Last meeting of the fiscal year
- Discussion on whether one member of the winner team should be awarded, who wasn’t able to get into the room for 2nd and 3rd session and didn’t participate much during the 1st and last session.
- Send out news letter announcing the winners of the spring festival.
- Review the last year - Year 3 plan:
- written description of VMT project: we have it on the website plus teacher’s guide
- clean up website, lobby design
- files: help menu, data, (all data are on ischool server)
- report: accurate account of participant number to report, publication list
- email interface for … emergencies: define teacher per room, option of sending email to particular participants and remaining private (no system message in the room), whispering (private message)
- VMT community site for posting solutions: spring fest wiki (no negative things observed during the fest sessions) – Johann (bridging)
- Basic browsing and search support for postings: how to create an archive that’s functional; how can we incorporate Math Forum resources into the problem solving at VMT chat – Nan (earlier version of ConcertChat: shared browser or document view? Compatibility of Java and browser)
- About 25 fest sessions, upward bound, Singapore, … close to 100 sessions
- Video taping sessions: IRB progress (Wes) (why? get a broader look of the larger social context for their participation,
- - Number of students/sessions for the final report (including sessions with students)
- Report from Aarthy:
- Scenarios to find out what features (of the chat room and whiteboard) are most difficult or important to have the video tutorial
- A link in the room pointing to the drawing tool help page
- Search feature, mind map is missing; MathML? feature
- Reviewed the help materials and proposed one task for Aarthy is to do graphic design the help information and what should go where
- Plan for next year (Year IV): scale up the service: server, redesign the lobby, business plan, self-directive system,
- scenario of students finding about VMT service, how to guide them through
- newsletter sent to teachers and they come or they see something on math forum and come to check it out
- the system should be self-directive, doesn’t need any staff or facilitator
- hook it up with the existing math forum infrastructure: how participants in VMT room make use of resources mainly digital libraries at math forum (example: pascal triangle to understand sticks problem, conducted a search at math forum site, the finding turned to be useful to understand the problem. How can we encourage students to do that?)
- some projects from June should be carried out:
- doctoral students should plan to have dissertation proposal done by end of the summer and have proposal defense in the fall (use the data from spring fest)