qr forum plans
Driven by mathematicians
1. Welcome statement
a) Feedback to mathematicians
i. Additional information (real data, URLS to explain more,...)
ii. Clarification of appropriateness of the example (works to describe the mathematical side—does it work as well to describe the actual principle?)
iii. Additional understanding of the concept (helps mathematician to describe the context)
a) ACM/PKAL conference
b) Urgency at liberal arts colleges to integrate the disciplines
c) Realization that students learn best when seeing similar concepts more than once—way to make this happen
d) Better to learn from actual/realistic applications rather than contrived ones
e) Sharing of good practice among mathematicians
a) Posted by mathematician by filling out a form that captures
i. Mathematics course
ii. Context discipline (physics, chemistry, geology, biology, psychology, economics, accounting, etc...)
iii. Type of information being requested
1. Reality check
2. Data sources
3. Additional understanding of concept
5. Realistic expectations
Needed to get the project off the ground (Sean)
1. Initial setups at all ACM schools
a) One liaison at each ACM school (start with those attending the ACM/PKAL workshop) to gather participants from their institution, from each of the disciplines, who wish to be included in getting emails to ask for specific information. The more the merrier, but it would be important to get at least one person from each of the disciplines from each school.
b) Liaison sends list of interested faculty and their disciplines and their email adresses to Sean for inclusion in the discipline-specific "list-serve" type groups.
c) On a "regular" basis (annually?), review the list, ask new members of the faculty, and remove names of people who are no longer associated with the College or no longer wish to participate.
a. Mathematician from one of the colleges (this could be a rotating position) to
i. "accept" or "reject" posted material from mathematician and
ii. determine the group to which accepted materials should be sent.
b. One long-term manager (could be a rotating position) who
i. Goes through the posts on an annual basis
ii. Gives feedback on what works well and what could be improved
iii. Suggests archiving
What does form look like?
At top: welcoming and purpose paragraph at top
- Instructor's name
- Instructor's e-mail address
- mathematics discipline (e.g. stats, applied math, calculus,...)
- Mathematics course (optional) (e.g. Calc I, differential equations,...)
- Mathematics concept (optional) (T-test, rates, min-max, intersections of lines)
- Posed question
- Related documents (optional)
- Optimal time line of mathematician (things like—I really need to know this by next week, or not at all—more nicely worded)
Expectations—change to prose
- Timeline of mathematician—Really need to give one or two weeks if you expect quality responses
- Timeline of discipline specific faculty response—Really need to reply within one or two weeks to be really useful, although additional responses will be accepted
- Need to post the materials so that others teaching the same types of things could benefit from the process—need a lot more
- Questions cannot be open ended—need to focus on making an existing idea better.
1. Who starts the process to find the liaisons at each institution to find the faculty interested in being a part of the forum? Seems like we can work with disciplinary group to get a lot of this done–M. Baehr can work with dean's list to make this happen.
2. How do we get the people to review for acceptance and to review annually? Work with mathematics for volunteers.
3. How in the future do we capture the "final product" created by the mathematician using the feedback?
Feedback from group:
1. Better to have a two way street than to have it initiated always by mathematics.
2. Important to make sure that agreement or disagreement in terminology are clear from the beginning and to make room for discussions around these issues. Build in that this would be part of the feedback loop for this.
3. Activitiy sheets that capture the context of the feedback AND the ways the activity could be used both in a mathematics course and the specific disicipline, in hopes that both would use, particularly at same institutions where students might get to see it twice.