This Week in Math Ed: April 8, 2016

Math Ed Said

April 1: Last Friday people were looking forward to Kasi Allen's presentation to the Global Math Department, "Math Trauma: Healing Our Classrooms, Our Students, and Our Discipline." You can watch the replay of her session here:


 Shared by: Kasi C. Allen, Jennifer Lawler, Gregory White, Global Math, Sahar Khatri

April 2: Three links were each shared three times last Saturday:
Shared by: MAA, Farshid Safi, Martin Joyce, Brian Bushart, Marilyn Burns, Bridget Dunbar, Janice Novakowski, Kristin Gray, NCTM

April 3: More ties: six people each shared links to the details of Marian Small's upcoming talk at NCTM and a Guardian story about the upcoming movie about Srinivasa Ramanujan.

Shared by: NCTM, Katherine Hansen, Jenni Clausen, Laura Wagenman, Christina Sherman, Daniel Luevanos, Steven Strogatz, Dan Anderson, MAA, George Woodbury, Egan Chernoff, Garrod Musto

April 4: For Square Root Day, a number of people (a perfect square number of people, in fact) re/tweeted a link to an article by Kyle Schultz and Stephen Bismarck in Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, "Radical Thoughts on Simplifying Square Roots."

Shared by: NCTM, Connected Math CMP, Ashley Bingenheimer, Theodore Chao, The Math Forum, Brian Brennan, Robert Cop, Greg George, Jennifer Bay-Williams

April 5: Don't extrapolate using only two data points, says Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Shared by: Ashli Black, Shauna Hedgepeth, Taylor Belcher, Kate Nowak, Josh Fisher, John Golden

April 6: Easily the most popular post of the week, 20 people shared the link to Katrina Schwartz's KQED MindShift article, "Could This Digital Math Tool Change Instruction For the Better?." If we stick with Betteridge's law of headlines our answer should be "no," which is generally appropriate when ed tech is involved. But given this is about Desmos and the work Dan Meyer and others are doing with the Desmos platform, I think we can ignore Betteridge's law with this story. If anyone sees Katrina next week at NCTM, please thank her for me for all the solid reporting she's been doing, will ya?

Shared by: Nancy Terry, Tara Maynard, David Coffey, Derek Oldfield, Terry Jones, Dan Meyer, Andrew Gael, Andrew Shauver, Elizabeth Statmore, Joce Dage, Cathy Yenca, Jon Orr, Matt Owen, Jonathan Osters, Julie Kindred, Tyler Anderson, Megan Schmidt, Scott, Regan Galvan, Martin Joyce

April 7: There's been some discussion about mathematical modeling, its importance, and how to to about it over on Dan Meyer's blog. The latest comes in the post, "A Response to Danny Brown & Geoff Wake: Should Modeling Be Important?."

Shared by: Danny Brown, Dan Meyer, Bob Lochel, Brian Lawler, Eddi Vulić, Jennifer Blinzler, Sara VanDerWerf, Nicol Reiner, Mary Williams, Bridget Dunbar

Around the Math Ed Web

NCTM, NCTM, NCTM. The Annual Meeting and associated events are upon us! I don't know about you, but I don't feel like there's room for much else in math ed, at least not for the next week or so.

Research Notes

Just a week after putting out the April 2016 issue, the International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education is back for May with these math-related articles:
New in the Journal of the Learning Sciences, you'll find this:
New in the Journal of Teacher Education:
Charalambous Charalambous presenting at AERA in 2014.

Math Ed in the News

The math wars in Canada seem particularly active this week. I'm just including a couple of articles, but a quick Google News search will give you more.

Math Ed in Colorado

Three big CCTM items:
  • CCTM members have until April 20 to vote for board members. You can learn more about the candidates here.
  • The deadline for submitting CCTM conference proposals is May 1.
  • CCTM's Spring 2016 issue of the Colorado Mathematics Teacher is out, featuring articles about mathematical mindsets, the PSAT and SAT, and professional development. While CCTM is now making the CMT journal free to all, it's the membership dues from over 600 Colorado math educators that supports this and the other work of CCTM.
CoMMIT (the Colorado Metropolitan Math Intervention Team) is having their spring meeting on April 21 from 9-noon at the Boulder Valley SD Education Center (6500 E. Arapahoe Rd) in Boulder. Kim Bunning, CU Teach Master Teacher at CU-Boulder, will be the presenter.

The next FRaMES (Front Range Mathematics Education Seminar) meeting will be held Friday, April 22 at 4pm on the Centerra campus of UNC. Sandra Laursen, Chuck Hayward, and Zachary Haberler, from the Ethnography and Evaluation Research (E&ER) team from CU-Boulder will be presenting about inquiry-based learning. If you're interested in attending, please register here.

The University of Northern Colorado is offering three graduate level math courses this summer as part of their Masters in Mathematics: Teaching Emphasis program. You don't have to be in the program to take the courses. A tentative schedule of courses through Spring 2018 and contact information is 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)
See the Rocky Mountain Math Teachers' Circle website and the Northern Colorado Math Circles for information about upcoming events, including a joint workshop in Durango from August 8-11. You have until June 15 to apply for that one!

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:
Job Openings:
Posted by at
Labels:
Location: Boulder, CO, USA

This Week in Math Ed: April 1, 2016

Math Ed Said

March 25: Last Friday a number of people were retweeting Keith Jones:
This looks like a great event from the British Educational Research Association to bring researchers and teachers together.

Shared by: Tim Stirrup, Learning Maths, Steve McCormack, Better Maths, Jo Morgan

March 26: Following Betteridge's law of headlines, of course, the answer to this one is "no." "Reckon you were born without a brain for maths? Highly unlikely" ran in The Guardian last weekend and (not surprisingly) got support from our Twitter-using math(s) education community.

Shared by: Tim Stirrup, Jo Morgan, Richard Cowley, Gregory White, Laura T, Marcus du Sautoy, Egan Chernoff, Matthew Oldridge, Susan Wilson, Sara Delano Moore, Learning Maths, Gregory Taylor

Michael Pershan presenting at the 2015 NCTM Annual Meeting.
March 27: Nine more people shared the previous day's most popular story, but that number was matched by those sharing Michael Pershan's "Best of 2016 (Q1)," which describes his favorite posts from January through March of this year.

Shared by: Michael Pershan, Dan Anderson, John Golden, Joe Schwartz, Kent Haines, Gregory Taylor, Raymond Johnson, Sahar Khatri, Jon Orr

March 28: The Guardian's story kept going strong with six more reshares, but was matched by a Washington Post story about some uniform fun by Romania's soccer team.

Shared by: MAA, George Woodbury, Marc van Zanten, CPM Director, Mathman Jon, Egan Chernoff

March 29: Heeee's baaaaack! A whole lot of people took time on Tuesday to tweet about Evelyn Lamb's review in Slate of Andrew Hacker's The Math Myth.

Shared by: Mathematics cian, John Allen Paulos, George Woodbury, Ilona Vashchyshyn, Joshua Bowman, Dave Richeson, Kent Haines, Dave Radcliffe, Glenn Waddell, Egan Chernoff, Ted Lewis, Ilana Horn, Taylor Belcher, Patrick Honner, Kate Nowak, Amy Hogan, Amy Spies, Geoff Krall, Carrie Muir

March 30: Dan Meyer talks good deeds in "Real World, But Unnecessary" while Ben Orlin has some fun with radical expressions. Both had five re/tweets each.

Shared by: Dan Meyer, Kyle Pearce, Greg George, Jessica Faurote, Richelle Marynowski, michiexile, Ilona Vashchyshyn, Susan Wilson, Jedidiah Butler, Ed Campos

March 31: Eleven people shared Katrina Schwartz's KQED MindShift post, "When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges." This gets into the metacognition work of Project Zero, which goes beyond simply "thinking about thinking."

Shared by: Nancy Terry, Malyn Mawby, Shelley Carlisle, geonz, Bridget Dunbar, Jennifer Lawler, DeAnn Huinker, Marcie Lewis, Cindy Brown, Darren Burris, Jennifer Blinzler

Around the Math Ed Web

It's April, so here in the U.S. that means hundreds — no, wait — thousands of us math education folks are gearing up for our big conference(s). For me this year, there are four over a 9-day period:
  1. Association of State Supervisors of Mathematics (ASSM) Annual Meeting
  2. National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics (NCSM) Annual Conference
  3. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Research Conference
  4. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Annual Meeting and Exposition
A Google Doc has floated around the web for months now where presenters from the Twitter community have promoted themselves. (I finally broke down and added the presentations I'm in. I don't want an empty room!) I'd recommended checking out this list, but be sure to look at the rest of the program, too!

Speaking of conferences, AMTE's call for proposals for next February's conference opened today and will close May 15. It's also not too early to think about the next NCTM Annual Meeting in San Antonio in April of 2017 — the deadline for speaker proposals for next year is May 1.

If you missed it last week, TODOS and NCSM jointly released a position paper called "Mathematics Education Through the Lens of Social Justice: Acknowledgement, Actions, and Accountability." You can now find the paper on NCSM's website.

Last Tuesday in the Global Math Department, Shelley Carranza gave some tips about using Desmos for "Charging Up" lessons. Next week, Kasi Allen presents, Math Trauma: Healing Our Classrooms, Our Students, and Our Discipline.

Research Notes

Here's another article added to the June 2016 issue of The Journal of Mathematical Behavior:
Here's the math-iest-looking articles in the April 2016 issue of the International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education:
Michal Ayalon at ISDDE 2015
New in AERA Open:

Math Ed in the News


Math Ed in Colorado

I attended the Colorado Math Pathways Conference and blogged about it. In short, there's a lot of coordinated work going on amongst Colorado's higher education institutions to get students in many majors into relevant courses in quantitative reasoning and statistics instead of dumping so many students into college algebra.

The deadline for submitting CCTM conference proposals is May 1.

In case you missed it, Lieutenant Governor Joe Garcia made some comments about the ACT and SAT and college admissions. Basically, scores from either test are accepted by any of Colorado's public colleges.

CoMMIT (the Colorado Metropolitan Math Intervention Team) is having their spring meeting on April 21 from 9-noon at the Boulder Valley SD Education Center (6500 E. Arapahoe Rd) in Boulder. Kim Bunning, CU Teach Master Teacher at CU-Boulder, will be the presenter.

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. The book study starts April 4!

The University of Northern Colorado is offering three graduate level math courses this summer as part of their Masters in Mathematics: Teaching Emphasis program. You don't have to be in the program to take the courses. A tentative schedule of courses through Spring 2018 and contact information is 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)
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.

Math Teachers' Circles — check the websites for meeting schedules!
  • Rocky Mountain Math Teachers' Circle:
    • 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.
  • Northern Colorado Math Circles

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:
Job Openings:
Posted by at
Labels:
Location: Boulder, CO, USA

Colorado Math Pathways Conference

On Monday, I attended the Colorado Math Pathways Conference, a gathering of faculty and department chairs from Colorado's 2- and 4-year colleges and universities, mostly representing mathematics departments, general education programs, and advising. In coordination with Colorado's Department of Higher Education, the Colorado Math Pathways Task Force has been examining the mathematics options required of Colorado's college students, and they've made these four recommendations:
  1. Revise the curriculum to provide a calculus pathway, a statistics pathway, and a quantitative thinking pathway. Many students who would have previously taken college algebra would now take one of two courses: social and behavioral science majors would take statistics, and arts and humanities majors would take a course in quantitative reasoning.
  2. Improve college advising through the creation of "meta-majors" with similar core and math requirements, and use multiple measures (beyond a sole placement score) to determine a student's readiness for college-level mathematics.
  3. Support and develop instructors to teach pathway courses, especially the increased number of introductory statistics courses that will be needed.
  4. Use multiple venues to improve communications about the pathways and their recommended use.
With these recommendations in mind, the purpose of the conference was to come together and work on some details of implementation. Colorado has thirteen 4-year institutions and fifteen more 2-year institutions, and a lot of effort over the years has gone into coordinating courses across the institutions to ensure transferability of general education courses.

Lieutenant Governor Joe Garcia led off the conference with comments about Colorado's successes in preparing undergraduates and our continued need to prepare more. Reflecting on a particular reform effort during his time leading Pikes Peak Community College, Garcia remembered a proposal to shift from three to four remedial courses prior to a gateway math course. When he looked at the data, he learned that fewer than 10% of students enrolled in remedial courses were actually making it to the gateway course. At Pikes Peak and elsewhere in Colorado, there has traditionally been more focus on enrollment and revenue generation than actually getting students through their programs. For an unfortunate number of students, they find themselves able to complete everything in their program except their mathematics requirement, and that is why the work of the Math Pathways Task Force is so important.

Dean Allison, the math department head at UNC, discussed the growing need for graduates to interpret and analyze data. For this reason, he and the task force want to join a national trend that moves away from college algebra as the default math course and towards courses in statistics and quantitative reasoning. This will require a lot of effort on the part of departments, advisors, and instructors.

The task force has been working with the Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin, a national leader in mathematics education who has been working with multiple states on math pathway revisions. Uri Treisman keynoted the conference to describe some of the efforts, trends, and findings he's seen across the country. He said that math was currently under two different spotlights: the first, a harsh spotlight, that shows a lack of completion and high failure rates, and a second, a positive spotlight, where students with skills in mathematics are more successful negotiating rough job markets and becoming upwardly mobile in society.

Treisman continually stressed that the reality of today is different than the reality of 10 or 20 years ago. Right now, three times as many students take calculus in high school (almost 25% of all high schoolers) than in higher education, and those students tend to succeed at high rates in college. Studies of transcripts reveal that those succeeding in college calculus almost certainly took calculus in high school. Only about 1% of students going beyond college calculus to a higher level course (like differential equations) started college in college algebra. We've been placing students in college algebra to start them on a path towards math-intensive majors, but almost no students are actually following this path to get there. It's not that we haven't been trying to make this path work, either. At a meeting of community college leaders in Ohio, Treisman had the group list all the various initiatives for improvement that they've tried. They managed to list a total of 81 initiatives, most of which lasted 2-3 years, and zero of them were sustained long-term. People work hard, but too often people vital to the effort move elsewhere, money dries up, or 4-year institutions don't cooperate.

Uri Treisman and Amy Getz, comparing the success rates of a co-requisite support model vs. a pre-requisite support model.

Treisman recommended four coordinated innovations needed in new pathways:
  1. Relevance: Too often college advisors accept students' wishes when it comes to course placement, rather than really trying to align the student's interests with the mathematical skills required of various majors. Placement tests haven't helped this, either. Said Treisman, "No longer should a placement test ensure a student is misplaced into a course, supported by a criminal enterprise of testing companies."
  2. Acceleration: We've been trying to help students catch up by slowing them down in remedial courses, but we've learned that about two-thirds of students can succeed in regular courses when they're given proper support. There was a belief that these supports would ensure success for all students — a belief that was "polished by hope and unfettered by data" — but we now recognize that to see success for this other third of students it will take a national, Manhattan-type project to figure it out.
  3. Narrow the gap between support and instruction: At Northwest Vista Community College in Texas, an advising "SWAT Team" crashes classes to confront students about why they're enrolled in the class they're in. About a quarter say it's because it fit their schedule, not because it's the class they need. They also aggressively supply support to students in the first three weeks of a course, before students slip behind or think there's a stigma about asking for help.
  4. Introduce evidence-based strategies into instruction: Treisman says this may very well be the hardest part, yet it's less important relative to the structural improvements needed and described above.
Treisman then pointed out some key challenges. For one, math departments need to come to the realization that tradition shouldn't be the dominant force in program design. Math departments also need to push back against other programs, like business schools and psychology departments, who often use math prerequisites to weed students out of their programs. Math departments need to be a partner instead of a service discipline that is often placed as a barrier to student success. As Treisman said, "We no longer want math departments to be a burial ground for tens of thousands of people wishing to better their lives."

Amy Getz, also working with the Dana Center, spoke passionately about needed shifts in our thinking. We need to think beyond the classroom and past our old ways of unnecessary prerequisites, predictable outcomes, inconsistent course alignments, and a lack of clear messaging about math requirements.

The rest of the day was structured around breakout sessions and whole-group debriefs of those sessions. In the morning, the breakouts were organized around each of the quantitative reasoning, statistics, and calculus pathways. In the "StatsPath" breakout, I learned that the CU-Boulder math department is preparing to drop college algebra altogether, knowing that the easiest way to get advisors to stop recommending it would be to eliminate it. The discussion moved towards the details of the content of a prerequisite course students might take before statistics, but Uri redirected the conversation back to structural elements, which led to good conversations about transfer credits, the need for leadership, and developing the capacity to offer new courses. People in the quantitative reasoning breakout talked about how to work with partner disciplines, while the calculus path group reported on various ways to provide student support.

Afternoon breakouts centered on issues of advising, degrees with designation, and on-ramps for under-prepared students. With advising, we talked about the need to coordinate higher ed and high school advising, and to see if the meta-major model really helps advisors and students make decisions about the math courses that align with student interests. The degrees with designation group talked more about working with partner disciplines to determine the learning outcomes they want and why, and putting people in positions to advocate and create change in the system. The on-ramps group focused on issues of communication, including things like email lists, websites, blogs, virtual open houses, and coordinating with organizations like the Colorado Mathematics Association of Two Year Colleges (ColoMATYC), the Colorado Association for Developmental Education (CoADE), the Rocky Mountain Section of the MAA, and CCTM.
Posted by at
Labels: , ,
Location: Boulder, CO, USA

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.
Posted by at
Labels: , , , ,
Location: Boulder, CO, USA

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:
Posted by at
Labels:
Location: Boulder, CO, USA
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)