also, www.purplemath.com
Joe,
You might want to look at The Math Forum, http://mathforum.org
In particular, check out the Problem of the Week and Ask Dr. Math. Answers to Problem of the Week and questions to Ask Dr. Math are answered by volunteers, who try to guide the students to understanding rather than handing them answers. They have an impressive architecture to triage questions. When the perfect answer has already been written, it gets sent. New questions are sent to live humans.
Their work is really impressive. So I would start your research with the question: What can I do even better than Math Forum?
Hope this helps!
-- Amy
On Nov 23, 2010, at 8:16 AM, Joe Corneli wrote:
So far, the best phrasing I've come up with is: "What stands in theway of building and supplying low-cost, high-quality mathematicseducation via the internet?"The art of encyclopedia-building doesn't seem to carry over directlyto education. This should be of fairly general concern (the WikimediaFoundation's mission is about developing and disseminating educationalcontent).I think there's a knowledge gap in there, maybe more than one. It'smuch easier for me to think about "engineering solutions" than it isto precisely specify a research problem question!! In particular, I'mthinking about(a) building interactive textbooks that work for self-guided learners(b) building technologies to support live tutorials over the web
(c) building infrastructure to help in developing good survey articlesor similar contentThe faculty here might want me to "pick one", but this is hard for meto do because I see each of these three approaches as being part ofthe puzzle. Asking how well one of them works in absence of the otheris a bit like asking how well a fish can breathe in the absence ofwater.So maybe the "research question" is about asking: What is the familyresemblance of (a)-(c)? How do they work together as a system? Or
maybe the question is about whether a given implementation of (a)-(c)shows any promise?I seem to be struggling to switch from a hacking-oriented way ofthinking about things to a research-oriented way of thinking aboutthings. I'd appreciate some feedback from those of you in a positionto offer advice on these matters._______________________________________________Wiki-research-l mailing listWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
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