MeetingSeventyEight

• Content organization of VMT wiki page

-- Project papers posted

• Questions about research design
  • Seeded question can be generated from POW
  • Open: freely come and go. Might be difficult to get them signed up.
  • 4-5 people per group:
  • Videotaping may be needed e.g. for watching what they are doing on paper along with the chat; facial expression and what's on the screen at the same time
  • Two main research questions:
    • Impact of mathematical identities and classroom culture on chat work
    • Structure of group itself and the way the group work develops

    Difference in math discussion in classroom and this online environment Classroom videotaping

  • What we have known about software use

• Fall program design
  • Membership required to participate in solving the problem
  • Run PoW? first
  • Provide trial account
  • Development schedule
  • Create user accounts
  • Create rooms/tasks/

• Usability problem

• More about registration: what data do we want to gather from registration
• Can we make time stamp of whiteboard -- it's available on the server. The old version shows the local time. It's still up in the air how to design it in the new version.

• Discussion of year 3 plan led by Steve
  • Open and seeded: maybe helpful to have an expert from math forum
  • Get feedback to see the requirement for mentoring and time/room
  • Coordination:
    • Can people send email around to invite more participants or should teachers be in charge of it?
    • Should we have “happy hour” over longer period of time?
    • Should people registered for the room get a list of people who also registered?
    • Do people need to wait to get the approval?
    • Maybe different types of room: we may want to get participants' opinion on how they want it to be set up, e.g.control of the room
  • other issues of designing:
    • Let someone join but still can deny the access to the room
    • If open, people can change their identity
    • (wes: younger kids don’t use email at all. They don’t have each other’s email. They use IM. They would wait or set away message. It’s similar to physical world without email. )
    • Specific time slots during the day/week to attract people

• Recruit the initial interview core group of Wes?

-- How to solve the time conflict? Should we do the interview before having them participate?

• Recruitment protocol for teachers/students
  • Put together recruitment plan for teachers and participants
  • One of benefits of participating: get feedback

  more: Learn a lot (pass the exam), generate ideas, to cooperate, share, etc

  • More specific about what we see good collaboration is in order to say what support we would be able to offer

• Scaling issue: not likely to happen based low participation using IM

• How are we providing the problems?
  • In HTML page: how is it going to be transfered into concertchat.
  • How do we want people to see the problem before they come to the room and work together?

  -- For the time being, we should allow them see so they have idea of the nature of the problems math forum provides. The type of problem changes the dynamic.

  -- Separate problems (under different categories) and one of them will pop up. So students know what types of problem to expect but didn’t know which one exactly. (similar to a game)

  -- We should keep thinking about the question of how they get problem, which will affect the conversation.

  -- Once the room is populated and ready to start, there’s a button for the owner to click and say “get the problem”. What are the benefits?

• For open group: Idea of library: browse and choose their own
• For seeded: strictly lined with POW

-- A list of problems under each is the list of rooms who are working on it

-- Can user create problems? No. they can only add rooms

• Control issue
• Multiple reviews: summary of the problem
• Design of math problems that enables tracking the learning, assessment

Track development over time: plan for year 4? Assessment

Alternative design of tracking the group but not the math knowledge (individual and group as a whole)

• Open-ended problem vs. hard problem
• Tree of problems: problem types

• What to do next:
  • Design recruitment protocols
  • Design the help documents
  • Design problems
  • Set a chat with them next week?