CLIME Meeting in San Francisco: The Future of CLIME

Description: CLIME, an affiliate of NCTM, has been a catalyst for the effective use of technology in math education for almost 30 years. In that time NCTM has come a long way in its support of technology. However there are some discouraging signs that might mean that CLIME needs to take the next step to see a truly seamless, integral use of technology that will enable blogging tools and twitter to play a larger role in our evolving classrooms. At the upcoming conference there is only one session (out of 689) that directly raises this issue. At our meeting we will discuss this and other issues that forward a new vision for CLIME.

Moderator: Ihor Charischak

Location: Nob Hill D (Marriott) 

Thursday, April 14, 2016 

6:00pm-7:00pm

Please come. Important decisions will be made about the future of CLIME’s role as an affiliate lobbying group of NCTM.

Let me know if you have any questions. I look forward to seeing you there. 

Reference

CLIME Conference Preview: NCTM in San Francisco (April, 2016)

Best wishes,

Ihor

Ihor Charischak
CLIME
Council for Technology in Math Education
Hyde Park, NY
ihor@clime.org
http://climeconnections.blogspot.com

CLIME Conference Preview: NCTM in San Francisco (April, 2016)

Technology sessions - San Francisco NCTM Conference

Ever since I read Dan Meyer’s blog titled “NCTM Gets it” my optimism about the future of NCTM annual conferences returned. In his blog Dan highlights NCTM’s interest in recruiting young teachers into their fold by supporting the MTBoS (mathblogosphere) initiative. For the first time an NCTM president, Diane Briars, engaged in what the Twitter-types refer to as a “tweetup.” Also at the regional conference in Nashville the keynote presentation was “Game Changers: Rethinking the Way We Teach Math from the Math Twitter Blogosphere”  This is a heady, Bernie Sanders-like stuff. (Read about my optimism re NCTM here.) So I was looking forward to the San Francisco program committee coming up with more sessions introducing young teachers to the blogging/tweeting phenomenon. But alas, such is not the case. Other than the ShadowCon after-hours “conference within a conference” organized by Dan Meyer, Mike Flynn and Zachary Champagne there’s no mention of the mathtwitterblogosphere and only one reference to blogging and twitter! Fortunately, there will be a presence in the Exhibit Hall where the leaders of the MTBoS movement will have a booth encouraging new teachers to join. So a grassroots, disruptive movement will continue despite the lack of sessions about it. Annie Fetter of the Math Forum connected me to a useful listing of sessions given by MTBoS members. (Tyler Auer is the author.)

Here’s some data and analysis for the upcoming annual meeting:

• There are 689 numbered sessions down from last year’s 819. (This  total includes 94 exhibitor sessions.)
• Of the 94 exhibitor sessions 32 focused on technological applications. 
• There are 118 technology sessions which is 17%. A low total in our opinion. (The highpoint was the Philadelphia conference in 2012 where there were 38% tech sessions.)
• If you go to the NCTM listing of topics and click on technology you will find only 60 sessions. 
• There were also 13 STEM sessions which we did not include in our tech count.

List of technology keywords noted in session descriptions along with frequencies.

There are collectively 36 sessions that focus on software applications. You will find the specifics for these keywords on this list. Just search for the keyword(s) you are interested in.
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CLIME's annual Meeting in San Francisco

The Future of CLIME
Moderator: Ihor Charischak
Location: Marriott Hotel - Nob Hill C
Date/Time: Thursday, April 14th, 6:00pm-7:00pm
Please come if you can. Important decisions will be made about the future of CLIME's role as an affiliate group of NCTM.
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On a personal note, I want to congratulate Ed Dickey on receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Mathematics Education Trust. Ed, a true champion of supporting the effective use of technology in math education, was my program chair on the NCTM program committee in San Francisco in 1999.

More to come in the next CLIME SF preview.

References

CLIME NCTM Boston 2015 Preview
CLIME NCTM New Orleans 2014 Preview
CLIME NCTM Denver 2013 Preview
CLIME NCTM Philadelphia 2012 Preview

Future of CLIME

Announcement: San Francisco CLIME meeting in April, 2016

Theme for discussion

I would like to invite you to an informal meeting/discussion about the future of CLIME (Council for Technology in Math Education - an affiliate group of NCTM) and technology's role in math education at the annual NCTM conference in San Francisco next April (2016). 

The Future of CLIME 

CLIME (Council for Technology in Math Education) annual meeting.

Moderator: Ihor Charischak

Nob Hill C (Marriott) 6:00pm-7:00pm
Thursday, April 14, 2016

If you are interested in participating please let me know by sending me an email.

For more about CLIME see clime.org

Thanks,

Ihor Charischak

President, CLIME

Hyde Park, NY

Reinventing Mathematics Education - A bold new conference

It's Time for Action
Math Education: Problems & Opportunities
by Gary Stager

There has never been greater interest in mathematics education, yet there is little consensus on how best to prepare children to face an increasingly complex future. We live at a time when politicians call for an emphasis on S.T.E.M. while students dislike math, teachers lack confidence in their mathematical ability, achievement is static and inequitable, computational thinking is required for navigating a successful life, and your phone can solve every problem in the existing math curriculum - simultaneously. Reinventing Mathematics Education is a unique symposium addressing challenges in teaching mathematics and exploring opportunities you may never have considered. The day features a balance between a theoretical understanding of how children learn to think mathematically and the implications of a technologically sophisticated society on the future of schooling. Our keynote speakers are among the best thinkers, scholars, and practitioners in the world.

For details about this exciting conference visit this website: http://reinventingmath.com

Out-of-the-Box Baseball Gets an Upgrade and Inspires My First Project-Based Math Experience

 Replica of Musial’s disk created in Geometer’s Sketchpad

In his 8/4/15 blog Dan Meyer summarizes everything he has learned about modeling. Here's a paragraph from that blog:

"Modeling asks students a) to take the world and turn it into mathematical structures, then b) to operate on those mathematical structures, and then c) to take the results of those operations and turn them back into the world. That entire cycle is some of the most challenging, exhilarating, democratic work your students will ever do in mathematics, requiring the best from all of your students, even the ones who dislike mathematics. If traditional textbooks have failed modeling in any one way, it’s that they perform the first and last acts for students, leaving only the most mathematical, most abstract act behind."

When I was 13 I learned about using mathematics to model something I was very interested in. I was making a disk to represent the production in a typical game of my favorite baseball player Stan Musial. Missing from the image is the spinner that would determine the outcome of an at-bat. Notice that the K slice is bigger than the HR slice. That's because Musial - a Hall of Famer - struck out more often than he hit home runs. Also his 1B is huge because he had a career (22 years) batting average of .331.

I think you can see that having a collection of these disks unique for each player allows you to play a relatively realistic game of baseball. This was the essence of the board game All-Star Baseball which was very popular in pre-computer days. I wrote about my math experience with these disks in Chapter 1 of my book The Wannado Curriculum. (Link)

Twitter Math Camp (#TMC15)

Twitter Math Camp 2015 ended last Friday. Mary Bourassa is one of the organizers and is not afraid that calling this conference a Twitter event will scare away most "reasonable" thinking math educators. Why? Because this may be the best math event anywhere. Just ask any MTBoS member who attended the conference!

Here's one. Christopher Danielson was a participant, speaker and early blogger of his experience there.

And another. Meg Craig. Important things you need to know (about TMC15)

More experience sharing via blogs is coming. Just follow the hastag #TMC15 and keep up with the commentary.

VIP Matt Larson (president-elect of NCTM) is now on Twitter! He also attended TMC 15. Things they are a changin'.

Hot off the press: Math Forum Joins NCTM!

Logo Under Fire - a little history

I got some email about my previous blog (A Conference Experience Like No Other) asking me why Logo faded from the limelight after much hype about its potential to transform education.

When Logo first came on the scene after Mindstorms was published (1980) enthusiasm about its potential for educational reform grew. Not only was Logo the first significant piece of educational software that included programming, but was also a catalyst for much discussion in schools about its potential for effective teaching and learning. Other educational software began to emerge from publishers like MECC and Sunburst but it was mostly of the CAI and drill & practice variety. Computer Literacy emerged as an important competency and learning how to program was a big part of it. By 1983 already there was grumbling about programming. Fred Hechinger in a New York Times article (July 26, 1983) wrote that the school's approach to computers was wrong in focusing on programming and drill and practice. He quoted Marc Tucker (prominent at the DOE at the time) as saying that teaching BASIC to kids makes them think crooked, if at all. Teachers were also not happy with having to learn to program in BASIC or Logo for that matter because it was time consuming. But still there were plenty of Logo enthusiasts who saw Papert and Logo create a new culture in the classroom that was student centered and teachers were "guides on the side." Critics began to surface and Papert had to come to the defense by explaining Logo's role as a microworld for learning which can be used ineffectively without proper understanding of how Logo should be used. There was one significant study that was done by Roy Pea and D. Midian Kurland of the the Bank Street College Center for Children and Technology that probably did the most damage.

"Among other things, Pea and Kurland tested children who had been exposed to Logo in specially set classroom situations. Since they wanted the study to mimic the effects of discovery learning. Pea and Kurland gave the teachers stringent guidelines to curtail their learning. At the end of one year, student who had worked with Logo were tested to see how their planning skills had been affected. Students in the control group which did not have Logo were given the same tests. The results showed no differences between the two groups leading the authors of the study to conclude that Logo does not help teach planning. Further the results caused them to question whether Logo supports other kinds of cognitive development, as its promoters claimed." (Note 1)

As you might expect this study made Papert furious mostly because he thought the students in the Logo experience group learned a little Logo and not much else so the results were not surprising. Pea fired back defending the experience by claiming that Bank Street was well versed in guiding students so that they have the Logo experience. There were other studies that showed positive results of the Logo experience, but the damage was done. Papert and MIT hosted several Logo conferences (Logo 84, 85 and 86) that I participated in that were intended to counteract the negative press. At the final session of Logo 86, Brian Harvey author of several Logo texts, held a session entitled "Whatever happened to the Revolution?" referring to Logo, of course. Geraldine Kozberg, director of staff development in the St. Paul, MN school district, who kept the Logo spirit alive in her district for the next 10 years spoke about Brian's talk at Logosium 96 conference in St. Paul. She had the same title as Brian's: What ever happened to the Revolution?" You can read her transcript here. Well worth it.

CLIME also had a transformation of sorts around the same time as Gerry's speech. In 1994 CLIME changed its name to Council for Logo and Technology in Mathematics Education to reflect new constructivist sofware developments in math especially Geometer's Sketchpad. The name of our acronym however remained the same (L is not changed to T) in honor of the Logo movement and Seymour Papert that inspired so many of us. Also the lack of technology sessions at annual NCTM conferences led to the reframing of CLIME's mission statement. (Note 2)

Notes

1. A Conversation with Seymour Papert: Logo Under Fire (Classroom Computer Learning, January, 1985)
2. In 1997 of CLIME does one more name change. It becomes the Council for Technology in Mathematics Education. Though Logo is dropped from the name, its spirit lives on. It just means that Logo has a lot of good company on the software shelf these days.