Maintaining an Online Scholarly Identity

tl;dr: I prefer an ORCID + figshare + Twitter/Google+ combination over services like ResearchGate and Academia.edu.

By 2009 I was taking social media pretty seriously, and with all those links to find, save, and share, I put a lot of thought into social bookmarking. I was trying to figure out how to manage a bunch of overlapping options; at one time or another, I was using Delicious, Diigo, Pinboard, Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and FriendFeed. Some of those products had integrations (like sending links from Reader to Twitter) while simultaneously having overlapping functions (like following someone on Reader for the links you were also seeing them post to Twitter). New services popped up all the time, and others faded away or were killed off completely. It was kind of a mess, and it taught me some things about what I valued in my tools: (1) multiple small tools (but not too many) focused on being good at specific tasks could return greater total value than all-in-one solutions, and (2) openness is important, for financial reasons (both mine and the service), interoperability, and exportability.

The current landscape of tools and services for managing an online scholarly identity feels very reminiscent of those social bookmarking days. Part of that online identity includes general social media services, like Twitter and Facebook, but also a bunch of services for academics: Academia.edu, ResearchGate, ORCID, Google Scholar, figshare, SlideShare, ResearcherID, and Mendeley. I'm sure there are others.

My experience with social networks and bookmarking taught me I had three basic needs: establishing my identity, saving resources, and a place to follow and share with others. For my identity, I've used my own website as well as services like about.me. For saving resources (links, mostly), I eventually ditched both Delicious and Diigo and went with Pinboard. For following and sharing, I now stick mostly to Twitter and Google+, with less activity on Facebook and LinkedIn.

With a scholarly identity, I feel like I still have the same three basic needs: establishing my identity, saving resources, and a place to follow and share with others. In academia, your identity is often represented by your curriculum vitae and publication record, and there are ways of maintaining a CV online that go beyond just posting a PDF of the paper version. For saving resources, academics need a repository to save their slides, posters, handouts, pre-prints, and unpublished manuscripts. That leaves a place to follow and share with others. It could be an all-purpose social network, or it could be something more specialized. Here's how I see the services I mentioned playing out across these three needs:

My view of the online scholarly identity landscape

Right away, you see two services, Academia.edu and ResearchGate, making the all-in-one play. They also happen to be mostly closed, profit-seeking services, which has raised the eyebrows (and/or fists) of some academics. Mendeley is nearby but doesn't offer much as a social network. Google Scholar is a bit further from the center, as it lets you follow other academics and be notified about new publications, but offers no way to interact with other people. For the most part, these services — while certainly valuable in their own ways — go against my two criteria of simplicity and openness. Does that mean I don't use them? Actually, I have accounts and profiles on all four of these services, but I don't spend a lot of time on them and I'm very wary of the rights they want over my work. It's tricky to add a publication to your ResearchGate or Academia.edu profile without actually giving them the document, and if you manage to do it they'll hound you for the full-text version. So tricky is Academia.edu in this respect, I've decided to trust it with nothing. For more on the pros and cons of these services, I'll refer you to the post "A Social Networking Site is Not an Open Access Repository" from the Univeristy of California.

That leaves me seeking out tools in the non-overlapping parts of my diagram. Here's what I've come to use most:

Identity: This is probably the easiest choice of them all. My ORCID is like my CV, and its sole purpose is to give researchers a unique identity tied to their scholarly activities and outputs. (See this as a list of ten things, if you prefer.) My profile is filled with a lot of things I entered manually, but when I published an article recently with Springer I gave them my ORCID and got two things: (1) the article was added to my ORCID profile automatically via CrossRef, and (2) I got a little ORCID badge on the article that links to my ORCID profile. Over time, this system is designed to make sure that no person or system confuses me with another Raymond Johnson, and all my works are tied together. I do pay attention to my Google Scholar profile since it's such a widely used and useful search tool, but you can tell Google doesn't put a ton of resources behind it and I'm not sure how many people or services rely on the profile features. Impactstory is a really cool thing that belongs in this category (nearest the center), but it really operates on top of, not instead of, ORCID and other services.

Repository: This is a tougher choice because in addition to having a repository that is stable and secure, there are also intellectual property rights to think about. I have tried hosting files on my own website, as many publishers allow academics to do. That puts a certain amount of responsibility on me, and I have to worry about registering domains, fixing broken links, having a stable URL structure, etc. I'm moving away from that and recently added all my slides and posters to figshare. While figshare does give me a profile page, identity services are really not its thing. Figshare is about sharing all kinds of open-licensed scholarly outputs, including datasets, figures, posters, presentations, and documents. They give you a stable DOI that (I assume) will always point to your file, even if figshare shuts down and someone else takes over the repository. figshare does have its rough edges, and through following their social media activity I can safely say that most of their attention is on behind-the-scenes integrations with services like ORCID, ImpactStory, and APIs that are more for librarians than individual users. figshare also takes some commitment, as you have to choose one of a number of open licenses to post your work publicly (like Creative Commons BY; I wish other CC licenses were available, but they're not), and once you post something there's no delete button. It's not that you've given your property to figshare and they won't give it back; rather, you've licensed your property for the world to see and use and figshare is making sure the world can exercise that right. There are alternatives, like SlideShare, but they're owned by LinkedIn, more business-oriented, and not as open or integrated into academic services.

I currently have two documents that I'm not sharing on figshare and have instead chosen to use our university repository. I could put more on scholar.colorado.edu and rely on the fact that it will probably operate so long as the university exists, but I can't continue to use it after I leave the university.

Social Network: While I get notifications about publications through Google Scholar and ResearchGate, I don't interact hardly at all with other people there. For that, I stick with Twitter and Google+. And that's fine with me, really, as I only have so much mental bandwidth to work with anyway. Once in a while I'll look at the Q&A on ResearchGate but rarely do I see a conversation I really want to jump into like I do routinely on my regular social media accounts.

By going with an ORCID + figshare + Twitter/Google+ combination I feel like I'm getting (and retaining) more value than I would with a single service like ResearchGate. It's a fair amount of work, though, and I'd recommend people not try to maintain too many identities at once. My Academia.edu profile is nearly empty because fewer education researchers I know are there, and it's just too much duplicate work to maintain it and ResearchGate, and my ResearchGate profile still doesn't include everything I list at ORCID. I think the rarer your name is, the less need there is for you to maintain a Google Scholar profile, and you can probably settle on just one repository for public posting of your work. I have a lot of confidence that ORCID will be around for the long haul, unlike some of these venture-funded services that will have to make a profit or likely be shut down. It's not easy to tell who might go the way of Google Reader or FriendFeed, but as we saw with those services, something new came along to replace them and it was easier if we weren't too invested in any one tool.

Oh, and if all else fails, an up-to-date, ready-to-print pdf of your CV is still not a bad thing to have handy.

This Week in Math Ed: March 25, 2016

Math Ed Said

March 18: Next to last week's TWiME post, the most shared link last Friday was to the schedule apps for the upcoming NCTM Annual Meeting.

Shared by: Suzanne Alejandre, Norma Gordon, Michael Fenton, Peg Cagle

March 19: I'll share just one of the five post-popular links from last Saturday: James Propp's "Believe It, Then Don't: Toward a Pedagogy of Discomfort." It's about getting students to look past the temptation of obvious truths/proofs, and includes this great line: "The discomfort of being mistaken has led the students to divest themselves of the approach that led them into error, and they are now standing in their intellectual underwear."

Shared by: Steven Strogatz, Patrick Honner, George Woodbury

March 20: Brian Marks and Leslie Lewis shared their slides from "Teaching with Rich, Real World Tasks," a presentation they gave at the Association of Teachers of Mathematics in Massachusetts Spring Conference.

Shared by: Brian Marks, Laura Wagenman, Pat Power, Darren Burris

March 21: Dan Meyer is concerned that some of us are getting ripped off at gas pumps. Actually, I doubt he's too worried about that, so let me try again: Dan Meyer is concerned that students get the opportunity to develop the mathematical skill to argue they're getting ripped off at gas pumps. Yeah, that feels about right.

Shared by: Nancy Terry, Erik, Dan Meyer, Eddi Vulić, Kyle Pearce

Jo Boaler speaking at the 2015 NCTM Annual Meeting.
March 22: Many people reshared Jo Boaler's "Handout for Parents," a simple front/back page of guiding principles and helpful resources.

Shared by: Jo Boaler, Kate Owens, Laura Wagenman, Nita Cochran, George Woodbury, Richelle Marynowski, Jill Buecking, Greg George, Federico Chialvo, Bridget Dunbar, Matthew Oldridge, Imtiaz Damji, Regina Barrett, Mark Chubb, Andrew Gael, Bryson Perry, Miss Kodroff

March 23: This one is personal for me, because I now know that Ben Orlin and I share a certain pain when students shun fractions for decimals. In another Math with Bad Drawings post, Ben illustrates "Decimal-Crazed Lunatics," wondering why students would write \(0.\bar{3}\) instead of \(\frac{1}{3}\). I tried to get my students to understand why doing more work to get a less precise answer was silly. I'm still thankful for my former student Alex W. for giving me the term "decimalized," as in "I decimalized the fraction \(\frac{3}{7}\) to 0.43," mostly because it gave me another way to tell students to "Stop unnecessary decimalization!"

Shared by: Ben Orlin, Jo Morgan, Simon Gregg, David Petersen, Bridget Dunbar, Mattie B, Taylor Belcher, Ken Smith, Jim Wysocki, Federico Chialvo, Carrie Muir, T R

March 24: "Fractions on a Numberline" is a Desmos activity designed by Nathan Kraft. As someone well-versed in Realistic Mathematics Education, I think this is a fine, short timescale example of progressive formalization and the use of increasingly generalized mathematical models to support growth in student understanding and reasoning.

Shared by: Shauna Hedgepeth, Andrew Gael, Simon Gregg, Geoff Krall, Jo Morgan, Nyima Drayang, Jessica Jeffers

Around the Math Ed Web

TODOS: Mathematics for All and NCSM NCSM quietly released a new position paper, "Mathematics Education Through the Lens of Social Justice: Acknowledgment, Actions, and Accountability." Website announcements of this paper are lagging a bit, but the paper itself is worth a read and well-placed alongside high-quality, yet somewhat business-as-usual (particularly at a systemic level) documents like standards or Principles to Actions.

AMTE has posted their call for proposals for next February's conference. The online submission site opens April 1 and closes May 15.

Next week's Global Math Department meeting is "Desmos Activity Builder: Best Practices for Charging Up Lessons," by Shelley Carranza. Last week's session, "Transforming Intervention: Moving from Skills Remediation to Rich Problem Solving," by Mary Beth Dillane and Kassia Omohundro Wedekind, is here:



Research Notes

Yet another article has been added to the June 2016 issue of The Journal of Mathematical Behavior:
A happy double issue of the Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education is out. This one features my first journal article, which you can get below or here as an open access pre-print. The focus of this special issue is Mathematics Teachers as Partners in Task Design.
The Elementary School Journal is out with their first issue of 2016, including these math-related articles:

Math Ed in the News


Math Ed in Colorado

On Monday the 28th I'll be attending the Colorado Math Pathways Conference along with representatives of our post-secondary teacher education and mathematics programs, the Department of Higher Education, and special guests Uri Treisman and Joe Garcia. I've been thinking about pathways a bit more since last week during the webcast of the March 2016 Research + Practice Collaboratory, Phil Daro said:


If you can't see the video, his comment comes down to this: we have 30-40 pathways students follow from 7th grade through high school, and no pathway has more than 10% of students in it. To me that means (a) we have a lot of different ideas about the series of courses students should take to be college-ready, and (b) from those ideas no dominant pathways are becoming more successful than the others. It's not just a matter of Geometry before Algebra 2 or vice-versa; a study of transcripts of actual student pathways tells the story, as seen in this quote from Daro's SERP report:
The data tell a compelling story; one that makes it uncomfortable to defend the status quo. For example, the most common course sequence in the transcripts of one of our districts was as follows: grade 8: Algebra I, grade 9: repeat Algebra I, grade 10: Geometry, grade 11: Algebra II, grade 12: repeat Algebra II. The next most common sequence also involved repeating algebra I. The third most common sequence repeated algebra I three times! Only 5% took the presumably normal sequence running from Algebra I in 8th grade through Calculus in 12th grade. Perhaps even more damning was the fact that not a single sequence was followed by as many as 10% of the students. Of the many, many sequences, few were defensible as a desirable pathway.
I'll report out what I can from the conference. I'm very interested to hear what everyone has to say, and I find it very promising that pathways to statistics are being given the kind of attention and value we used to only give calculus.

Other Colorado-relevant announcements:

Cassie Harrelson of Aurora Public Schools is facilitating an online book study of Jo Boaler's Mathematical Mindsets. The book study can be found on CEA's COpilot site and a course flyer can be found here.

Jackie Weber, director of math and computer science in the Boulder Valley School District, is trying to collect names of people who are leading computer science efforts in their districts. She's looking to form a cohort of district CS leaders, and you can give her your name here.

Rebekah Ottenbreit from CDE's Office of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education is offering two more sessions focused on helping math teachers and ESL/bilingual educators use tools and strategies to make mathematics content more accessible to English learners. You can grab a flyer here.
  • May 10, 2016, from 8:30-noon at the Pueblo City Schools Administration Building, Pueblo, CO (register by 5/5/16)
  • May 13, 2016, from 8:30-noon at the NW CO BOCES downstairs conference room in Steamboat Springs (register by 5/8/16)
The Rocky Mountain Math Teachers' Circle is preparing for a big summer, including:
  • HS Teacher Workshop: Active Learning Activities for Teaching Precalculus (June 13-17)
  • HS Teacher Workshop: Active Learning Activities for Teaching Calculus (June 20-24)
  • Summer Workshop in Winter Park with Northern Colorado Math Teachers' Circle (July 11-15)
  • Additionally, the Rocky Mountain Math Teachers' Circle and the Southwest Math Teachers' Circle are jointly offering a workshop from August 8-11 at Fort Lewis College in Durango. Graduate credit or continuing education units will be available, and information about scholarships to pay for those credits is forthcoming. Applications are accepted until June 15.
April 18 looks like the next meeting of the Northern Colorado Math Circles.

CU-Boulder is looking for a master teacher in mathematics for their CU Teach program. It's an awesome opportunity to help prepare the next generation of math teachers in Colorado, as well as a great place to work.

The "Expanding Your Horizons" symposium for middle school girls interested in STEM registration begins March 1.

NCTM is offering two summer institutes this summer in Denver:

This Week in Math Ed: March 18, 2016

Math Ed Said

March 11: Timothy Gowers, British mathematician and Fields Medalist, writes in The Guardian, "Maths isn't the problem - the way it’s taught is" in response to an earlier article by Simon Jenkins questioning the importance we place on learning math. Gowers drives his point home: "But until our mathematics classes encourage people to think, rather than merely play games with marks on paper, the Simon Jenkinses of this world will continue to confuse mathematics with mindless symbol manipulation, attacking the subject itself when their real target should be today's curriculum."

Shared by: Dave Radcliffe, TJ Hitchman, Earl Samuelson, Kate Owens, Susan Davidson, Egan Chernoff

March 12: If you haven't heard already, The Best of the Math Teacher Blogs 2015 is available now and Tina Cardone has all the details about getting yourself a copy in her post.

Shared by: Tina Cardone, Lisa Henry, TMC, Megan Schmidt, Pam Wilson, Jonathan Schoolcraft, Kent Haines, Bridget Dunbar, Joe Schwartz

March 13: Karim Kai Ani wrote a beautiful blog post called "On Purpose," in which he looks to better understand the importance of mathematics, why we teach it, and the roles he thinks he can play in education and as a curriculum developer. The post touched a lot of people, as 18 tweeted about it on Sunday, with many others on other days.

Shared by: Margie Pearse, Gary Davis, Jennifer Wilson, Amy Hogan, Sharon Vestal, Robert Cop, Greg George, Julie Kubiak, Tyler Anderson, Steve Leinwand, Cynthia Crenshaw, Bridget Dunbar, Anna Blinstein, Richelle Marynowski, Kris Karbon, Mathalicious, Martin Joyce, Andy

March 14: Many properties of prime numbers have been thought to be more or less random, so it was a big deal when some Stanford mathematicians discovered a way in which they aren't. "Mathematicians Discover Prime Conspiracy," an article in Quanta Magazine, was the most-shared link on Pi Day. This personally made me happy because it's great to see math celebrated on Pi Day, not just the trivia of an approximated value.

Shared by: OCTM, Steve Phelps, Nick Yates, Mark Ellis, Steven Strogatz, Patrick Honner, Steve Humble, Bowen Kerins, Illustrative Maths, Egan Chernoff, PhET Sims

March 15: Joe Schwartz makes another appearance as a most-shared link with his post "Teaching to the Test," in which he takes a careful look at some of the instructional activities he's done with his students and the influence those activities may have had on a mid-year assessment. This kind of systematic analysis of one's own teaching always gets me excited, as I really believe these are tough but needed steps on a path to improved teaching and learning. What's particularly good here is that Joe's activities aren't simply routinized practice of problems as they appeared on the assessment.

Shared by: Daniel Luevanos, Laura Wagenman, Mary Bourassa, WODB? Math, Christina

March 16: This isn't about math, but it touched me and touched many others. "Screaming Silence" by Megan Schmidt recalls incidents of abuse suffered as a teenager, and how an older and wiser Megan has used these incidents to be a more caring and more protective adult in charge of the teens in her classroom.

Shared by: Megan Schmidt, Shannon Houghton, Glenn Waddell, John Golden, Laila Nur, Shannon Houghton, Justin Lanier, Christopher Danielson, Bowen Kerins

Rochelle Gutiérrez giving the Iris M. Carl Equity Address
 at the 2014 NCTM Annual Meeting. (Webcast)
March 17: On my podcast listening list for the weekend will be Sam Otten's latest episode of the Math Ed Podcast. Featuring Rochelle Gutiérrez, this bonus-length episode looks across Rochelle's career and many of her best-known articles addressing issues of equity and opportunity in math education.

Shared by: Samuel Otten, John Golden, Kate Johnson, Andrew Gael, Jennifer Lawler, NCTM, Egan Chernoff, Raymond Johnson

Around the Math Ed Web

The Global Math Department featured "Bringing the World Outside School Into Your Math Classroom" by Shelby Aaberg last week. Next week's gathering is titled "Transforming Intervention: Moving from Skills Remediation to Rich Problem Solving."



NCTM has more information about their summer institutes in Denver and Atlanta. APME chapter proposals are due March 21.

The Teachers Development Group is holding their "Leadership Seminar on Mathematics Professional Development" in Portland, OR. There's some pretty high-quality tweeting going on if you check out the hashtag #tdgmath2016.

AMTE has posted their call for proposals for next February's conference. The online submission site opens April 1 and closes May 15.

Research Notes

The March 2016 issue of the International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education is focused on metacognition in technology-infused learning environments. Two research articles focus on mathematics:
A new issue of Cognition and Instruction is out, including:

Math Ed in the News


Math Ed in Colorado

CCTM: If you are interested in the technology integration specialist position on the CCTM board you have until March 18 (TODAY!) to apply.

Cassie Harrelson of Aurora Public Schools is facilitating an online book study of Jo Boaler's Mathematical Mindsets. The book study can be found on CEA's COpilot site and a course flyer can be found here.

Jackie Weber, director of math and computer science in the Boulder Valley School District, is trying to collect names of people who are leading computer science efforts in their districts. She's looking to form a cohort of district CS leaders, and you can give her your name here.

Rebekah Ottenbreit from CDE's Office of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education is offering two more sessions focused on helping math teachers and ESL/bilingual educators use tools and strategies to make mathematics content more accessible to English learners. You can grab a flyer here.
  • May 10, 2016, from 8:30-noon at the Pueblo City Schools Administration Building, Pueblo, CO
  • May 13, 2016, from 8:30-noon at the NW CO BOCES downstairs conference room in Steamboat Springs
The Rocky Mountain Math Teachers' Circle is preparing for a big summer, including:
  • HS Teacher Workshop: Active Learning Activities for Teaching Precalculus (June 13-17)
  • HS Teacher Workshop: Active Learning Activities for Teaching Calculus (June 20-24)
  • Summer Workshop in Winter Park with Northern Colorado Math Teachers' Circle (July 11-15)
  • Additionally, the Rocky Mountain Math Teachers' Circle and the Southwest Math Teachers' Circle are jointly offering a workshop from August 8-11 at Fort Lewis College in Durango. Graduate credit or continuing education units will be available, and information about scholarships to pay for those credits is forthcoming. Applications are accepted until June 15.
April 18 looks like the next meeting of the Northern Colorado Math Circles.

CU-Boulder is looking for a master teacher in mathematics for their CU Teach program. It's an awesome opportunity to help prepare the next generation of math teachers in Colorado, as well as a great place to work.

The "Expanding Your Horizons" symposium for middle school girls interested in STEM registration begins March 1.

Lastly, as mentioned above, NCTM is offering two summer institutes this summer in Denver:

This Week in Math Ed: March 11, 2016

Math Ed Said

March 4: Graham Fletcher is back with another video in his Making Sense Series, "The Progression of Addition and Subtraction." Perhaps my favorite thing about these videos is that my perspective of standards more easily shifts to a multi-year span of time, instead of a deadline when those standards appear for a particular grade. Learning takes time, y'all.

Shared by: Graham Fletcher, Alex Overwijk, Heather Kohn, Zak Champagne, Jaymie Obney, Tracy Johnston Zager, Bridget Dunbar, Meleia Bridenstine, Tyler Anderson, Dave Lanovaz, Keith Devlin, Brett Parker, Kyle Pearce, Shauna Hedgepeth, Andrew Gael, Richelle Marynowski

March 5: Corey Drake's article, "The fantastic new ways to teach math that most schools aren’t even using," was the most-shared link on March 3rd and it topped the chart again on the 5th.

Shared by: Joel Amidon, Amanda Jansen, Julie Kubiak, Margie Pearse, Paul Reimer, Tina Palmer, Theodore Chao, Alayne Armstrong, Nancy Terry

This is my one picture of Dan Meyer, and it's lousy. It's him, trust me.
March 6: Dan Meyer's advice to his younger self and other teachers is to "Ignore The Adjectives. Watch The Verbs.." I hadn't quite thought of this the same way, but I've come to cringe when I hear "hands-on" and "real-world," as both terms have been overused and abused of their meaning. Instead, I find myself asking, "What are students mathematizing?" This is where it's particularly helpful for me to think about Adrian Treffer's classic Three Dimensions, in which he describes horizontal mathematization is described as starting from a realistic context and organizing it mathematically with increasingly sophisticated models, while vertical mathematization is described as a process of reorganizing within the mathematics itself.

Shared by: Nancy Terry, Dan Meyer, Margie Pearse, Lorraine Males, Andrew Gael, Mark Chubb, Brett Parker

March 7: Ilana Horn wrote "Professional Development is Broken, but Be Careful How We Fix It." Not only is the post great, but the comment section is equally great! Posts like this really hit home for me, as I'm now in a position where I'm tasked with bringing outside expertise to a group of teachers. My years in academia have sensitized me to labels, definitions, and frameworks, and there's a challenge to interpret people's discourse and ideas with each new group I meet with.

Shared by: Ilana Horn, Danny Brown, Josh Fisher, Peps Mccrea, Bridget Dunbar, Bryan Meyer, Tyler Anderson, Patrick Honner, Andrew Gael, Michelle Naidu, Darren Kuropatwa

March 8: A post on the Achieve the Core website, "Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching," highlights the special kind of knowledge math teachers need for choosing problems and methods that best set the conditions for student learning. This math teacher knowledge is often called "Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching," which may be best known for being described in Ball, Thames, and Phelps (2008).

Shared by: Alex Jaffurs, Amy Spies, Jennifer Lawler, Kimberly Dugdale, Illustrative Maths, Josh Fisher

March 9: NCTM and Teaching Children Mathematics (TCM) held another #TCMchat, this time around Chepina Rumsey's article, "Promoting Mathematical Argumentation."

Shared by: NCTM - TCM, Zak Champagne, NCTM, The Math Forum, USU TeachMath, Jody Guarino, Julie Kubiak

March 10: Robert Kaplinsky asks a question near and dear to me, "Why Are You Using That Problem?" I don't think I would have answered the same way Robert has, but I appreciate efforts to articulate the criteria with which problems/tasks/activities are chosen.

Shared by: Regan Galvan, Bridget Dunbar, Julie Kubiak, John Berray, Robert Kaplinsky, Andrew Stadel, Bryan Anderson, Melinda Lula, Sendhil Revuluri, Shauna Hedgepeth

Around the Math Ed Web

NCTM had a March 1 deadline for APME chapters (and as of this writing this page still says March 1), but according to a tweet, it appears the deadline has been extended to March 21.

I haven't been saying enough about the Principles to Actions book chat (#nctmp2a), which continues on across a series of tweets and blog posts. I see so much good stuff in Principles to Actions and have sometimes wondered if there shouldn't be some kind of 8-year PD plan for the 8 teaching practices it describes. I think you could dig deep that entire time and still not max out your teaching abilities.

"Using Peer Feedback to Increase Student Understanding" was the topic at this week's meeting of the Global Math Department, and next week's presentation is slated to be "Bringing the World Outside School Into Your Math Classroom."



Research Notes

Another article has been added to the June 2016 issue of The Journal of Mathematical Behavior:
And that's it. Maybe this will give me a chance to catch up with last week's giant list of new research articles.

Math Ed in the News


Math Ed in Colorado

CCTM: Today is the last day to submit nominations for the CCTM leadership award and teaching award, but you have until March 18 to apply for the technology integration specialist postition on the CCTM board.

Math Circles: April 18 looks like the next meeting of the Northern Colorado Math Circles and you can learn more about the activities of the Rocky Mountain Math Teachers' Circle by signing up for their listserv.

Cassie Harrelson of Aurora Public Schools is facilitating an online book study of Jo Boaler's Mathematical Mindsets. The book study can be found on CEA's COpilot site and a course flyer can be found here.

CU-Boulder is looking for a master teacher in mathematics for their CU Teach program. It's an awesome opportunity to help prepare the next generation of math teachers in Colorado, as well as a great place to work.

The "Expanding Your Horizons" symposium for middle school girls interested in STEM registration begins March 1.

This Week in Math Ed: March 4, 2016

Math Ed Said

February 26: The most-shared post of this day was last week's TWiME post, which I'm taking as an indicator that the time it takes me to assemble these posts is well-spent. That said, I'd rather recognize two other popular posts from last Friday. First, Rachel Lambert shared a presentation she gave at UCLA, "Including Learners with Disabilities in Meaningful Mathematics," and second, folks were tweeting about Megan Schmidt's "We Read. And then We Math."

Shared by: Rachel Lambert, Andrew Gael, Tim Hudson, Shauhna Feitlin, John Golden, Kent Haines, Kim Webb, Michelle Naidu

February 27: I'll admit that this one got a laugh out of me when I first saw it, so I'll not spoil the fun and hope you get a laugh out of it, too.
Note: Despite thousands of retweets and likes, Adam Becker understands that for some, this is not an easy topic to laugh at. Sadly, I understand, too.

Shared by: Mike Thayer, Steven Strogatz, Kate Owens, Martin Joyce, Kent Haines, Michael Ferrara

February 28: Twenty-four (!) people shared a link to Andrew Hacker's NYT op-ed, "The Wrong Way to Teach Math." By my count, this is the third reference I've made to Hacker's new book and his NYT appearances in the past four weeks.

Shared by: Markus Sagebiel, Mister Suever, Meleia Bridenstine, OCTM, Brian Marks, Amy Hogan, Douglas Weathers, Jonathan Schoolcraft, Sherri Adler, Cassy Turner, Matthew Oldridge, Susan Davidson, Susan Wilson, Chris Shore, Kristin Manna, Brian Lawler, Bryan Meyer, Gregory White, Glenn Waddell, John Golden, Sadie Estrella, Anthony Purcell, Robert Berry, Eric Milou

February 29: Jose Vilson graces us with a post on the Teaching Tolerance blog called "Why I Teach: Solving Problems Beyond Math Class."

Shared by: Jose Vilson, Shannon Houghton, Andrew Gael, Carrie Muir, Julie Wright

March 1: Shall we have more Andrew Hacker commentary? Keith Devlin responds to Hacker with a widely-shared post, "The Math Myth that permeates 'The Math Myth'."

Shared by: MAA, Keith Devlin, TedCoe, Egan Chernoff, Denise Gaskins, Carrie Muir, Bowen Kerins, Ilana Horn, Ilona Vashchyshyn

March 2: Even more people were talking about Keith Devlin's post.

Commentary: As with many heated discussions about mathematics education, dig deep enough and you're likely to find some fundamental differences in what people believe mathematics is. At CU-Boulder we offer a class called "Perspectives on Math and Math Education," and I find what I learned in that class both interesting and highly valuable when sorting out where people stand in debates like this, or like the arguments I typically see in the math wars. Devlin's specific criticisms aside, if anything, Hacker prompted a lot of math educators to ask themselves, "What is this stuff I'm teaching, and should I be teaching it?" It's not a bad question to ask ourselves, and something the field of math ed seems to do one syllabus, one textbook adoption, and one standards revision at a time. (With or without the NYT op-eds.)

Shared by: Keith Devlin, Ashley Walther, Erik Johnson, Shannon Houghton, Jack Brown, Samuel Otten, Joshua Bowman, John Golden, Bob Lochel, Farshid Safi, Patrick Honner, Pam Wilson

March 3: Corey Drake of Michigan State wrote an opinion piece in The Hechinger Report, "The Fantastic New Ways to Teach Math That Most Schools Aren’t Even Using." The article is written mostly for teacher educators, but I think all in math ed could read this and take away a sense of the progress we've made in math education. This is the first I've seen Corey Drake write outside the normal academic venues, and I hope it's not the last.

Shared by: Emily Clare, Greg George, Earl Samuelson, Christie Madancy, Mrs. Math Teach, Melissa Soto

Around the Math Ed Web

NCTM extended their Innov8 conference proposal deadline to March 7.

The next #TCMchat is March 9 at 9 pm ET. The focus of the chat is the article "Promoting Mathematical Argumentation" by Chepina Rumsey and Cynthia Langrall.

Next week's Global Math Department session is "Using Peer Feedback to Increase Student Understanding." I thought last week's was about Desmos Activity Builder, but I think I was a full month off and that one will come at the end of March.

Research Notes

Week by week I've been waiting for the dam to burst with a surge of research articles, and it will be easy to drown with everything published this past week. Bear with me!

New in the March 2016 issue of the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education:
Meanwhile, the June 2016 issue of The Journal of Mathematical Behavior is in progress:
Also, new articles in the March 2016 issue of Mathematics Teacher Educator:
Wait, there's more! How about the March 2016 issue of the Mathematics Education Research Journal:

Math Ed in the News


Math Ed in Colorado

I'm posting this later this week because I spent a long but worthwhile day with teachers in Ellicott, one of Colorado's great rural places on the eastern plains with big skies and views of Pikes Peak:

The view of Pikes Peak in the distance from Ellicott

The next session of the Northern Colorado Math Circles is March 7. See their website for more details. The Rocky Mountain and Northern Colorado Math Teachers' Circles are teaming up for a summer workshop in Winter Park from July 11-15. There's also a Rocky Mountain Math Teachers' Circle listserv you can sign up for to receive updates.

CCTM is taking nominations for their leadership award and teaching award, both of which are due by March 11. The CCTM board is also seeking to appoint a technology integration specialist to the board. See the link for details. There is a CCTM workshop for Region 7 (Douglas, El Paso, Elbert, and Teller counties) on March 12 in Colorado Springs. The topic of the workshop is fractions, ratios, and rates of change.

CU-Boulder is looking for a master teacher in mathematics for their CU Teach program. It's an awesome opportunity to help prepare the next generation of math teachers in Colorado, as well as a great place to work.

The "Expanding Your Horizons" symposium for middle school girls interested in STEM registration begins March 1.

eNet Learning has resources and courses.