Hello Joe,
You are right, a good research question is the most important basis
for a thesis, and that it is why it is so difficult.
>From what I see in your mail, a-c is indeed like the three sides of
one and the same thing. What is overtly missing is the agent; "who" is
supposed to build?
In the Netherlands there is a project (government supported) to let
teachers create free textbooks or textbook materials so that the
government can save a lot of money ("Wikiwijs"). Is this kinda in the
direction you are thinking about?
And what is your faculty? Are you a mathematician, a sociologist? It
could be a good start to have look at the many projects to
collaboratively write textbooks, they exist also in English I am sure.
You could study them and tell what are the obstacles they are
struggling with?
Kind regards
Ziko van Dijk
2010/11/23 Joe Corneli <holtzermann17@gmail.com>:
So far, the best phrasing I've come up with is: "What stands in the
way of building and supplying low-cost, high-quality mathematics
education via the internet?"
The art of encyclopedia-building doesn't seem to carry over directly
to education. This should be of fairly general concern (the Wikimedia
Foundation's mission is about developing and disseminating educational
content).
I think there's a knowledge gap in there, maybe more than one. It's
much easier for me to think about "engineering solutions" than it is
to precisely specify a research problem question!! In particular, I'm
thinking 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 articles
or similar content
The faculty here might want me to "pick one", but this is hard for me
to do because I see each of these three approaches as being part of
the puzzle. Asking how well one of them works in absence of the other
is a bit like asking how well a fish can breathe in the absence of
water.
So maybe the "research question" is about asking: What is the family
resemblance 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 of
thinking about things to a research-oriented way of thinking about
things. I'd appreciate some feedback from those of you in a position
to offer advice on these matters.