5+2ugpJUqBT/rREnbJBC0XERuptETb02M6MYeZ1yUFvfDMO0AxiorAmiMN 4hweuvZAxV+mEGmjZ2H26/lmjpw/8fco4Zzgt8v17YvNdi6qN4NaDzW1r/3Bg91h rwwBeyvQX1W1K/WpyWm1lkQ64EticcKVUY3MNgYxN8e9LAl54flPn1f
[IAEP] Come to the Math 2.0 community event tonight, Wednesday March 3rd, at 9:30 ET
Math 2.0 Interest Group is a network of math-rich social media and computational math communities. Last October, Caroline Meeks did a great presentation about Sugar for the open webinar series the group holds. Tonight, we will be talking about ways to help member communities better, and organizing conferences and meetings in 2010-2011. I would very much like to see people with experiences, and ideas, about community building and grassroots collaboration in the context of technology education. This describes many of the people in this group. Please come! Here is some information about the event: Time converter for your time zone: *http://1ps.us/rdf6ew* ~*~*~*~*~* Event details All Math 2.0 events are free and open to the public. Wednesday, March 3rd 2010 we will meet in the LearnCentral public Elluminate room at 6:30pm Pacific / 9:30pm Eastern time: https://sas.elluminate.com/d.jnlp?sid=lceventspassword=Webinar_Guest I propose we get together and address some key community building themes. I will try my best to invite leaders and representatives of Math 2.0 communities who expressed an interest before, and I would like to ask everyone here to do the same. I see Math 2.0 Interest Group, when it develops to the next stage, as an alliance of communities with diverse members, interests, and projects: a community of communities. For this to happen, we need to define some structures for promoting conversations and collaborations. Here are two areas, open to change, we may discuss this Wednesday. Some of the questions about each area follow. *Math 2.0 community representatives* - Self-identify contact persons - community leaders or network nodes - representing each Math 2.0 community as ambassadors. Questions: Where and how is this contact information collected and made available? What about individuals joining on their own? - Representatives describe what areas interest their community. Question: What is the initial list of these tags, and how do we add to it? - Subgroups of representatives can invite their communities to collaborate on projects in common areas. Question: How do we define subgroups? How do we identify projects in different stages of maturity (idea, initial building, ongoing)? - Representatives pass on relevant messages to their communities, such as event and project information. Question: Who has access to this message structure and how do we support highly relevant information exchange? *Conferences and events 2010-2011* - For those of us presenting at events, build a conference intro pack with several rich media objects, open to collective authoring, and describing Math 2.0, member communities and their representatives, past and current projects within communities, ways to join, key terms and definitions. The goal is for anyone active in the Math 2.0 Interest Group to be able to quickly and easily put together a good presentation about the current state of events. Questions: Do we make this a completely open resource to be used by anyone? How do we organize everybody's contributions? - Define a better structure for the weekly events, with rotating moderators, rotating interesting platforms (such as 3d worlds) and a clear way for Math 2.0 members to identify and contact people they want to see as guests and hosts. Question: What is a good scheduler tool for multiple people scheduling events? - Identify conferences. Questions: What are good existing conferences to go to in 2010-2011, and which of us are already going? How can we help one another make our presentations better? - Plan Math 2.0 conferences. Questions: What are good venues for online conferences? What about face-to-face? Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Math on Web
Gerald, Check out Nibipedia for that sort of software. The creators may be open for collaboration. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 7:53 PM, Gerald Ardito gerald.ard...@gmail.comwrote: Caroline, Something else that may be worth considering is the development of an activity like Info Slicer, where teachers can provide annotations for the videos, and/or prompts for notes or reflections. Gerald On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 3:41 PM, Caroline Meeks solutiongr...@gmail.comwrote: On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 12:22 AM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.comwrote: Anybody know about this? I wonder whether he would be willing to let us adapt his materials to laptops. Good idea! What ideas do you have about how we would adopt it? We could start by asking him if he would make them CC license. I'm traveling to the Bay Area next month. If we can get some good ideas I'm happy to maybe team up with Cherry take him out to coffee and ask. Caroline http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/north_america/jan-june10/khan_02-22.html Feb. 22, 2010 Math Wiz Adds Web Tools to Take Education to New Limits -- Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://www.earthtreasury.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Webinar tonight, February 17th: Math game design framework
This is a part of the Math 2.0 Interest Group series of weekly open webinars. We will discuss a few game design books, see what game mechanics correspond to math ideas, and look at examples of favorite (or not) math games. Wednesday, February 17th 2010 we will meet in the LearnCentral public Elluminate room at 6:30pm Pacific / 9:30pm Eastern time: https://sas.elluminate.com/d.jnlp?sid=lceventspassword=Webinar_Guest The game subgroup http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/GameGroup has been focusing on the subject of serious games for learning mathematics since the Fall of 2009. We are working on a conceptual framework for evaluating and designing math games. It is based on the series of decisions in design. Definitions of decisions come from game theory research and gaming studies. The gameplay consequences of each decision are analyzed based on existing games viewed through the lens of these definitions. The mathematics education consequences of each decision are then analyzed based on the pedagogy embodied in the gameplay, and viewed through the lens of learning theories. A series of parallels between gaming concepts and pedagogical notions helps mathematics educators make sense of game theory concepts, and apply these concepts to teaching. The resulting structure makes it clear that some types of math games are overused, and other promising types are rarely employed by mathematics education game developers. The decisions, as well as their mathematics and math education parallels, are made along these dimensions that provide dichotomies, gradients or levels: · *Abstraction dichotomy:* narrative-based vs. abstract; situated vs. formalized · *Revelation gradient:* full disclosure to hidden information; open-book to closed-book · *Strategic gradient:* strategic to typed; problem-solving to exercises · *Resource levels:* bounded rationality gameplay or not; level or stage learning theories · *Agency and autonomy gradient:* high to none; open-ended to closed-ended tasks · *Planning levels:* interactions, tasks, tactics, strategies; order of math tasks · *Depth gradient:* expert to superficial knowledge; deep learning to expository learning · *Goal gradient:* sandbox play to clear goals; conceptual learning to procedural fluency Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Math 2.0 today: Caroline Meeks presents Sugar on a Stick
Wednesday, October 14th the Math 2.0 interest group hosts its open weekly webinar in the LearnCentral public Elluminate room at 6pm Pacific / 9pm Eastern time: https://sas.elluminate.com/d.jnlp?sid=lceventspassword=Webinar_Guest Caroline Meeks founded Solution Grove, which specializes in open source solutions for learning communities and has created sites for groups at MIT, Harvard, MGH and Boston Museum of Science. Caroline is actively involved in two open-source communities, dotLRN, which she co-founded in 2001, and Sugar (sugarlabs.org) which was developed as part of the OLPC project. This year she is piloting Sugar on a Stick in a Boston public elementary school. Caroline is a candidate for an MEd in 2010 from the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Technology, Innovation and Education Program, and is a graduate of MIT. Web Sites: http://www.solutiongrove.com http://www.sugaronastick.com http://www.shovelreadyed.com ~*~*~*~*~* Next few Math 2.0 events include: October 21st, 2009. Guaranteach: An adaptive video tutor. Host: Alasdair Trotter October 31st, 2009. WikiEducator. Hosts: Nellie Deutsch, Gladys Gahona November 4th, 2009. Curriki. Host: Joshua Marks You can see full recordings of past events and find out how to join these projects at the Events page of the group's wiki: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/events ~*~*~*~*~* There is a growing list for ongoing projects of the Math 2.0 interest group, with several projects being added each month: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/people+and+networks Some examples: an unconference in April being organized by CLIME; helping GeoGebra conference in North America; NextVista math video collection. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Math 2.0 today: Caroline Meeks presents Sugar on a Stick
Sean, Thank you for your comments. I usually provide links to both the platform/community being discussed, and personal sites of the webinar hosts. In this case, I somehow missed the first part in the copying and pasting. The event page has the links clearly marked as such: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/Sugar+on+a+Stick Caroline put the event page together on the Math 2.0 wiki (properly) and I copied parts of it into the message (with an important part missing). Sorry about this. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 1:04 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: I am very, very concerned about confusion. Sean On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 7:02 PM, Caroline Meeks solutiongr...@gmail.com wrote: Here is the announcement in context: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/Sugar+on+a+Stick I put the Sugar Labs pages under resources. The list of web sites Maria posted was part of my bio and in the context of the original page that was clear. Sorry if I'm being oversensitive to being judged right now! Thanks, Caroline On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 12:53 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: The official webpage for Sugar on a Stick can be found here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick Sean Sugar Labs Marketing Coordinator On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 6:15 PM, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.com wrote: Wednesday, October 14th the Math 2.0 interest group hosts its open weekly webinar in the LearnCentral public Elluminate room at 6pm Pacific / 9pm Eastern time: https://sas.elluminate.com/d.jnlp?sid=lceventspassword=Webinar_Guest Caroline Meeks founded Solution Grove, which specializes in open source solutions for learning communities and has created sites for groups at MIT, Harvard, MGH and Boston Museum of Science. Caroline is actively involved in two open-source communities, dotLRN, which she co-founded in 2001, and Sugar (sugarlabs.org) which was developed as part of the OLPC project. This year she is piloting Sugar on a Stick in a Boston public elementary school. Caroline is a candidate for an MEd in 2010 from the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Technology, Innovation and Education Program, and is a graduate of MIT. Web Sites: http://www.solutiongrove.com http://www.sugaronastick.com http://www.shovelreadyed.com ~*~*~*~*~* Next few Math 2.0 events include: October 21st, 2009. Guaranteach: An adaptive video tutor. Host: Alasdair Trotter October 31st, 2009. WikiEducator. Hosts: Nellie Deutsch, Gladys Gahona November 4th, 2009. Curriki. Host: Joshua Marks You can see full recordings of past events and find out how to join these projects at the Events page of the group's wiki: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/events ~*~*~*~*~* There is a growing list for ongoing projects of the Math 2.0 interest group, with several projects being added each month: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/people+and+networks Some examples: an unconference in April being organized by CLIME; helping GeoGebra conference in North America; NextVista math video collection. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] inquiry on constructionism advantages
You may want to use Jo Boaler's longitudinal study of two British poor neighborhood schools, one using procedural math and another project-based math. Kids in the project school did significantly better on standardized tests, and had higher-than-national passing rate (which is incredible given low socioeconomic status). There is a lot of various statistics there, including the fact that project-based learning removed the gender gap. I can send you a review of the book I just did for a grant. While not directly about constructionism, the practices and ideals, as described, are very close. Reference: Boaler, J. (2002). Experiencing School Mathematics: Traditional and Reform Approaches To Teaching and Their Impact on Student Learning, Revised and Expanded Edition (Rev Enl.). Lawrence Erlbaum. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 12:51 PM, Yamandu Ploskonka yamap...@gmail.comwrote: I have received an inquiry on implementing constructionism from a high official in the Bolivian government. Since my opinion may be biased :-), I request you help us with clear, simple and please objective answers (no vapor-stuff), if at all possible 1) How do constructionist pupils do on standardized tests, such as University entrance exams. (please inform about other demographic situations besides children of highly trained scholars - most Bolivian kids do not fit THAT bracket, alas) 2) How do they do with usual classroom tests, especially in the University. Core question is, are alumni of constructionism better, or at least competitive there? What evidence do we have to prove this? 3) Is there any evidence (objective, unbiased) as to the impact of constructionism in education? The big maybe here is further impact on development, yes ? (I may be mistaken here, please correct) 4) any other solid, statistically valid data supporting constructionism Please avoid treatises - I will be presenting this this week, and if anyone would volunteer, it may be possible to put you directly in touch with this official and/or his staff. It is, or should be widely known that I see the current conctructionist stance within OLPC and Sugar as a misguided, feel-good attempt that is bound to do more harm to most kids than good compared to what could be achieved with a solid curricular-content approach, but I honestly would be happier I were mistaken, if determined by solid evidence. I love constructionism, it just doesn't seem to me to be what kids need, and all in all, I wish it worked, but I cannot prove it does for most kids. I am certain, but cannot prove either, that it does work within classrooms with highly trained teachers, or for gifted kids, or when there is a lot of educated support from home, in any case not a basis to adopt it for a country like Bolivia. Yama ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Where should we put Lesson Plans? Currwiki?
Caroline, I am copying this to Peter Levy, the Curriki person you need for the purpose of setting up partnerships. He's been very helpful in answering my Curriki questions. Peter, This is a neat project. Beautiful things may happen when you connect. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 10:58 AM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: Hi Chris, I think the right answer is to put our materials on both your system and Curriki for now and hopefully an automated interoperable system will emerge. I am very interested in collaborating with OLE and in making materials accessible to schools without internet access. Please talk more about how your system supports these environments. I have not yet reached out to the Curriki people to try to create a partnership. Are you in communication with them? For the Moodle advocates. I am a big Moodle fan. But I don't think its our right now solution for the work we are talking about doing. Our target, elementary school teachers are not currently using either Moodle or Sugar, adding both at once makes the learning curve even harder. We are focusing on lesson plans in the 1 hour and even 20-minute groupwork time frames. Moodle is more focused on longer time frames. We are focusing on what the teacher will do and what the class will do both online and offline during the lesson as well as learning goals, standards, help for the teacher in differentiating the lesson etc. Think the teachers guide for the text book. Moodle is more focused on what the student is doing online. Its not a very natural fit. Moodle has tremendous promise in terms of reducing teacher workload. Here is an example of what I hope that in the future Moodle will be able to: Provide a link that students click and they open a Write document that is a template/scaffolding for a specific assignment, say writing a scientific argument. When the document is saved it is automatically turned in as Homework in Moodle allowing the teacher to review and comment on the document from anywhere, even on days when the class does not see the science teacher. however, these features aren't there yet. Once they are there will be a large payoff for teachers to learn Moodle. However, I still see Moodle as just one format teachers will use. Other lessons and other teachers and other contexts may still want to print out a pdf. Other times a teacher may just be browsing for a sample lesson to be used as inspiration to create a quite different lesson. Thanks, Caroline On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Chris Rowe ch...@ole.org wrote: Caroline, We at Open Learning Exchange (OLE) have been working towards a solution for this over the past 2 years and have a working prototype with the most basic functionality we think is needed. You are welcome to try it out at library.ole.org There are several sites on the web that are trying to create a place for curriculum to be shared but none of them that I know of are addressing the needs of developing countries. We have done a lot of work to address the diverse needs of countries with limited internet access and feel we have a solution that will be very powerful in the near future. We are working with our centers around the world to identify the key success factors in making a Global Learning Library as well as several partners like the Siyavula project in South Africa and Connexions at Rice University to leverage existing work done in this area. In addition, we have begun talks with Sugarlabs to use our library as a repository of educational materials that incorporate sugar activities. It would be very helpful for us to get your feedback on what we have and to work with you on integrating it with your work and the work of the Sugarlabs community. Some of my thoughts on other solutions. Sugarlabs wiki: There is too much other content on the sugarlabs wiki that is not relevant to teachers. Just like activities.sugarlabs.org is a place to find and download activities I think we need a place designed specifically for curriculum materials. Moodle: Moodle is a great tool for creating structured, interactive lesson plans and for deploying them in classrooms but it is not designed as a library or repository of materials. Our plan is to start by allowing people to create Moodle courses and share them on our library for others to download and use on their own Moodle servers. We are also working with a developer to integrate work he has done on Moodle import/export into our library in the future. Curriki: Curriki is the closest thing to what we think is needed but it lacks the ability to be deployed on a country by country basis. We feel strongly that a learning library needs to be customizable for each country, each school and even each student. Curriculum alignment: There are many features that we we feel
Re: [IAEP] 40 maths shapes challenges
On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 2:23 AM, K. K. Subramaniam subb...@gmail.com wrote: On Friday 04 Sep 2009 10:12:36 pm Maria Droujkova wrote: Circle is one of the hardest in Scratch. Unless I am missing a command. Maria, Could you be more specific please? hardest to understand through Scratch or hardest to create after having understood? Subbu The smooth circle is hard (trig?), the approximation of a circle by polygons is easy. Actually, it's one of the first thing, beyond going straight 10 steps, many kids I worked with try in Scratch: - When Space is pressed - Move 10 steps - Turn right 15 degrees This polygon looks close enough to kids that they call it circle. This discussion was very helpful. A Math Club I lead for 5-6 years old is crazy about Scratch. The last unit we did, all August, was on maps and mazes, suggested by kids based on their roleplays (pirates mostly). That lead into some interesting shape work. I was eying these puzzles, but wanted some story tie-in. This conversation reminded me of Flatland. Luckily, last year a very nice short movie came out, quite accessible to 4-6 year olds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8oiwnNlyE4 In that story, Triangle parents have Square kids, Square parents have Pentagon kids and so on. The more angles there are, the higher the society status, until polygons have so many angles that they look like Circles, at which point they become (evil) priests. So, I am thinking of inviting kids to work with this in Scratch. Hopefully, we will arrive at a general way of programming regular polygon angles, as a time-saving device (from doing every shape by hand). But this is not the main mathematical reason I want this. The last time polygon approximation came up for this kids, we were making gift boxes (general prisms) out of paper. First, kids drew pictures, say, a dinosaur or a light saber, then made the boundary into straight segments, then drew rectangular flaps next to each segment, cut out and lifted flaps to form the box. My hope is that Scratch polygons will be another entry into this calculus example space devoted to approximation. Ideas and advice appreciated. Cheers, Maria Droujkova Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/ Math 2.0 interest group home ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] 40 maths shapes challenges
Circle is one of the hardest in Scratch. Unless I am missing a command. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Bill Kerr billk...@gmail.com wrote: Image attached Forty shapes to make in Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/ or some other version of logo, such as Turtle Arthttp://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art. It's hard to see the thumbnail but click on it for a larger view. This is one of the best sheets ever for teaching maths (designed by Barry Newell): - the logo turtle or scratch cat acts as a transitional object between the concrete maths shape and the abstraction of the script that makes the shape - the sheet includes both simple and complex shapes, increasing in order of complexity, there is a challenge there for everyone - many of the more complex shapes are made up of combinations of the simpler shapes Source: Barry Newell's Turtle Confusion (1988) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Physics - Lesson plans ideas?
On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 12:23 PM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: Hi Asaf Among other things, our human brains are set up by nature to -- take the world as it seems -- want to learn the culture around us -- believe (and then try to justify our beliefs) -- especially believe our tribes, from family outwards -- think of most things in terms of stories -- disappear our beliefs into a normal which makes it difficult to think in other terms -- desire explanations, but be satisfied with stories as answers Early massive exposure to social media can reset some of these defaults. The main change is the shift from THE culture to hundreds and thousands of cultures, with corresponding meta-reflection on cultural beliefs. Kids in their tween years and older, especially more word-savvy girls, pick on differences in stories, worldviews and beliefs of different cultures in different social sites. They are very aware of differences in what is normal in different communities, and of abilities of outsiders or enemies to deconstruct mere stories for aggression (snark, flame wars) or simply for the fun of it. There are sophisticated vocabularies supporting these endeavors, lists of relevant concepts, acceptable and unacceptable argument techniques and so on. We need something more like: -- the world is not as it seems -- our culture's views likely have nothing much to do with how the universe is set up -- think instead of believe -- especially be careful of our tribal pulls to believe like them -- most interesting things are not stories and can't be judged by story criteria -- have to fight the invisibility of normal -- we need to be super tough about what we provisionally accept as explanations for anything Most parents and teachers I've explained this to are shocked. It's so anti-social and rebellious! This is the last thing most of them want to help their children achieve. (And they are so successful.) People who grow up with assumed social pluralism won't be as shocked, though. Science principles match the new social order of the massively multiplayer community scene pretty well. Cheers, Maria Droujkova Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/ Math 2.0 interest group ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Physics - Lesson plans ideas?
into. -- most interesting things are not stories and can't be judged by story criteria I don't understand this item well enough to comment. I think it is about the difference between interest as in shallow curiosity and interest as in significance for cultural progress. -- have to fight the invisibility of normal Again, the plurality of normal make norms more visible, and an item for discussion, deconstruction and evaluation. Meta-languages for discussion of norms (e.g. notions of tropes and memes) become a part of everyday conversations and net games on social sites. On the other hand, less popular topics, where only relatively few people work and play, are more prone to invisibility of norms. Unfortunately, mathematics is such an area at present (very few people, and those somewhat culturally uniform, generate popular math content online), though this is changing. Much of the survival value of adherence to previously established normal has to do with either limited resources and the need to distribute them based on norms, or on limited information processing efficiency and the need for attenuating the complexity into something normal just to deal with it. The metaphor of the internet as an unlimited space with enough place for any project deconstructs the limited resource mindset. Tools for dealing with massive amounts of information support the possibility of switching norms (realities) easier and faster, without information overloads. -- we need to be super tough about what we provisionally accept as explanations for anything I have doubts about this one. We need a gradient of toughness, with relaxed rules for play, brainstorming and learning activities peripheral to communities, and increasingly tougher rules for more central activities. Cheers, Maria Droujkova Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/ Math 2.0 interest group -- *From:* Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.com *To:* Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com *Cc:* Asaf Paris Mandoki asa...@gmail.com; Sue VanHattum mathanthologyedi...@gmail.com; iaep SugarLabs iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org; Joshua N Pritikin jpriti...@pobox.com; Dmitri Droujkov drouj...@gmail.com *Sent:* Sunday, August 23, 2009 10:04:08 AM *Subject:* Re: [IAEP] Physics - Lesson plans ideas? On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 12:23 PM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: Hi Asaf Among other things, our human brains are set up by nature to -- take the world as it seems -- want to learn the culture around us -- believe (and then try to justify our beliefs) -- especially believe our tribes, from family outwards -- think of most things in terms of stories -- disappear our beliefs into a normal which makes it difficult to think in other terms -- desire explanations, but be satisfied with stories as answers Early massive exposure to social media can reset some of these defaults. The main change is the shift from THE culture to hundreds and thousands of cultures, with corresponding meta-reflection on cultural beliefs. Kids in their tween years and older, especially more word-savvy girls, pick on differences in stories, worldviews and beliefs of different cultures in different social sites. They are very aware of differences in what is normal in different communities, and of abilities of outsiders or enemies to deconstruct mere stories for aggression (snark, flame wars) or simply for the fun of it. There are sophisticated vocabularies supporting these endeavors, lists of relevant concepts, acceptable and unacceptable argument techniques and so on. We need something more like: -- the world is not as it seems -- our culture's views likely have nothing much to do with how the universe is set up -- think instead of believe -- especially be careful of our tribal pulls to believe like them -- most interesting things are not stories and can't be judged by story criteria -- have to fight the invisibility of normal -- we need to be super tough about what we provisionally accept as explanations for anything Most parents and teachers I've explained this to are shocked. It's so anti-social and rebellious! This is the last thing most of them want to help their children achieve. (And they are so successful.) People who grow up with assumed social pluralism won't be as shocked, though. Science principles match the new social order of the massively multiplayer community scene pretty well. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Reality is a crutch (was Re: Physics - Lesson plans ideas?)
None of the numbers are real world - they are human-made representations of either something in the real world, or something else in some culture. Bridges between cultures and real world are built both ways. Imaginary numbers used to be purely cultural for a while, until bridges Cherlin mentions allowed people to see them as models of something in physical reality. Same goes for quaternions and many exotic geometries. Relationships with reality is one of the main distinctions between most mathematical and most scientific frameworks and methodologies, which is a huge topic. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 7:29 AM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 12:25 AM, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: Alan We study complex numbers and transfinite numbers even though they aren't real world. Root(-1) isn't real world but its a useful abstraction to study. This turns out not to be the case. Complex numbers are required in classical electricity and in all parts of Quantum Mechanics, where the imaginary part of a wave is necessary to represent its phase, where probabilities of states are represented by the product of the wave function with its complex conjugate, and where state-change operators (such as _i_ times partial derivative with respect to spatial coordinates) routinely involve complex values. Infinities and infinitesimals appear as real-world values in the theory of games of perfect information. See Conway, On Numbers and Games, and Berlekamp, Conway, and Guy, Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] GPA Notes 7/23/09
On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 9:38 PM, Anurag Goel agoe...@gmail.com wrote: The kids used the following sequence to make the turtle point in different hour directions: seth() -- forward(100) -- back(100) Note: The kids started off by experimenting with different values for seth I feel most kids struggled with this because they had not learned too much about geometry, particularily concepts involving degrees and radii. However, kids experimented with a lot of different values to better predict increments. Some kids realized that if they input a really large number they would get the same result as importing a really small number (ex: 12 and 732). As expected, the kids did not understand why that was. Perhaps we need to give a brief geometry lesson before letting the kids play with heading directions. I had good luck with paper folding activities to go with clock activities, for example, making snowflakes with different number of segments. Clock is a highly multiplicative structure, and kids who have weak multiplicative reasoning (e.g. reunitizing) struggle with it. I have an online snowflake maker to introduce the activity: http://www.naturalmath.com/special-snowflake/index.php Just leaving 4 out of 12 clock numbers (3, 6, 9, 12) helps a lot, too, because quarters are easier cognitively, the angles are familiar and so on. However, this is the attenuation approach (simplifying the environment) and I don't like to attenuate too much. With paper folding, you can give kids angle experience in an interesting context. I started to sketch a Zoombini-like paper folding activity, where you need, for example, to construct (match) certain folds to build a stained glass window. You construct everything out of prime number folds. So, to make the clock (1/12th) fold, you need to use a 3-fold and a 2-fold twice. This relates to the splitting conjecture by Confrey et al, and the ways young kids can construct numbers multiplicatively instead of additively. However, you can't use 3-folds with paper at the start, so there is the added fun complexity here. In physical space, I use coffee filters for this work. Cheers, Maria Droujkova Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath subscribe now to discuss future math culture with parents, researchers and techies http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/ Math 2.0 interest group home http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Sugar people at the Where is Math 2.0? event Wednesday
Hello, Tomorrow (Wednesday, July 8th) at 5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern USA time, there will be an event about Math 2.0 on the Future of Education and Classroom 2.0 interview/webinar series. Here is information about the session: http://www.futureofeducation.com/forum/topics/where-is-math-20 If you have not used Elluminate before, there is a client download, so start ahead. I'd love to see people from this group there. I will try to bring XO and Sugar up as an example in its own class, but it would be nice to have other, more experienced voices there. If you can't make it Wednesday, but are interested in being a part of the discussion, please let me know. We will talk tomorrow about good ways to aggregate the discussions about the topic going on everywhere. Probably a wiki and a series of blog and Twitter tags should do it. Cheers, Maria Droujkova Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath subscribe now to discuss future math culture with parents, researchers and techies http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and Mastering Educational SW
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Alan Kayalan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: When I get together with other scientists, at some point I ask them how they got started. For most, it wasn't because of school, but because of direct contact with adults, often a relative who was a scientist, and some of the older generation got into it from reading the classic science fiction stories of the 40s and 50s. (This is not a scientific survey, heh heh, but it would be interesting to see the results of one.) I have seen results of more formal studies about the subject in several different areas. One of most notable areas is survival: success stories of people who grew up with serious adversity, such as parental abuse or extreme poverty. Almost universally, people who were able to make it name significant adults as the key difference in their life. I conducted some interviews at two summer camps, one for keeping girls on the fast math track, and another for underrepresented minorities. I asked kids about their decisions for college, future career, and current math and science activities. Personal adult friends or relatives came up as the main factor in these interviews. My daughter is working on a parent-child-professional coop called My young apprentice for helping kids meet adults for micro-apprenticeships and possibly longer-term contact. It's crucial for, well, everything pretty much. From: K. K. Subramaniam subb...@gmail.com On Tuesday 30 Jun 2009 11:23:24 pm Alan Kay wrote: what is more interesting is how well certain ways of thinking work in finding strong models of phenomena compared to others. This is the part that interests me too ... So, if we get pneumonia, there are lots of paradigms to choose from, but I'm betting that most will choose the one that knows how to find out about bacteria and how to make antibiotics. ... and this is where I get stuck ;-), particularly in the context of school education (first 12 years). Unlike the 3Rs, thinking processes have no external manifestation that parents/teachers can monitor, assess or assist. The economic value of deep thinking is not realized until many years later. The latency between 'input' and 'output' can be as large as 12 years and 'evaluation' of output may stretch into decades! I beg to differ here, Subbu. Any time you do any sort of meaningful project with a person of any age, deep thinking manifests itself most strikingly. Here are some household examples: - Deep idea: random events. A toddler pushes a pet bunny off a high place. The mother says that unlike kittens, rabbits can break their legs this way, but the toddler thinks since it did not happen this once, it won't ever happen. The mother takes a glass outside and rolls it down the stairs, several times. It breaks at fourth roll. Toddler experiments with breakable objects more to explore the idea of sometimes. They keep discussing this big idea of sometimes and experimenting. A few years down the road, the mother relates to the kid how this guy was saying, I smoked all my life and I am fine - and they laugh at it, together. Probability and statistics comes in later still. Meanwhile, the bunny's safe, and a whole host of dangers that happens sometimes are easy to communicate to the toddler. - Deep tool: graphs. Several kids play with graphs qualitatively (a-la http://thisisindexed.com/). What comes of it? When the 5yo math club members yell too loud, the leader makes a yelling graph kids follow up and down in volume, as it's being drawn, thereby obtaining control. When a 10yo experiences a strange math anxiety, she draws a graph of her mood vs. problem solving events, and analyzes it for possible patterns. When a tween and teen group discusses game design, they compare learning curves for apps and games they know and make design decisions correspondingly. - Deep collective reasoning: kites. A 3-5 Reggio Emilia group decides to make kites together. Adults provide books and supplies, kids work on patterns and sketch and photograph their ideas. It takes listening and coordinating; their peacekeepers of the day resolve conflicts. Kites change from day to day, becoming increasingly complex. Cheers, Maria Droujkova Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath subscribe now to discuss future math culture with parents, researchers and techies http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and Mastering Educational SW
On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: In theory, teachers are supposed to be a critical pool of significant adults, especially for the fields -- such as math and science -- in which most parents are not adept or interested. In the US, this is unfortunately also the case for most elementary school teachers, and (way too) many middle and high school teachers. Serious juvenile science fiction stories and novels -- not TV or movies -- in the 40s and 50s were a great alternative. For example, those by Heinlein, Asimov, Clark, etc. Cheers, Alan Juvenile science fiction and fantasy has been increasingly moving from technology focus to social and psychological topics. What kids read now is much more likely to be about touch moral choices than about fancy future technologies. This may be a part of the general lack of math in juvenile cultures, including social web sites. MariaD -- *From:* Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.com *To:* Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com *Cc:* K. K. Subramaniam subb...@gmail.com; iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org *Sent:* Wednesday, July 1, 2009 8:18:34 AM *Subject:* Re: [IAEP] Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and Mastering Educational SW On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Alan Kayalan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: When I get together with other scientists, at some point I ask them how they got started. For most, it wasn't because of school, but because of direct contact with adults, often a relative who was a scientist, and some of the older generation got into it from reading the classic science fiction stories of the 40s and 50s. (This is not a scientific survey, heh heh, but it would be interesting to see the results of one.) I have seen results of more formal studies about the subject in several different areas. One of most notable areas is survival: success stories of people who grew up with serious adversity, such as parental abuse or extreme poverty. Almost universally, people who were able to make it name significant adults as the key difference in their life. I conducted some interviews at two summer camps, one for keeping girls on the fast math track, and another for underrepresented minorities. I asked kids about their decisions for college, future career, and current math and science activities. Personal adult friends or relatives came up as the main factor in these interviews. My daughter is working on a parent-child-professional coop called My young apprentice for helping kids meet adults for micro-apprenticeships and possibly longer-term contact. It's crucial for, well, everything pretty much. From: K. K. Subramaniam subb...@gmail.com On Tuesday 30 Jun 2009 11:23:24 pm Alan Kay wrote: what is more interesting is how well certain ways of thinking work in finding strong models of phenomena compared to others. This is the part that interests me too ... So, if we get pneumonia, there are lots of paradigms to choose from, but I'm betting that most will choose the one that knows how to find out about bacteria and how to make antibiotics. ... and this is where I get stuck ;-), particularly in the context of school education (first 12 years). Unlike the 3Rs, thinking processes have no external manifestation that parents/teachers can monitor, assess or assist. The economic value of deep thinking is not realized until many years later. The latency between 'input' and 'output' can be as large as 12 years and 'evaluation' of output may stretch into decades! I beg to differ here, Subbu. Any time you do any sort of meaningful project with a person of any age, deep thinking manifests itself most strikingly. Here are some household examples: - Deep idea: random events. A toddler pushes a pet bunny off a high place. The mother says that unlike kittens, rabbits can break their legs this way, but the toddler thinks since it did not happen this once, it won't ever happen. The mother takes a glass outside and rolls it down the stairs, several times. It breaks at fourth roll. Toddler experiments with breakable objects more to explore the idea of sometimes. They keep discussing this big idea of sometimes and experimenting. A few years down the road, the mother relates to the kid how this guy was saying, I smoked all my life and I am fine - and they laugh at it, together. Probability and statistics comes in later still. Meanwhile, the bunny's safe, and a whole host of dangers that happens sometimes are easy to communicate to the toddler. - Deep tool: graphs. Several kids play with graphs qualitatively (a-la http://thisisindexed.com/). What comes of it? When the 5yo math club members yell too loud, the leader makes a yelling graph kids follow up and down in volume, as it's being drawn, thereby obtaining control. When a 10yo experiences a strange math anxiety, she draws a graph of her mood vs
Re: [IAEP] Some Comments on Digital Textbooks In California
On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 3:31 AM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: Here is question of some importance: Almost all education systems in the world were put in place by Imperial powers, whether at home or in their colonies, with the aim of keeping the population in order and providing soldiers, government functionaries, professionals, teachers, and so on to run the Empire without making trouble for the rulers. (...) But now things are different. Instead of everybody learning the same lesson from the same printed textbook on the same day by the same method, we have, with computers and Free Digital Learning Materials, o collaboration o discovery o multiple approaches o continuous improvement of teaching materials by students and teachers o sharp tools o powerful ideas o how to ask the right questions, rather than how to memorize or calculate the right answers Maybe. If we make it so. Are you in? I have been looking at homeschoolers' communities and practices, mostly ethnographically, to summarize post-school principles of organization. My list mostly focuses on what can be called time and task management rather than instructional design, but they are related all too directly. I think I will focus more on design specifically for the next iteration (sharp tools - must have!). Here is what I have now: - Rapid prototyping of everything, short cycles of evaluation and change, and correspondingly short educational experiences are the norm. Families have moved from “package deal” of whole set curricula (”this is what you do for middle school”) to hand-picking books, teachers, and methods for each child for each 2-4 months of each subject. A kid can stay with a program that works for years, or drop one that does not in a few weeks. This leads to increased quality of programs. - High value is placed on engagement, love for subjects and personal relevance of activities both for activity leaders and for all participants. It is expected that participants and especially leaders of activities CARE. Children are much more likely to be learning topics and subjects that are meaningful for them personally, in ways they personally find engaging. Much discussion happens, and much know-how is accumulated about ways of finding and developing meaningful activities for particular subject areas. - Deconstruction of “age” and shift to ability levels and styles is frequent among homeschoolers. One often sees age spreads of 3-6 years within each homeschool group activity. Grouping by age is rare and loose (e.g. “teens and tweens” rather than “fourteen year olds”). Correspondingly, friendships and informal communities form across ages, based on common interests and activities. - Barter economies, gift economies, network economies, coops and other innovative (or age-old) alternative forms of education financing are widespread. Homeschoolers value and often use open and free software and open educational resources, as well as the culture of exchange and communal use of resources. Interestingly, the largest benefits of homeschooling as far as standardized tests and college admissions go happen in the poorest families with lowest-educated parents. - Co-production models of learning, where learners and teachers are curriculum co-creators, project learning, unit studies and other active learning models are prevalent among homeschoolers. - Homeschoolers often form “nakama” groups, small, local tight friend and family groups getting together to achieve their goals, and tied personally as well as educationally. High value is placed on friendships, and day-to-day educational decisions come from these personal ties. - There are active, robust local communities and global support networks for homeschooling families, for anything from finding an appropriate math program for highly gifted ADHD Asperger kid who likes computers, to helping a family through tough economic times. Homeschoolers are some of the most socially networked demographics, which include lightning-fast spread of politically relevant news, such as proposed laws. I think of homeschoolers as a distributed think tank and early adopters of education practices of the future. The coops and other communities they form is probably where many k-8 educational institutions will be in 20 years. Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath subscribe now to discuss future math culture with parents, researchers and techies http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: An interesting project I stumbled across
Caroline, What can a volunteer do is a good general question. I have been lurking on this list for a while, and I am still looking for some SHORT tasks (1 hour or so) someone completely new could do. The problem with most tasks is hours of preparation they seem to require before they even start making sense. Maybe I missed some noob tasks, too, because I could not tell them among others. Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath future math culture email group http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 2:39 PM, Caroline Meekssolutiongr...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 1:18 AM, Frederick Grosefgr...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.wizzydigital.org/index.html Wizzy Digital Courier is right in the middle of my longer-term plans. A quick google shows a few pages I've written in the wiki about it. Hi Martin, I like your vision for where the school server should go. I think it will be an incredible resource for schools both with and without reliable internet service. As we grow and get more volunteers, how can we more effectively get other people contributing in parallel to making your vision a reality? We can take this as a specific example. Lets say we had someone in this thread who though wizzy was awesome and wanted to help? What should that person do? Thanks, Caroline Not that I'm original. When I joined OLPC, Jim Gettys toured me over wwwoffle, WDC, rproxy, hashcache proxy and a myriad of other things I had to study. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Some Comments on Digital Textbooks In California
I would like to make two points about the textbook initiative. 1. It's not about text anymore. Educators need to shift to a variety of media. 2. It's not about books anymore. Book is the metaphor for a huge producer-consumer divide and broadcast models of learning. The efficiency of broadcast models is lower than the first steam engine prototypes. Educators need to shift to co-production and participatory models of learning. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath future math culture email group http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2009-06-01
Your links is daunting to the beginner, too. How do I get there? On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 9:19 PM, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: Walter wrote In Sugar, we bundle an IRC Activity that defaults to #sugar. * Is there more we can do to encourage participation? IRC can be a bit daunting for the beginner, both the technical aspects and the etiquette. I have added a link to each team meeting page Help: [[Sugar_Labs/Contacts#IRC.2C_Internet_Relay_Chat |Using IRC]] except for the design team, I was unable to determine whether it meets on IRC I know this is a big ask, but when putting announcements or reminders of IRC meetings on lists, please give the time and date in UTC and also give links to worldclock and Help:Using IRC Thanks Tony ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath future math culture email group http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Labs Flophouse
On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 5:17 PM, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 2:36 PM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 8:43 AM, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Hey all, Is anyone interested in setting up a Sugar Labs Flophouse next summer? I have been impresses with the quality of applicants interested in gsoc and independent internships. If you set it up to run year round I would move in in a heartbeat and offer seminars. Can we consider doing this in a target country? Ghana would work well for me. I haven't thought this through very far yet. So the following might make less sense than I usually make. Within the next couple of years, I would like to start a Sugar institute to foster the Sugar community. I am thinking of something with work and living space for about 20 people to come together to work together for brief periods (a couple of weeks to a couple of months). There is much know-how on organizing places like that in coworking communities. This mailing list, for example, is nice: http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en There are economic models, frequently asked questions, examples of many existing spaces and so on. A transitional possibility to your Institute can be contacting existing coworking spaces for events like Sugar Month @ YourCoworkingSpace across the world. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath our email group http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] versus, not
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 9:26 AM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: If the real deals are chosen, then the interesting question is what kinds of processes will work for what kinds of learners? If it is some non-trivial percentage of direct instruction, then this is what should be done (and depending on the learner, this percentage could range from 0% to a surprisingly high number). However, part of the real deal is being able to *do* the pursuits, not just know something about them, so all pedagogical approaches will have to find ways to get learners to learn how to do what practitioners do who above the two thresholds of fluency and pro. Tim Gallwey is one of the best teachers I've ever observed, and he had a number of extremely effective techniques to help his students learn the real deal very quickly (and almost none of these were direct instruction -- partly because, as he liked to say, The parts of the brain that you need to do the learning very often don't understand English!). But if he could see that the student had gotten on a track that couldn't be influenced by guided discovery, then he would instantly tell them to do it this way. In other words, he was not religious about his own very successful method, but instead did what his students individually needed and that worked the best for them (which happened to be learning by doing). I think it may be useful to distinguish tracks, and destinations to which they lead. The real deal destinations are to make mathematics: coin definitions and refine them, pose problems, form conjectures, construct example spaces, create models and so on. Activities with real deal destinations invite students to make mathematics; this is the part where I get pretty religious and I suspect Tim does, as well. Then teachers can help students to search for tracks toward these destinations, by whatever methods work best. Searching for fruitful tracks is a large part of the real deal, of course. But such searching, for field practitioners, does involve referring to past work in the field, and getting direct instruction from peers and more advanced colleagues. For example, a kid I observed, trying to extend her model of division to also work on improper fractions looked at a bunch of traditional algorithms in search of ideas. Math Club members attempting to create a definition of multiplication that makes sense to them were directly instructed on some existing definitions, to which they listened with rapt attention. When Tim would instantly tell them to do it this way it made sense, because this way was a track toward some real deal destination. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath our email group http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] educational brew
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 12:35 AM, Bill Kerr billk...@gmail.com wrote: The other thing I should have said about rob's post but didn't was that I pretty much agree with all of it as a description of the reality we face, ie. my experiences of being an innovative teacher are similar enough to what rob describes as to make it pointless to quibble about the differences my support for the continuation of widespread unreasonable behaviour (in the xo tradition) is based on acceptance of that reality In my experience, the homeschool community provides a nice space for meaningfully unreasonable behavior. Especially unschoolers. Also, consider research restrictions. It takes from several months to half a year in my county to get all the necessary permissions for an educational study in public schools, whereas it only takes the internal IRB approval to work with homescholers. Families and local communities should not be overlooked as powerful agents of change. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath our email group http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] educational brew
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 5:03 AM, Albert Cahalan acaha...@gmail.com wrote: To benefit from a given lesson, one must master any prerequisites. The good news is that as time goes on, people (slowly) develop ways to help kids acquire prerequisites within learning new topics. For example, you can build lessons about proportionality on multiplication, which you can build on addition, which you can build on counting. Alternatively, you can work with unfair sharing, growth/shadows/perspective and other similarity, or intensive unit (e.g. speed) metaphors directly, incorporating development of multiplicative reasoning and its coordination with additive reasoning into this work. As the culture progresses, math gets more and more packed, prerequisites and all. I found Bill's non-universals summary to be quite useful in thinking about these issues, especially the similarities over differences part http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com/nonUniversals As we figure out to help kids work with similarities in deeper ways, and as we uncover better metaphors for similarities, prerequisites get subsumed into other topics. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath our email group http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar is an X that happens to have an entire learning platform and operating system included.
On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: But it also makes sense to think about the easy to grasp benefits. I think one important criteria is it needs to be something that a group of people already knows they want. Anyone want to brainstorm with me? For Sugar on a Stick I've got: eBook reader that remembers the page and notes and as the child moves from the computer to computer in classrooms, after-school and at home. ePortfolio solution for K-5th grade students Lets kid use Scratch even when the school won't let them install new software. How are the collaboration and networking tools? Does it let kids collaborate without setting them loose in the whole big scary internet (many organizations and individuals are scared of anything connected to the real internet)? -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Logic simulator
It's a very neat thing. From my point of view, its pedagogical value would very much increase if you could save and share your diagrams. So that one student could build something and give it to others to improve, etc. Or make some classic diagrams, etc. On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Noticed this Flash based logic simulator: http://joshblog.net/projects/logic-gate-simulator/Logicly.html Would be quite a simple sandbox activity to make (python, gtk+, ciaro); but before I burn time (well add to my future todos list), do teachers on this list think it is more than just a geeky play-thing, or does it have educational merit? FWIW: it could do with a few more input/output and processing devices (sensors, buzzers, coloured leds, motors, counters). And, hey if time is no obstacle, perhaps make it a split screen view, holding a physics sandbox with the logic driving/animating simple little motorised constructions. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2009-05-03
On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: ===Sugar Digest=== I encourage you to join two threads on the Education List this week: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005382.html, which has boiled down to an instruction vs construction debate; and http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005342.html, which has boiled down to a debate of catering to local culture vs the Enlightenment. I encourage you to join these discussions. Rather than commenting here, I want to discuss a third, orthogonal topic: creativity. I hosted a visit to Cambridge this week from Diego Uribe, a Chilean researcher who is currently a Fulbright scholar at the International Center for Studies in Creativity in Buffalo, NY. Diego challenged me with two questions: Can we be more deliberate in developing children's creativity skills and how can we use Sugar to better disseminate creativity heuristics? Guidelines for divergent thinking * defer judgment * go for quantity * make connections * seek novelty Guidelines for convergent thinking * apply affirmative judgment * keep novelty alive * check your objectives * stay focused Walter, Thank you very much for this write-up. It is very, very interesting and quite helpful! Coincidentally, I am working on a proposal part about convergent and divergent actions, as applied to children's authoring in mathematics. As an aside, I find that using creativity or creating distracts people into a lot of tangents when I talk about math, so unless I have a lot of time to explain contexts, I go with authoring. Metaphors and example spaces are two relevant parts of my framework here. A metaphor can start the divergent part of the cycle, allowing kids to quickly generate a number of mathematical objects. Then particular questions or goals help kids to sort through their objects, noticing properties and observing patterns. These generalities (properties and patterns) are convergent, and a pile of objects born of a metaphor gets structured into an example space. Now objects become examples OF something - namely, of observed generalities. At which point kids are tempted to generate more and better examples, which is the divergent part of the cycle at a new level, and so on. In practice, kids need ways to make math objects within a common metaphor and to collect, share and re-make those objects. With some kids, it's as simple as providing a graffiti wall and a verbal prompt, but typically you need heuristics and scaffolds to keep the thing going. In software, the challenge is to find a balance between providing enough scaffolds, yet leaving enough space for the divergent part of the cycle, allowing kids to actually, here goes - create. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] maths instruction
On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Kathy Pusztavari ka...@kathyandcalvin.com wrote: I'm of the direct instruction camp. If skills and concepts are not build upon each other correctly, you will get kids that either learn a concept wrong (then they have to unlearn it) or fail and then feel like they are stupid. Having a kid with autism, I've seen both. Unfortunately, I've seen both with typical kids or even smart ones under poor teaching practices. This is especially true for teaching reading - Project Follow Through showed that direct instruction was by far the most effective in teaching period. What I'm suggesting is taking effective practices and putting them in a computer model. Using short videos or whatever (flash like animation) to teach concepts. Strongly systematic approach is a good general principle for sciences and math. In my mind, the strength of computers is in helping kids tinker, construct, interact with microworlds and with each other, remix, tag, and otherwise be active. Learning happens through doing. Nobody learns anything deeply enough the first time they are exposed; understanding keeps growing and growing through time, as learners are ACTIVELY DOING something related to that concept. In math in particular, you need to have a very healthy balance of all levels of learning activities (see Bloom's Digital Taxonomy http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+Digital+Taxonomy), which computers definitely can support. Good math learning software should combine three things: the ability to create your own mathematical objects in scaffolded environments (with videos or animations that can be a part of scaffolding); the ability to share these objects with other learners in your local community of practice; and tools for connecting these example spaces or lesson environments with mathematics at large, including other topics and past traditions of doing math and other local communities - that is, with larger communities of mathematical practices. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Grassroots-l] OLPC in Kindergarten
My company has developed some software prototypes for early algebra that could work for 4-6 year olds. I would be interested in adopting these ideas for OLPC, but I'd need some collaborators for that. On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 8:55 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 2:36 PM, Christoph Derndorfer e0425...@student.tuwien.ac.at wrote: Hola Alejandro, I'm currently not aware of any other OLPC or Sugar projects working with children at that age. Most pilots and deployments currently seem to be focused on primary-school children (age 6 to 10). -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] maths instruction
On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Kathy Pusztavari ka...@kathyandcalvin.com wrote: Bloom's Taxonomy reminds me of committees that never get anything done in the Life of Brian. Direct Instruction reminds me of the people that get in there and get the job done. Here is how I see these issues. Bloom's Taxonomy is a part of a research and design framework, and direct instruction is a pedagogical methodology. In general, frameworks help people analyze and plan, and methodologies help people to implement (get things done). Typically, you need to work with both methodologies and frameworks for sizable research and development projects. Depending on the project's goals, you make or choose frameworks and methodologies suitable to the goals. Constructivism, in particular, is a group of framework for studying how people learn. To contrast direct instruction with something, one can choose a different teaching methodology, for example, the discovery method popular in the sixties and seventies but not as much anymore, or the Socratic method still popular in some circles after a couple of millenia. Relationships between frameworks and methodologies are complex. For example, one can use constructivist frameworks to study how students learn under direct instruction methodologies. One can also use behaviorist or information theory frameworks to study learning under the same methodologies. It's not a one-to-one correspondence. There is a lot of confusion about the matter, because people use theories and frameworks not only for research, but also as ammo in policy wars. Also, sometimes the same person or group works on developing theories and methodologies, and they become twined in people's minds through their authors. In general, relationships between theory and practice are complicated and often frustrating in education, just as they are in medicine and other human-centered fields. The important thing is for everybody to be able to match frameworks and methodologies to their goals. For example, at some point I made a taxonomy of computer learning environments focusing specifically on users' power over representations, because my goals had to do with authoring, and creating representations is a good measure of authoring. I think it may be of interest to people here: http://wikieducator.org/User:MariaDroujkova/UserPower Life of Brian is wonderful - one of my favorite movies. Very quotable. - You are all individuals! - Yes, we are all individuals! - this could be used to snark recitation, but I happen to find the technique very useful. Kathy, congratulations on your license!!! What grades do you plan to teach next? -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] maths instruction
On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Kathy Pusztavari ka...@kathyandcalvin.com wrote: I will not teach in the public sector. I will, however, volunteer or create a afterschool or summer school program. I'd love to use sugar (SoaS) to test some of the activities and do some research. We need more educational research even if it is very small. Do you know any of the people involved in Math Clubs and Math Circles? The Berkley folks just made a very nice web site: http://www.mathcircles.org/ I think programs of that sort are great for research, because of flexibility and low stakes. I did a class on Scratch in a local homeschool coop this Winter. I am working on designing a programming-based algebra program for this Fall, as well. I want to collect more detailed data from it, because this time around, I have some research questions. '- You are all individuals! - Yes, we are all individuals!' Funny. It took a couple seconds until I got it :) It's the episode where Brian's on the balcony trying to convince the crowd to think for themselves, while they just repeat whatever he says: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQqq3e03EBQ A clash of a teaching method and a learning method, I think. Or maybe not. It's funny, anyway. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] 70 minute interview with Bryan Berry on XO deployment in Nepal
10) Open Source software critical to high quality education – education has to be very customised, to the kids, the teacher, the environment and the country – not something you can design in New York city and will fit another country Liping Ma argues (admittedly from small sample sizes) that many teachers teach elementary maths differently and *better* in China than in the USA http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2009/03/long-multiplication.html I think education has to be customizABLE, not customized. Every practitioner of math has to be able to make their own version of it, based on the previous traditions - from rephrasing definitions in your own words to finding math in your everyday life, from choosing representation that best suites your data and your audience to applying general principles to particular examples. Strong teachers (including those Ma studied) are able to use timeless, universal ideas and strategies in ways that are meaningful to themselves and their particular students. For example, a large part of what Chinese, Japanese or Eastern European teachers do themselves and teach their students is creation of meaningful example spaces for each mathematical idea and concept, including a variety of applications, representations, connections, contexts, examples and counterexamples. One of the most well-known part of Ma's research of these differences included teachers searching for examples of fraction operations. In a telling cultural experiment reported by Sfard from Israel, a chapter quiz asked students to prove a geometry theorem from the chapter. However, the theorem was rephrased compared to the chapter, and letters labeling geometric figures were changed around. Recent immigrants from Eastern Europe have not noticed the change, because it is very normal for them - a sort of customization of material they are taught to do for themselves. On the other hand, many kids who grew up in Israel had difficulties recognizing or proving the theorem in its new form. How can this principle of customizable math be applied to framework development? -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
