teaching mathematical abstract subjects with technology

Actualization of mathematical and abstract subjects using computer-based guided tutorials

Porscha McRobbie – U of Michigan

1. Revamping lectures and homework: extensive lecture notes -  new additions: in class live demonstrations/animations from exiwsting notes
2. homework assignments – new additions: interactive/exploratory
3. discussion problems

Challenges: finding complimentary resources: cross-disciplinary time consuming to translate; non-traditional course content; seek highly specific interactive tools.

Bringing lectures to life: example from Wolfram Mathematica for students [link].

Guided tutorial style homework is also possible.

Tool of choice: build-in manipulate and animate commands; creating interactive assignments requires little coding; students only need free MathematicaPlayer (no programming required, source code hidden).

Resources: a forum called Wolfram education group [especially Mathematica for education] to answer your questions. Also the Wolfram Demonstrations Project where people are creating those demonstrations and uploading them to that site [demonstrations.wolfram.com].

day 3: you’ve got to be kidding!

That’s the name of the final ‘keynote’ or featured presentation. Very funny, extremely useful and thought-provoking -  as expected.

Recognition, reward and tenure: you’ve got to be kidding!

Carl Berger, U of Michigan, Emeritus

Presenting scholarly work: have you heard of faculty not using new media as it would decrease chances of tenure? what is the dominant form of media for presenting scholarship in your discipline? have you seen changes in how scholarship is presented? what other ways could scholarship be presented that would be more effective? if it uses more of those techniques and delivering them.

More questions: have you helped faculty present or publish? have you co-authored with faculty or searched for new venues? have you helped with new tools for presenting/publishing? how many have influenced our administration to use new publishing to be used for R,R&T.

Carnac the Magnificent or Jeopardy:

• Easy for classroom writing or how do I get this damn thing to work? the answer is: Blackboard.
• interesting last comment or if I lose this I’m dead! answer: Endnote.
• a new greek restaurant or help for resources on the web. Answer is: Zotero

He encourages everyone to created Zotero because it saves the bibliography for you and you cannot lose it.

Instructor tools in the past: blackboard, chalk, resuse, syllabus, technology etc. And student tools: books, notebooks, pencil, pens, highlighter etc.

Now: blackboard, cd with books, clickers, Twitter … etc. So now we have a different kind of student: it is the digital student. There is also the millenial student. What is the difference between the two? the first was born into it, and the second is the one who has grown into it. Now there is also the Millenial faculty member. What is your expertise? we asked students, the Millenial instructors and faculty on education, research and personal and whether they are novice or expert. The Millenials have confidence that they are expert in technology and in changing students.

Barriers to using technology: instructors don’t know how, extra work, little connection, takes too much time, students don’t know how, too complicated, don’t have tech support, don’t have the skills. The Millenials and the students believed that the faculty themselves did not know how to use the technology – and faculty also believe the same thing about themselves. Faculty say there is extra work and little connection and faculty are the first to proclaim that it takes too much time. Students said they are a mile wide but one inch deep: they can use the Excel program but have no idea what to do with it. There is no depth. That is why now there is the Millenial instructor.

Faculty spend a tremendous amount on research, some time on service and little time for teaching. The Millenial instructor can do more service and more teaching and less research time.

Reward: recognition, travel, share, join, lead, fame, hopefully the right kind of fame.

Tenure: base qualification, ready for evaluating, presentaiton of work, review by pees, citation by peers, presentation of views.Technology crept in this area even in the  traditional way of acquiring tenure.

Publishing venues: a range from close to traditional to way-out. Supported by a wide variety of sources. traditionally there is expensive subscription to traditional journals, organization in house, page fees. Whereas online it can begin by getting a grant which is of course time consuming. Organization is in house or in the future we may see that even research is supported by advertisements and number of page hits [think of the Boston Globe and others].

One excellent journal to know is the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching [JOLT]. It is like old wine in new bottles. They took publishing and put it in a new venue so that it is easier to publish and review – and it makes reviews taking years, but it can be done in a month because of JOLT. Stats: 42ooo hits, 96000 pages read, 162 countries, 58 articles. This demonstrates how well it meets a need.

There is also the Virtual Center for Online Learning and Research. The Journal of Visualized Experiments [JOVE] think about presenting that to your promotional community. You can actually see the research in action but they may ask you for printouts rather than go online. There is also PLOS [Public Library of Science]. There is also IJLM [ijlm.net]. Vectors at USC http://www.vectorsjournal.org/.

How do we guide such folk? get out of their way? meet special needs? recognize and reward? The upsides: if it fits your research; it does that which we could not do before; integration of multiple disciplines – academic intersections. The downsides: finding that appropriate place that is accepting and critical and gives positive review; yet another format and rules; acceptance by peers – if it’s fun they think it’s play but it is not; the bottom line is the quality and veracity.

Using multimedia in peer reviewed publications: how can we help? help them find places to publish; help them enter their work; help administration find reputable reviewers and that is a tough one. In our own institutions we rarely have someone who handles these intersections together. At Merlot, they do that. Provide local reward: get that local reward out within maybe the provost office; encourage presenting with your colleagues; show how it might look and how it is done.

rep129 provided the podcast link on Twitter: click here.

collaborating with south korea

A partnership session. This sounded fascinating because of the partnership aspect and collaboration across cultural bounderies.

Artful Collaboration: Crossing Cultural and Technological Borders

Presenters: Lori Brink, Shirley Penland, Barbara Cox, Becca Barniskis [Minnesota U], Lisa Thompson [Taejon Christian International School, Korea]

This session was skyped with South Korea.

Lisa : introducing the project. She was wondering what is Becca had the opportunity to connect with her students in South Korea.

Becca:  both planned and worked on the program together. Instead of documenting a project, they decided to BE the project. They coordinated together and it was a very interesting project.

Shirley: was in South Korea for a long time and her role in the school is a professional development and curriculum coordinator. S. Korea has advanced technology and therefore they are always challenged to make the curricula up to that advanced standard. In school they train faculty to use the tools as they develop their instruction. Two of their fundamental concepts are intercultural awareness and communication. They used video conferencing. The students benefited the most because they were the ones capable of producing the art.

The panelists then showed a video: descriptive review – notice, question and speculate. In the video, 6th grade students talk to a poet in Minnesota.

They facilitated a descriptive review with the audience. These are not clarifying questions. We took two minutes to describe different things that you noticed from their presentation of the project to the video. One of the audience members suggested having a voice over in the video. The poem that the children wrote was about their immediate environment. Some of the students were shy – soft spoken voices and one covered his face. It seemed like an American classroom. Interesting mix of technology and paper.

Ended with a discussion between participants in the workshop and South Korea.

threaded discussions

Examining threaded discussions in online graduate courses

Tim Molseed, Black Hills State University

The context is the students doing their capstone portfolios. The purpose of the study was twofold: to better facilitate engagement as a learning community in supporting, motivating and encouraging each other in the process of developing capstone portfolios, and to better facilitate graduate students to engage as a community of learners in analyzing, critiquing and making suggestions regarding their capstone portfolios.

Study construction: examine the social and emotional respnses [opinion/evaluate, anecdotal/reflective], and to examine task responses defined as either content or style.

Hypotheses:

1. the number of social/emotional peer review response types will differ significantly from the task oriented peer review response types
2. of the task oriented response types that deal specifically with issues of content will differ significantly from those dealing with issues of style.

Findings: social/emotional 42%, task 51% and other 7%.

Suggestions for instruction:

• need for the intentional building of social/emotional interactions balanced with group maturity and history
• defining ‘meaningful responses’ to engage students in task comments
• modeling of expectations using both public and private forums. The instructor’s role needs to be one of restrained response.  Using private responses from instructor to student is very important because we don’t want to influence other opinions. Public forum responses are only if they have significance to the group.

MELO: addressing basic skills

Creating an interdisciplinary collection of learning objects to address basic skills

Presenters: Jay Holden and Adena Rottenstein, U of Michigan

MELO is the Michigan Education through Learning Objects.

Students come with different backgrounds. Sucess in undergraduate education demands a solid foundation ina variety of basic academic skills, eg. writing skills, working in groups, classroom presentation and study skills. Since they come from a variety of backgrounds we really don’t know which of these skills they have or don’t have and most of the time we don’t have the time for that. How then do we level the playing field?

The solution? Players: MELO

The speakers invited audience participation: break up into groups of 2-3. Introduce yourself and your academic discipline. Come up with 3 basic/foundational academic skills aht are critical for academic success, students commonly lack and apply across various disciplines.

Team Findings: generalizations, written and verbal communication skills, reading, time management [soft skills], ELS.

The process of brainstorming: in the group of 12 [the MELO group] they came up with many skills that students lack in all disciplines. Process II was searching and posting. They searched independently for LOs to address the areas of greatest need. They created a group website for posting search results and composing LO commentary. Finally they submitted LO findings. Process III Selecting: collaborate in selection [review preliminary collection]; which LOs were selected fopr the final collection? 4.25 star rated LOs and above; overlapping LOs found and posted by multiple reviewers.

Outcome: ended up with 17 LOs. Visit personal collection title: the Cross-discipline collection: basic skills. Go to Merlot website and put in the search Merlot @ Michigan and search members, or click this link:

http://www.merlot.org/merlot/members.htm?keywords=merlot+%40michigan

open content, open educational resources [OER]

Session on open content like the MIT coursework.. that’s what I wanted to see. Even to me, an open content and free software advocate, there was some new information in this session Not arrogance, honestly – but I have been working on free and open source stuff for a long time now.  Certainly a worthwhile session for a whole lot of people.

If content is King, then let Openness be Queen

Judy Baker, Dean – Foothill College

People visit websites for their content. Faculty visit a website for its open content. ‘Open content’ is any kind of creative work, of content, published in a format that explicitly allows copying and modifying of its information by anyone. But why would anyone do that and share it with other people? Why openness is important? Like MIT, Community Colleges have the Sofia Course @ http://sofia.fhda.edu/gallery/. What MIT found that it costs quite a bit but it ended up paying for itself from marketing because people made donations who have used the courses for free etc. It was worth it to them to offer those shareable courses. It gives students the opportunity to do their ‘course shopping’ better by viewing all of its content.

Why would instructors want to freely share online content? Marketing courses, ease of access, content repetition, pedagogical idea sharing, expert feedback support, standardization of the content, experimentation and risk, personal growth and responsive to the needs of others. We need feedback from each other rather than the popularity contest of student evaluations. It is honest feedback and can share with you ideas to improve the course. It also helps lower costs of educational materials for students. It lowers cost of books for example – text-book affordability. You can also share and remix learning materials for customized and localized use. There is also a fast feedback loop on quality and relevance of learning materials – continual improvement and rapid development. You get feedback from people across the world and you can make modifications to the course and you don’t have to wait for the next print edition. The book should not really be the course.

Open Textbook: cost is online free and pdf free. Visit the ‘connexions’ website @ http://www.cnx.org

Explore and become active and break free from expensive books. You need, however, the tools. This is key to successful and sustained use of open textbooks by educators – and they customize it and share learning content for use in classrooms. Sometimes Merlot and all these resources are too much for us, so perhaps we need to look at a critique of those tools:

Criteria: ease of use vs complexity;  collaboration, community building and networking, etc.

Tools for locating, organizaing and delivering open textbooks: Merlot, flatworld, Project Guttenburg, connexions, GEM. There are also many tools for collaboration and development such as labspace or wikimedia commons. Merlot has all the bells and whistles with the open textbooks. Use advanced search and save time to look for the courses you want and Merlot also added Creative Commons licensing so you know where you stand.

plenary/keynote, day 2

I finally woke up early this morning so I attended the keynote for day 2. Well worth it of course. Wade, the keynote speaker is very charismatic and his presentation was both humorous and very informative. It encouraged reflection, really, and one must go back and look once again at some of the activities one has planned for classes that one teaches.

Wade,  Jane and ?

Inquiry-based software MicroWorlds: Promoting Understanding and Retention of Concepts

Presenter: Wade Ellis – West Valley College.

Wade wanted to use technology in teaching mathematics. He then understood that technology was about learning and that he really liked to lecture with chalk boards [that were in themselves a technology]. Students should learn to learn mathematics or your chosen discipline. He felt he needed to facilitate and improve their learning but he couldn’t do it by himself – he felt he needed a team. Any time you want to change the quality of instruction you need a team.

Wade has been involved in several projects, among them the National Digital Library Visiting Team, ODE Architect software package, etc.

Merlot as a repository:

What kinds of things are in Merlot? Text, animations [we are told what we should observe], simulations, lessons of various sorts and other stuff as well. What is missing in Merlot? A significant amount of effort put in in instructional design.

Examples:

Contour map: it runs for 28 seconds and it is really good, but where is the lesson that surrounds it? This was an animation that you can sort of make it into a simulation.

ALEKS Tour: it is really a package.  It is an artificial intelligence-based system for individualized learning. Start up money was 10 million dollars. It is expensive, heavily based on research, heavily designed in terms of interface and pedagogy. This is a full-blown package that has bells and whistles and is on the web all the time, whereas we saw the Contour map which was smaller. How do we integrate them or how do we put all this stuff together? The learning object is not the learning activity here.

Brain research: diagrams by Kolb and Zull. The idea that there are different parts of the brain that we know about that deal with concrete experience. Others deal with reflective observations. Others take that reflective observation and creates hypotheses and then there is the actual testing of the hypotheses.

The brain therefore engages in experience, reflects on it, abstracts it and then tries it. From a mathematical point of view we often start with diagrams, reflect on it, abstract it and then try it. However the materials we produce tell student things and does not let them go through this process. If you bathe the whole learning event in emotion, you get better results. The other way is to scare people. J

Malcolm Knowles makes the following assumptions about the design of learning for adult learners [Andragogy]: they need to know why they need to learn something; adults need to learn experientially; adults approach learning as problem-solving, and adults learn best when the topic is of immediate value.

Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning: it has 4 levels of learning: information [remembering]; knowledge [understanding]; application [applying in real world]; problem solving [analyzing]; evaluation [judging] and research [creating].

Some research shows that if you don’t get to the application and problem solving level it does not translate into long term knowledge. They don’t remember anything later. As the adage goes: “what happens in the mathematics classroom, stays in the mathematics classroom”. Not good.

Action, consequence, reflection principle: students act on mathematical objects, observe the consequences of their actions and then reflect on it.

The learning object should be embedded into the activity. If you embed it into an activity, what is the important part of the activity that you will build? You build the reflective part of this which is essential to the Bloom’s taxonomy.

Inquiry questions: we could use good or bad questions and students should recognize them.

Learning process methodology: in the activity, there is preparation, a learning activity and then a reflection.

In preparation: why are we doing the activity? Where does it fit in the knowledge framework? What are the resources? Goals? Performance criteria, is there a language that I will have to learn? Do most lessons and most activities have this set of ideas? Probably not.

The learning activity: you’re prepared, now you need the plan, key questions/critical thinking questions [Reflection], examples and models, application and problem solving.

Reflection: self-assessment is very important especially that I already have performance criteria. Then there is the extension: could I use this somewhere else?

Learning as a process:

Learning skills: Good idea if we embed into the activity learning skills such as reading carefully, abstracting, generalizing, dealing with frustration. Can you prove any of those skills? Should we talk to our students about those frustration issues?

Example:

Preparation : why? Understanding contour mapping will help you in reading such maps when you are deciding on paths for power lines or hiking paths.

Where does it fit? You can currently read road maps and hiking trail maps

Learning activity example:

Plan:  read the critical thinking questions, work with the contour map program, answer the critical thinking questions, interpret the applications, solve the problems. There should be some questions that are easy and some that should be more complicated.

Application: another topographic map to interpret.

Reflection: self-assessment: can you determine basic features of a region from its topographic map?

Extension: how do you use it beyond class?

Two essential ways of thinking: The Axiomatic Method and the Scientific Method. They are the foundation of many of the activities that we do. Yet there are no technological support for us to apply those.

Bits and pieces: social aspects of learning communities; tablet PCs and classroom communications, using the Internet to expand the curriculum.  Important to check the classroom setting, how students are sitting, room temperature, etc. Expanding the curriculum on American History for example should show emphasis on American Indian perspectives, black perspectives, Hispanic perspectives etc… but this would cause teachers to be challenged. Most teachers don’t like to go there. We need to diversify the sources of what they learn and this is what the internet will do.

gamelets

Phew!! loooong day.. and two more long days to go. But quite worthwhile. So now the last session of the day at 5 pm. So here is the session I attended to end the day: Gamelets. Happy I attended it.

Teaching Learning with Gamelets

Juliette Bourdier. University of Colorado

What is a gamelet and why and how to use it.

What is a gamelet? Like an applet – it is a tool and also a toy, on a specific topic. It is intended as game design for education and could be used inside/outside the classroom [for students for example who were absent or who did not follow with you in class]. Finally who is the teacher? Many teachers think that with gamelets you lose control of the class. This is not true. You are still the boss of your class, so don’t have that fear.

The gamelet is very small and therefore you need to be very focused and do a gamelet with a specific issue or question.

Why use a gamelet?

• To design simulation or observation. We will put a simulation where something is happening. The students may not yet understand what is happening. He/she will notice something is happening and it is my role as teacher to help him/her understand what is happening.
• To reformulate concepts, ideas. Some students don’t understand and so we can use other things to make them understand.
• To cover the Kolb learning style inventory. Learning by producing, experimenting.
• To bring practice, repetitiveness and automatism. Students sometimes understand things but forget it the next day so repetitiveness will create automatism and that is how we learn.
• To allow learners to follow their own pace. This depends on student pace – some are faster and some are slower.
• To provide students with additional feedback and testing opportunities. Depending on whether we teach skills or fact we will be training, practicing or testing. For example what is the population of Germany? It is a fact – but if we ask which country is bigger, Germany or France, that is a skill.

How to design a gamelet?

First I need to know:

• What are the pre-requisite skills, facts and ideas?
• Are they real-world skills? We have to tell the students how they will use it in real life.
• Does playing the game provide extensive practice of the skill?
• Does the game include instructions or demonstrations that could help understand the skills?
• Does it make the learner aware of the skills involved in the game?
• Which important generalizations involves playing this game?
• Does this game present comparable but contrasting situations or entities?
• What proportion of the time learners spend on the game, represents processing this knowledge?

Learning with simulations

• It is an animation with interaction. Simulation means students must interact not just watch.
• Demonstration is not simulation
• Observation can be wrongly interpreted – it is more for literature.
• Engagement is the key. It has to be fun. You can have the best program and all but it is not fun and students will say ‘we learned something but just don’t do it again’. If you want them to play it again and again and again, it means it is engaging.
• Goal tuned with difficulty levels. The levels mean whether they understood or not, and they need to pass something to move to the next. It is a reinforcement.
• Partial reinforcement.
• Progress toward the goal
• Balance between chance and skill

Viewing some games:

Agent sheets:

http://www.agentsheets.com/index.html

Has been created for teachers so any teacher can use it and they have plenty of support for teachers.

Scalable game design: wiki to help in the creation of gamelets.

Phet: the moving man: interactive simulations especially for math and physics

http://phet.colorado.edu/simulations/sims.php?sim=The_Moving_Man

digital storytelling – again

So I attended another digital storytelling session. Interesting session but I have yet to look into the videos myself. I know I saw that site before and took a look at its main video, but did not quite get it. Now I think I understand more what that is all about. So.. without further ado, here are my notes:

Digital storytelling for enhanced faculty development

Presenters: Brett Christie, Sonoma State University and Lou Zweier, CSU

Digital storytelling for enhanced faculty development

Presenters: Brett Christie, Sonoma State University and Lou Zweier, CSU

Websites:

http://elixir.merlot.org
http://enact.sonoma.edu
http://pachyderm.nmc.org

slideshare.net (MIC 2009 Elixir-EnAct) for the slide presentation

Overview of ELIXIR, EnAct, and CSU FDC, main goals and how case stories supports, case story defined etc.

What is a case story? An interactive multimedia presentation of innovative teaching practice. It integrates text, images, video and support resources to tell a story and demonstrate ‘how to’; integrates faculty, student, and faculty development perspectives to communicate educational and personal impact; stories are focused on a set of themes from a range of disciplines [so that faculty development people could use these].

What really are the challenges that faculty face? How are students affected by it?

ELIXIR case story themes: academic integrity, 1^st day of classes, etc.

How are they made? Case story teams can include a faculty developer, a media producer, an instructional designer, and a project director:

• A subject for the case is selected
• A case scenario is developed and reviewed
• Faculty and student interviews are conducted
• Classroom and other illustrative footage is shot
• Video footage review and editing
• Formative review and feedback with web review page
• Assembly of presentation with Pachyderm
• Revisions and release

The theme leader coordinates and guides the case stories developed with that theme. Some teams may do storyboarding and some may not.

Website is at http://elixr.merlot.org/ He showed the video: http://pachyderm.cdl.edu/elixr-stories/tcd-business-math/

The cases are available for anyone to use.

Case story use for faculty development: the cases can be used

• As a component of a F2F workshop eg. Course transformation
• As a lead-in or follow-up to a F2F session eg. Knowledge surverys
• As a component of faculty learning community process eg. Universal Design for Learning
• As part of new faculty orientation: eg. First Day of Class [how do you show teachers how to make students excited on that first day about coming back the following week]

Faculty learning communities in higher education: another video on Merlot ELIXIR. We have interviews there with faculty etc. Faculty members sharing their course and getting feedback from peers.

Can other faculty make comments on those videos? This is something they will look at. There is a user-testing form that you can fill out so you can make suggestions about the project.

Look at the resources section in the ELIXIR on Merlot.

In the end he showed some very positive stats on the use of this project.

Lessons learned:

• ‘how to’ is as important as ‘why’ in a good case story
• Formative review during case story development is critical
• Short clips with efficient narrative are preferred – 1-3 min
• Support resources provide needed detail for implementation – handouts, guides, repots, links]
• Student voice and ‘B Roll’ adds credibility and dimension
• Usability of authoring tool and published presentation is critical

Closure:

• Invitation to use our case stories
• Invitation to make your own

session on digital storytelling

I was thinking of ways of integrating digital story telling in my curricula because it is very interesting. Since I teach technology, it poses a challenge. However this semester I will do that and let you know its outcome. That’s why I attended this session and it was interesting.

Digital Storytelling.

Presenter: Bernard Robin, University of Houston
Handout and website: http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu

Early needs for DS: seeking meaningful uses of digital photography; wanted students to use digital images as a mode of communication and personal reflection; looking for a way to successfully integrate multimedia development into K-12 education.

Benefits of DS to students: when done right it helps them research content online [find and analyze info]; writing skills, organization skills, tech skills, presentation skills, interview skills, interpersonal skills, problem-solving skills.

Why does it work? Because we have reached the point where computers are powerful enough and available and software that helps you put all this together etc.

Types of digital stories:

• Personal narratives
• Stories based on historical events [eg. Abe Lincoln’s 2^nd inaugural address]
• Stories designed to inform or instruct people on a particular topic [eg. Examines history of pop-up books] They are more like digital media projects.

The 7 elements of digital storytelling

The center for digital storytelling developed these principles, so Robin added a few more such as

Language and grammar, clarity of voice, dramatic content, etc.

Challenges: trouble formulating a story/script; less interest in the storytelling; limited access to technology; inability to save from the internet; time consuming; copyright and intellectual property. The primary objection to using copyright information is if the copyright holder is losing then this does him/her harm and they have a case, but a student using items is all right for educational purposes.

Resources: Alan Levine’s 50 ways to tell a digital story.

What’s next?

Robin wants to: add more digital story examples, articles, research, etc., better training materials, a submit your own story option, more emphasis on the international aspect of digital storytelling/stories in multiple languages, more on DS in healthcare education and finally, a new dynamic database website.