"Web 2.0 infrastructure for problem solving"
⇧
⇖
⇘
Learning mathematics has traditionally been a social practice. People talk with one another to achieve knowledge transfer or negotiation. A central outcome in this process is often to show how ideas or material expressions of these ideas relate. If we can build an infrastructure for people to carry out the social practice of mathematics online, we will have made an important step towards bringing STEM education online.
- Research Problem
- Show the potentials and limitations of peer support and crowdsourcing in mathematics learning.
- Interaction design
- The model I plan to implement here is a mixture of peer tutoring and peer review (see "PlanetMath Redux" link for details). People can contribute problems and solutions, and review one anothers solutions, check others' reviews, etc. The classic interactions from PlanetMath, related to encyclopedia content, will continue as well.
- Analytical techniques
- Anything having to do with "learning analytics" or "knowledge analytics" seems relevant.
- Cases
- One or more small-scale pilots would help produce some interesting results without necessarily needing the entire implementation to be ready right away. For example, special-purpose installations could be used in a co-located university maths or computer science course, or we could do after-school study using a sandboxed PlanetMath-like infrastructure.
- I am hoping that some such studies can be run at Liverpool Hope University and/or Heriot-Watt University, in the Spring semester (i.e. using whatever software is ready in January).
- As a back-up or addition, Jim Pitman's statistics courses or Michael Kohlhase's computer science courses (which are already using Planetary) could be examined.
- Another interesting option would be to obtain materials from a distance learning course (e.g. an OU course) and look at whether it can be run in a peer-supported self-study mode on PlanetMath.
- Additional input could come from educators and other potential users in in-person workshops, e.g. to look at the usability of PlanetMath's tools for marking/assessment, and/or to critique the methodology proposed in the "Detecting Learning" paper.
- The ideal large-scale study would use PlanetMath in a "live" setting, while also subsuming small-group dynamics as in the pilots.
Future/related work
- I am specifically interested in discovering ways that technology could support the learning process (i.e. any confirmation to the hypotheses associated with the follow-up studies in my Ph. D. plan). Additionally I am hoping that this study will help refine the basic methodology (so we will know better what sorts of interactions produce the best learning).
References