Math 2.0 Live! Wed August 25th 2010 9:30 EDT

Dan Meyer will be the guest host for the tomorrow night's Math 2.0 Elluminate session. See Events page. More about this event in my next blog.

The Madison Project, Bob Davis and the Mathman

"How can I motivate my students to get more interested in doing math?" was the question I posed to Don Cohen back in 1972 at a Saturday morning math workshop in NYC.  "The problem is that your kids are not really doing math," Don replied as we strolled down a picturesque Greenwich Village street. "What you need to do is get your students to create their own math. But first the teacher needs to do the same. That's the purpose of the workshop I am leading here." That one comment has stayed with me ever since as I continue my effort to inspire teachers to aim for that vision for themselves and with their students.

At the time, Don's vision came from his work with Bob Davis and the Madison Math Project. Join us tonight at the Math 2.0 Elluminate Live! session (August 4, 2010 9:30pm EDT) where Don (the Mathman) will be sharing that his early vision hasn't really changed all that much over the past 40+ years.

If you can't make it tonight, there will be a recording available at Math 2.0 Elluminate site after the session is over.

Patrick Vennebush - NCTM's Technology Linchpin

When Seth Godin wrote his book Linchpin, he had people like Patrick Vannebush in mind. Last night (July 7th) Patrick was the guest speaker on Maria Droujkova's Math 2.0 Live! Elluminate session and he spoke very eloquently and passionately about his work as one of the technology leaders at NCTM. 

As people who read my blog know, I have this "love/hate" relationship with NCTM. On the one hand I'm dismayed by NCTM's continued conservative stance when it comes to promoting their technology principle while their support of the other 5 principles (equity, learning, teaching, assessing & curriculum) is loud and clear. Since I'm all for equal time for technology and I wanted to do a non-confrontational protest of some recent decisions that the NCTM board made about the use of technology at conferences (i.e. vetoed support for using Wifi at their annual "showcase" conference because it costs too much) thus discouraging the use of a technology that is currently ubiquitious in society. Instead at NCTM meetings where you still have to line up at their anachronistic "Cyber Cafe" which worked in the late 1990s-and early 2000s  when the Web 2.0 was still emerging. Since NCTM provides discounts for affilate groups (of which CLIME is one) I was able to exhibit and promote Math 2.0 which is a synergy between the use of powerful math software tools in a Web 2.0 environment in math classes. Though it was fun sharing example how math ed will be transformed by these current and emerging technologies at the conference, it was discouraging to see how far we still have to go to educate our math teachers on its potential. 

Which brings me back to Patrick. Since the idea of CLIME began 23 years at an annual meeting in Washington with a vision promote a constructivist, student empowered way of learning with technology,i've been involved with NCTM as a affiliate president, conference planning committee member  at the national and local level (1999 and 2004) and on several committees, I have met a lot of people intimately involved with NCTM and the surprise was that weren't any conservative folks who were trying to keep us in the 20th century, but were truly people who were interested in reform with technology being at the forefront.

So NCTM by its a nature is conservative, yet at the same time is encouraging and doing some creative & innovative work. Patrick is one of the points of light that has emerged on the NCTM scene that bodes very well for the future and the direction that NCTM is headed. 

Read more about Calculation Nation and the Illumination project at NCTM.

Hear Patrick's archived presentation on Elluminate July 7th, 2010.

WCYDWT defined? more...

Here's another "What Can You do With This?" lesson grabber. Watch the video. What are your reactions?
My reaction was (and still is): "This is cool!" My next thought was: "Can I turn this into a math session motivator?" That is, can I get my students attention long enough to transition into an engaging & productive math activity? (As always, there is a devil ready to snarl progress in developing the details.) Dan Meyer who shared this video on his blog is thinking about how this might become a starting point for building a curriculum unit around it. I like the idea a lot because it feeds my mantra of what pieces a lesson scenario should have.

I say "we" in step 3 because as the teacher I'm learning right along with the kids so I want to share as well.
Dan has gone further by creating a more story-like 3-step process rubric. From his latest blog entry:

(In the) Beginning:

• engage the students with multimedia — pictures, videos, sound.
• the students come up with the question.
• the students make predictions — “give me a guess.”
• the students establish a range around their answer — “give me a wrong answer. give me an answer that’s too high, that’s too low.”
• there isn't information on the first image.
• “announce the problem’s constraints quickly and clearly.”
• ask questions that lend themselves to guesses: "how long? how many? how heavy? how far? how fast?"
• try to translate questions that are harder to guess into questions that don't change the objective but which lend themselves to guesses: "what is the area? what is the circumference?"

Middle:

• ask: “what information do you need to solve this?”
• ask: “how do you know that?”
• ask: “why?” “how?” — even on right answers.
• encourage students to explain their reasoning to other students.
• ask students to collaborate — “what do you think about jerold did?”
• ask: “how would that help you?” after they tell you certain information is necessary.
• ask: “what isn’t necessary to find the answer? what information don’t we care about?”

End:

• ask students to summarize the process.

In my "model" the middle portion (above) is still in the setting the stage phase, but that doesn't detract from these suggested steps being very helpful in framing my actions in a way that maximizes the possibility for learning.

Not all "stage setter" learning objects have the same impact. Dan's Water tank activity left me a bit dry, because I didn't find the video had much intrinsic motivation. (In other words, I didn't think it was "cool".) But like all devices for grabbing a student's attention, the context in which the learning object is presented is crucial. That's why I like to use video clips that pass my "Who cares?" test. It makes the transition to building the context around it smoother & easier.

See also my companion blog "Scenes from a Dynamic Math Classroom" for some of my WCYDWT tinkering.

Math 2.0 Online: The Petition

Math 2.0 Online - 5/12/10 - Drujkova/Charischak interview highlights. The challenge: how to get NCTM to become more proactive about supporting technology presentations at conferences.

• I sent this petition to 185 people who spoke at NCTM on a technology theme. I also sent the petition to all the speakers at the conference (766 sessions.) The result? I got 12 signatures. That tells you the story.
• We should bring back the rejected 2008 resolution and get the Board to understand we are not "messing around." This is critical to the future of math education. Cost is an issue (of course) but we are throwing out the baby (the technology principle) with the bathwater (too expensive to support.) Having a technology theme with no Wifi presence is a disgrace.
• I heard several comments that NCTM as an organization is going to go into the oblivion, or become small potatoes. But that's very unlikely. Most people are fine with the way things are. We just need to get the kids to study more and learn their basics.
• I was discouraged about what's going on with technology in math education from what I saw going on at both conferences. But what I am optimistic about is that many of the young teachers - the upcoming linchpins* who also blog are making inroads "disruptively" in their classrooms. Ten or fifteen years from now we should see some major shifts in the dynamics of how we teach and learn math assuming the conserving forces will be disarmed by how society will change by then. I want to believe what I'm reading in the current flurry of new books on this topic. My latest is John Seely Brown's "The Power of Pull : How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. (More about this book in future posts.) In the meantime CLIME will continue to promote "disruptive" measures that are currently (and slowly) changing the landscape of math education.

* A linchpin, as Seth Godin describes it, is somebody in an organization who is indispensable, who cannot be replaced. A proactive person (i.e. educator) who is making a difference in their community.

Math blog post of the day: On the Dangers of Continuous Improvement - Sameer Shah

Math 2.0 at NCTM Conference - A recap - part 2

So how did my adventure in the CLIME booth at NCTM in San Diego go? Curious minds wanted to know. So Maria Droujkova invited me to talk about it at the Math 2.0 Elluminate session recently. We also had a followup interview discussion about it since the audio portion of the original session left a lot to be desired. You can read Maria's recap and catch the archived interview here.

CLIME @ NCTM Conference, April, 2010

Ihor proudly shares his vision of Math 2.0 at the
CLIME booth in San Diego.

Maria Droujkova (founder of the Math 2.0 - Mathfuture group) interviewed Ihor after his return from the San Diego NCTM meeting. You can catch the recording and/or read a summary transcript here.