life is a rum go guv’nor, and that’s the truth
Math problem solving procedures are important tools in a problem solver’s toolbox. Fluency at using those procedures frees up cognitive resources for problem solving. This is the component fluency hypothesis described by van Merriënboer in his book Training Complex Cognitive Skills and in an ETR&D article. These algorithmic skills are not everything though. Common taxonomies [...]
Posted on April 22nd, 2008 by joel
Filed under: math education | No Comments »
Recently the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center (PSLC) opened public access to a wiki version of their theoretical framework which had previously only been available in PDF format. Kurt VanLehn, one of the PSLC directors, and a pioneer in the field of intelligent tutoring systems, serves as editor. The framework attempts to provide a cohesive [...]
Posted on April 22nd, 2008 by joel
Filed under: math education | No Comments »
Why is it that students so often claim “I am no good at math”? Here is one theory:
In primary grades the major emphasis is on recall of basic math facts (e.g. 3 + 5).
Many kids aren’t wired for simple recall (they aren’t good at memorizing). I’m not.
Commonly used instructional approaches don’t give the immediate feedback [...]
Posted on April 22nd, 2008 by joel
Filed under: math education | 1 Comment »
For sometime I have envisioned a web browser that allows me to search and browse all of the web-pages of the world and view them in English. I figure there have got to be lots of cool things going on in the non-English speaking world that I would be interested in but I never hear [...]
Posted on April 21st, 2008 by admin
Filed under: conferences, rails, web development | 1 Comment »
I recently moved from hostgator to slicehost. I signed up with hostgator because it seemed to be a cheap place ($10/mo) to play with rails. It turns out that hostgator doesn’t really do rails (they offer it via cgi, not even fastcgi). They didn’t allow me to install things like the Send2Wiki perl module or [...]
Posted on April 21st, 2008 by admin
Filed under: web development | No Comments »
Recently I had the great opportunity to visit with Jennifer Suh and Gwenanne Salkind from The Mathematics Education Center (MEC). Thanks to Jim, they came to visit the USU College of Education and the NLVM team prior to presenting on Developing persistent & flexible problem solvers at the annual NCTM meeting in Salt Lake. Jennifer’s [...]
Posted on April 21st, 2008 by admin
Filed under: interactive online math | No Comments »
A couple of years ago I wrote the NLVM Application using Java Swing 1.4. It incorporates the Interactive Math Applets from the NLVM Website. The challenge was that those applets were written based on framework built back in the bronze ages when Netscape on Mac 8 was used heavily in the schools. At that time [...]
Posted on April 3rd, 2008 by joel
Filed under: java | No Comments »
Last week I posted an update to OER Recommender. The source for the project is posted in Google code projects: oerrecommender, recommenderd, and aggregatord. The biggest change was moving OER Recommender from my home-brewed indexing and recommendation engine to using the super fast, super easy, open source search engine Lucene. I made the move because [...]
Posted on April 3rd, 2008 by joel
Filed under: web development | No Comments »