Dear Joe,

On Tue, 23 Nov 2010, Joe Corneli wrote:

[...]

(a) building interactive textbooks that work for self-guided learners

This sounds like Wikibooks http://en.wikibooks.org

or Wikiversity http://en.wikiversity.org

Although there is not much interaction with the reader unless s/he begins to write.

(b) building technologies to support live tutorials over the web

This sounds like http://videolectures.net/

I suppose that Wikimedia Commons could also host live tutorials. I haven't seen on though. YouTube also have some content.

(c) building infrastructure to help in developing good survey articles or similar content

This sounds like Wikipedia.

[...]

best regards Finn

___________________________________________________________________

Finn Aarup Nielsen, DTU Informatics, Denmark Lundbeck Foundation Center for Integrated Molecular Brain Imaging http://www.imm.dtu.dk/~fn/ http://nru.dk/staff/fnielsen/ ___________________________________________________________________

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.

---

Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Hi Joe,

These are interesting questions, but I think that it will be hard to comprehensively address ALL of them simultaneously.

I think the WHO question is foundational. For instance: (0) How is the current 'teacher' role modified in delivering low-cost high-quality math education via the Internet? (1) Who benefits from low-cost high-quality mathematics education via the Internet? (2) Who stands to lose?

You haven't specified whether the learners themselves are picking the material -- or whether they're being guided by others. Live tutorials and 'good survey articles' suggest that there are other people directing things; with interactive textbooks that's less clear. Are you trying to scale numbers? Deliver education over a distance? From http://p2pu.org/general/diy-math I'm guessing that you're imagining distributing the 'educator' role through crowdsourcing. That in itself would be an interesting discussion.

You might also think about the risks -- such as cultural and linguistic barriers, disruption to existing education systems, etc. As well as what current roles are played by teachers.

Furthermore, you haven't specified what level of education you're talking about -- and thus what kind of mathematics you're talking about. Addition? Fractions? Algebra? Graduate Mathematics?

You might look at the Math Forum, especially 'Ask Dr. Math': http://mathforum.org/ I suspect you're well aware of it from http://metameso.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/Joe%27s_Ph._D._Prospectus

The OER and Creative Commons Education communities are likely to have more suggestions and advice than the wiki-research-l folks (in case you haven't tried there, too!).

-Jodi

On 23 Nov 2010, at 13:16, Joe Corneli wrote:

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.

---

Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Hi All:

Thanks a bunch for the comments: I'm just going to reply to everyone in one email for now, to keep things simple and, hopefully, brief! My latest question for you is here, and answers to your earlier questions are below.

NEW QUESTION: METHODOLOGY ADVICE?

What methodologies can I use to research this question?

"What are the ingredients of mathematical knowing?"

ASSETS

As I see it now, the main assets I have are:

(1) PlanetMath's historical data over the last 10 years (minus whatever was lost due to one or two hardware malfunctions);

(2) The opportunity to add new things into PlanetMath's system, including new metrics for gathering data, and I also have inside track with some of the new technologies that have been developing in the online mathematics field;

(3) The opportunity to organize courses at P2PU;

(4) Access to Wikimedia data for comparison (especially assuming some of you can show me the ropes with that!);

(5) Most likely I could get access to the Math Overflow data (they use the same Creative Commons license as PlanetMath and Wikipedia).

There are probably a few other things I'm forgetting now, but even just (1)-(3) seem enough to create an interesting story.

BACKGROUND

I have a B.A. in Mathematics, did some work in artificial intelligence related to mathematics, and I'm also interested in computer-mediated communication of mathematics more generally (I'm on the board of directors of PlanetMath.org), and in various "commons" issues.

My current position is as a research student in the Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University, UK. KMi (as it's called) is part of the Centre for Research in Computing, and so I'm currently a "computing student", just by another name.

SKETCH OF A PLAN

As of today I think that adding facilities to PlanetMath for *submitting*, *solving*, *hyperlinking*, *marking*, and *keeping track of* problems would be enough to make me pretty happy.

Of course, that's not a research question or methodology -- but it does seem to get at some of "the ingredients of mathematical knowing".

E.g. it would possible to use such a system to *share* problems of interest, *link* them to relevant material in PlanetMath's encyclopedia and other related problems, and start working one's way through, *ask* for help from other people on the site, *give advice* about techniques or other approaches, and *keep track of* things one had *learned*.

The "who" here would be a mathematics learner -- and most likely at the university level (since that's where most of PlanetMath's current content and user base comes from). Other people would surely be involved (e.g. teachers or course designers) but wouldn't be the focus of the research project as I currently envision it.

Joe

PS. Regarding The Math Forum: I know one of their developers, but I've tended to stay away from systems that don't use a free license.