MeetingSeventyFive

Overall picture of VMT project Y1 Y2 Y3 Y4 Y5 -- -- renewal AOL ConcertChat Pow Open

The main goal of VMT project: Institute a service based on math forum similar to pow but collaboratively.

• IRB

Certificate of conducting human experiments More work on survey

• Technology
• Problems
• Process – build community
• CA
• Coding
• Ethnographic

Gerry: Proceed on what we’ve been doing: analysis, thesis topic defining Wes: we should work on research design that enables people to see the context of research Discussion followed:

• Is powwow experiment a failure?
• Problems of self-assigned groups: some people knew and it’s not good for collaboration; some cases people don’t know much

• Return pattern: small number of participants returned; statistically valid?

Martin: we should define the goal of service better, e.g. encourage collaboration or help students with their math problem

Steve: Room for Dr. Math

• Discussion followed:
  • Truly collaborative peer-based setting
  • Make VMT problems free (but you have to work with other people) to see how it changes the actions
  • How do participants feel about the collaboration sessions? There’re basic things we as researchers don’t know.
  • Math contest series: several rounds
  • Participation, continuity in order to answer the questions raised by Wes earlier (to understand what’s going on there)
  • Incentive? assessment?

• Alan: shouldn’t separate collaboration and continuity
• Are they collaborating the way we want? Do we know?
  • There isn’t a specific way we want them to collaborate. But there’s some certain ways we know it’s not collaboration. We would like to see the different ways people collaborate to solve the math problem.
  • some criteria of what kind of collaboration we would like to see – goal

• goals:
  • build a critical mass of participants
  • criteria for collaboration

• 3 room types:
  • seeded: built around the problems of the week. Groups self-assigned
  • open: groups and problems are left to the user
  • programmed: we define a particular problem and assign people to rooms

• more discussion:
  • Structure of the group: equal/similar ability or mixed ability
  • Characterization of powwow sessions
  • Human moderation
  • Assess your own
  • Are we in the position of starting a service without moderation?
  • Try to come up with a version that moderation is minimal (guarantee safety, privacy).At lease review of the activities
  • List of what has to be done:

• Issues
  • General:
    • How do we monitor room activity? Which activity needs what kind of monitoring?
    • How do users find rooms? What is the category structure or keywords that would facilitate finding?
    • What’s the relationship between “archived” rooms and live rooms?
    • How do we recruit students? Through other informal math orgs.
    • How do we support community building?
    • How do we interact with the users and the activity in the rooms? Feedback? Scaffolding?
    • When should we structure the group? When do same ability groups prove most effective and how can we facilitate those forming? Do we design a matchmaking component?
    • Can we provide an environment that meets the students’ needs? (interest in math, homework problem)

Majority of students don’t fall into the categories of having full confidence or don’t care. They may not want to feel being judged/assessed. To encourage collaboration and participation vs. no assessment of their performance

• what are we going to do:
  • Write down research design
  • Set up a wiki page for year 3 plan, post this document. People post their points.
  • Open room; Seeded; Use the pow model. Each week post a new problem for them to work on. The room is always open.
  • Programmed needs experimental design.
  • Timetable for the issues
  • Wes is going to write research design.
  • What information we want to get from user registration
  • How to recruit more people to participate
  • How to manage registration that make it easy to people to register as well as not to double register (we only want one identity for the same person?)
    • Grab the IP address to keep track of person
    • Incentive of using the same name: come back to meet the same kids, establish their credential