Fwd: [Math 2.0] Platforms for sharing (my guest blog post at TIE)
Joe Corneli
thinking about why; one can look at the criteria the author specified
and those that have been left un-stated; also interesting to look at
the proliferation of platforms in this space. A further question
(which I'll investigate) is which of the platforms she mentions are
license- and otherwise-compatible with PlanetMath.
Joe
PS. I just learned about the mathfuture Google Group yesterday, in
the most random fashion...
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Maria Droujkova <drou...@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 2:17 PM
Subject: [Math 2.0] Platforms for sharing (my guest blog post at TIE)
To: mathf...@googlegroups.com
I am one of guest bloggers at Technology Integration in Education
"Weekly Website Write-up." Here is a post I just sent, about platforms
for sharing math activities. Please add what I missed! I'd like to
make a good collection, especially of math-specific platforms.
~*~*~*~*~*
This is a guest post for Technology Integration in Education. It is
the second of two connected posts.
In the first post, I began a wish list for an activity-sharing platform:
Allow user-defined taxonomy of resources by topics, levels and
possibly other tags (such as learning styles)
Support linking and embedding
Support commenting and discussion
Support multiple media
In the last few years, several platforms were designed to these
specifications. The aim of a platform is to provide all tools
necessary for making a lesson under one login, in one web site. At the
same time, there is an increasing tendency to use "web as a platform"
- that is, combine a variety of existing tools, and aggregate them by
linking only.
Following discussions of platform developers, I identified several
problems (contradictions) they aim to resolve, including:
Openness vs. well-edited content
Accessibility vs. power of the tools
Innovation vs. existing curricular standards
Folksonomy vs. taxonomy
The way each platform addresses the contradictions defines what is
possible. For example, pre-screening and dedicated editing groups
produce well-edited content but restrict openness. On the other hand,
large, active wiki-communities produce well-edited content and keep
openness, but communities can rarely start out already large and
active. Tagging supports collaborative, emergent categories of content
(folksonomies) and pre-defined category lists support existing
taxonomies.
A platform for sharing activities is a different tool from a content
management system for courses, and I do not review content management
systems in this post. Several general platform-building efforts are
based on wikis, because several major wiki platforms support the wish
list above.
Here are links to my interviews with developers of projects I review below.
InterGeo
Models for Math
Equalis
Project Euclid
Math Towers
WikiEducator
Curriki
Mathematics platforms
InterGeo is a platform for sharing interactive resources in geometry.
This is a large, growing project based on XWiki. One of the main goals
is meta-tagging of existing and new resources, and developing of a
modern tagging system. InterGeo resources are tagged with Geo Skills,
a collaborative language for building the ontology of competencies,
topics and levels. InterGeo has a network of partners and supporting
organizations of math content developers and educators.
Models for Math is a new (beta started in September 2010) platform
based on the popular eNLVM. It provides a minimalist, clean interface
for "framing" online math activities. There is an easy one-click way
of opening another person's activity for editing and remixing, which
will be saved as a separate instance. Models for Math is collaborating
with GeoGebra to support content development efforts.
Equalis is a new (beta started in August 2010) social media platform,
aiming to become the hub of forums, blogs, and events related to open
source mathematics software packages and other collaborative efforts.
Equalis has a close partnership with SciLab, and plans to expand this
successful model to other groups.
Project Euclid is a large collection (over a million pages of content)
that aims at helping mathematical and statistical journals share and
promote their content online. The platform is especially helpful for
small, new, independent and society journals, though it collaborates
with many large established publications. This is an example of the
modern library science, as applied to mathematics. In the next few
years, Project Euclid leaders want to add some social tools to the
platform, as well.
Math Towers is a platform that scaffolds problem-posing and
problem-solving for students. It is based on social constructivist
theories of mathematics education, promoting conversation around
problem-solving. It aims to set up shared contexts for problems, as
well as providing tools for exploration, and the supporting community.
It includes support for student groupings. The content is indexed by
problem types, called "environments."
In 2008-2009, my company Natural Math built a platform that combined a
wiki, a blog and a light LMS to run a collaborative project called
Multiplication Planet. The pilot was somewhat promising, but we
decided to switch to the "web as a platform" model for further work.
The main reason was the easy availability of dedicated tools, with
customer support and large existing user bases, which allows a small
company to concentrate on content development rather than
platform-building.
General platforms
WikiEducator is a general community that aims to create full free and
open k-20 curricula by 2015. Toward this goal, the project builds up a
wiki platform based on Mediawiki, a set of templates for it, and
develops "three Cs" in educators. They are: capacity, that is, the
ability to use wikis and other computer tools for education; content,
the growing collection of free materials created collaboratively and
licensed under Creative Commons; and connections among educators,
technology groups, institutions and projects. The project started in
2006 and has been growing exponentially.
Curriki is a general collaborating platform with the ability of group
editing, based on XWiki platform. The aim is to build and to share
free k-12 lessons in a user-friendly way, for example, the content
organizing part of the interface is made to look like a PC folder
system. There are tools for creating resources from scratch, but
Curriki is often used to share existing collections created elsewhere.
Summer of Content is Curriki's annual teacher competition for STEM
lesson units, attracting content developers and providing cash prizes.
Merlot is a higher education collaborative platform. It is one of the
oldest still operating, having started in 1997. It uses the
proprietary content building platform based on Carnegie Foundation's
KEEP toolkit, where users fill in boxes for different type of content
and meta-tags. Merlot supports 20+ subject communities, including a
community for mathematics.
Cheers,
Maria Droujkova
Make math your own, to make your own math.
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