Community Building With And For Teachers At The Math Forum

This chapter addresses the way in which the Internet forms the core of an intentional, online community by promoting communication between interested parties. The Math Forum (mathforum.org) is a unique group of individuals who are committed to using computers and the Internet to enhance what they know about learning, teaching, and doing mathematics. The Math Forum includes programmers, project and service staff, Web persons, and an ever-expanding number of teachers, students, and other individuals (i.e., parents, software developers, mathematicians). Thus, community building for The Math Forum staff includes work with teachers, with partners (National Council of the Teachers of Mathematics, Mathematics Association of America, and so on), and with specific services developed by The Math Forum staff that enable teachers and students to come together to pose and seek solutions to problems. The Math Forum uses the Internet to provide interactive services that foster mathematical thinking and discussion. These services include Ask Dr. Math and several Problems of the Week (PoWs); a teacher discussion format called Teacher to Teacher (T2T); an archive of problems, participant contributions (e.g., lesson plans), and past discussions; and an Internet newsletter. Within four years, with no explicit efforts to garner promotion or publicity, the site grew to include 1,600,000 Web pages and to attract 3.5 million accesses and over 800,000 visitors per month – a third of which constitutes sticky traffic ranging from world-famous mathematicians to elementary school children

The Scientist, Spring 2007

https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/scientist/1000/thumbnail.jp

The Centrality Of Culture And Community To Participant Learning At And With The Math Forum

In this chapter, the terms culture and community are problematized, and their centrality to participant learning at and with The Math Forum (mathforum.org) is discussed. Culture, as it is used here, refers to the rituals and norms that come to be associated with a site and its functioning. Community describes recognition of connections to and identification with other participants. The Math Forum is an interactive and inquiry-informed digital library, or virtual resource center, for mathematics education. Previous chapters have addressed the ways in which The Math Forum has leveraged the concept of community in order to become a dynamic and resource-rich educational site (Renninger & Shumar, 2002; Shumar & Renninger, 2002). In the present chapter, this analysis is taken a step further. The culture of The Math Forum is described as providing its participants with a unique set of opportunities for learning and for making the relationship between the individual and the community one in which individual and community needs can both be met. Site culture enables contributions from individuals that by definition help to build out and sustain this community. Math Forum participants include Math Forum staff members and a mix of teachers, students, and other individuals such as parents, software developers, mathematicians, math educators, professionals, and tradespeople, many of whom also volunteer their time as mentors for the site. Participants differ not only in terms of their roles, but in their experience, level of expertise, and interest for mathematics (Renninger & Shumar, 2002)

OntoMathPROOntoMath^{PRO} Ontology: A Linked Data Hub for Mathematics

In this paper, we present an ontology of mathematical knowledge concepts that covers a wide range of the fields of mathematics and introduces a balanced representation between comprehensive and sensible models. We demonstrate the applications of this representation in information extraction, semantic search, and education. We argue that the ontology can be a core of future integration of math-aware data sets in the Web of Data and, therefore, provide mappings onto relevant datasets, such as DBpedia and ScienceWISE.Comment: 15 pages, 6 images, 1 table, Knowledge Engineering and the Semantic Web - 5th International Conferenc

Report on argumentation and teacher education in Europe

This document will ultimately form part of a comprehensive package of materials for teacher education and professional development in argumentation. The initial deliverable from Kaunas University of Technology described the rhetorical basis of argumentation theory for pre‐ and in‐service teachers, whilst this state of the art report sets out the current and rather unsatisfactory status of argumentation in curricula, initial teacher training/education and teacher professional development, across the fifteen S‐TEAM partner countries. We believe that this is a representative sample and that the report can be taken as a reliable snapshot of the situation in Europe generally

A Survey on Retrieval of Mathematical Knowledge

We present a short survey of the literature on indexing and retrieval of mathematical knowledge, with pointers to 72 papers and tentative taxonomies of both retrieval problems and recurring techniques.Comment: CICM 2015, 20 page