http://www.joelduffin.com/blog life is a rum go guv’nor, and that’s the truth Wed, 28 Jul 2010 04:12:44 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm presenting at the First GeoGebra North America Conference this morning http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/07/27/geogebra-na-2010/ Today I am presenting Using Technology Effectively to Teach Mathematics at the Utah Association of Math Teacher Educators annual meeting being held at Utah State University. http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/03/06/using-technology-to-teach-mathematics/ I was excited to see yesterday that images from the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) are being made public. Amazing images. Here is my new computer desktop image that I stare at in wonder. For more info and cool images check out the WISE project website. Some of Technology for WISE ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/02/19/wide-field-infrared-survey-explorer-wise/ Recently our National Library of Virtual Manipulatives team (Bob Heal, Larry Cannon, Jim Dorward, and myself) was awarded the Utah Governor's Medal for Science and Technology. Here is some press that covered the award: Utah State Today - USU Researchers Awarded Governor's Medals for Science and Technology USU College of Science - Three ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/01/28/nlvm-team-receives-utah-governors-medal-for-science-and-technology/ Justin and I submitted proposals to the Digital Media and Learning Competition. I was amazed to see the breadth of the 100 pages of submissions. There are a lot of good ideas there. Not being sure that the submissions will always be kept public, I wanted to archive them for ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/01/28/web-crawling-on-a-budget/ My daughter's friends got a hold of my droid and thought it would be fun to try to guess the password pattern. After enough times, it locked up my droid and asked me to login with my gmail account credentials. Problem is, that didn't work. It is a known bug. ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/01/28/how-to-unlock-your-droid-when-your-kids-try-to-guess-the-pattern-too-many-times/ Generating personal recommendations is one thing, presenting them to the user in a way that they find them useful is something else. Here are our plans for folksemantic.com: Personal recommendations page - For each user, provide a personal recommendations page. Visually separate recommendations that they have already clicked on. Personal recommendations tool ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/23/presenting-personal-recommendations/ We're in the process of building out personal recommendations for folksemantic.com. The basis for the recommendations is user attention metadata. The data we use includes: Identity feeds - RSS feeds that users register that represent their interests. For example, their blog or their delicious account. Clicks - The articles that the user ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/23/a-personal-recommendation-algorithm/ I had the chance to talk with David Yaron again about how to generate more and better assessments that get at deeper levels of knowledge than what typical assessments do. I didn't realize this but, Turadg, whose presentation I attended is one of David's students. I shared my reaction to ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/19/encouraging-the-creation-of-assessments-to-measure-deep-understanding/ Rachel Bower - Internet Scout Wisconson Madison, ATE Central, AMSER. Advanced Technological Education is a sister program to NSDL. Designed to connect NSDL with community and technical college faculty. Instead of focusing on a content area, they chose to focus on an audience and to cover all of applied math ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/18/ate-a-sister-program-to-nsf/ Lyle Barbato, the comPADRE lead developer talked about conference services as a model for sustainability. Each collection in comPADRE is focused around supporting existing community or a particular course. Teachers, Courses, Specific Students, Specific faculty. They offer workshops etc to those communities. The Physics Education Research community has existed since ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/18/per-central-conference-services-as-a-sustainability-model/ Bruce Mason - Open Source Physics. Modern Physics is done with computation no matter whether you are a theoretical or experimental. Our current classroom practice doesn't allow with this well. A tri-partrate learning platform. Their project combines Open Source Physics, Easy Java Simulation, and the Compadre Library. Modeling is important because ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/18/open-source-physics-adoptable-adaptable-and-understandable-power-to-the-people/ Dan Garcia is charged with motivating users to participate. 90-9-1 principle. 90% of users are audience, 9% of users are editors, 1% of users are creators. Creators are not representative of who the community is. Cites alertbox/participation_ Nielson research about 90% of postings come from 1% of the users. We ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/18/90-9-1-principle-getting-people-to-contribute/ Lois Delcambre is talking about the new ensemble portal and the CS1 project being motivated by the CSTA. There is an intellectual debate about what you should use to introduce people to computer science. Their community site is intended to promote discussion. The site uses drupal as a platform. They ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/18/remixing-web-content/ Frank Shipman has worked for years on a Interest Profile Manager (IPM) that runs locally on a users's computer. They model users based on 3 sources: (1) interaction with their knowledge browser, (2) browser history, and (3). They are starting a new project to explore pooling individual models to community ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/18/modeling-users-to-provide-recommendations/ I'm listening to Arlene De Strulle, Bruce Mason, Kimberly Lightle, Cathy Manduca, Darrell Porcello in the opening panel at the NSDL annual meeting. Dr. De Strulle is talking about the report Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge. Highlights of the report: Crossdisciplinary approach - use Platform perspective ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/18/fostering-learning-in-the-networked-role-the-cyberlearning-opportunity-and-challenge/ I'm falling in love with Make. Their site has too much cool stuff on it, to actually do, like this magnetic sculpture - make sure to watch to the end when he plays with the ferrofluid. Magnetic Sculpture kit from Collin Cunningham on Vimeo. Or at least watch other people do, and ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/13/make-cool-stuff/ A couple of years ago I started Models for Learning. The company's tag line is "engaging the students of today to solve the problems of tomorrow." The mission of the company is to interest and prepare youth for careers in Science, Technology, Education, and Mathematics. Along those lines I have ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/10/stem-challenge/ I am a heretic. I develop Rails apps on Windows. I own a Macbook, but I usually boot it into Windows. Justin thinks I should just should just move to developing on a Mac. I keep holding out. But periodically I try to install a gem that needs to compile ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/05/11/compiling-bcrypt-for-windows/ I arrived in NYC today with Bob Heal, Jim Dorward, and Patricia Moyer-Packenham. Tomorrow we are making a presentation titled "Using Virtual Manipulatives to Support the Development of Mathematical Understanding" at the Teachers College, Columbia University. Daniel McVeigh has been an advocate of our work with the NLVM for a ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/02/20/presenting-at-teachers-college-columbia-university/ Last week our family camped at Tony Grove Lake up Logan Canyon. The wildflowers were amazingly diverse and beautiful including these that Meghan spotted growing on a boulder in the lake. After morning hikes we swam in the lake which was surprisingly pleasant. The older kids and I explored polygamy cave. My Dad ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/07/22/camping-at-tony-grove/ http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/07/11/how-fun-is-that/ JCDL 2008 trip continued: On my way out of town I couldn't resist stopping by the PSLC to attend a lunch meeting where Turadg Aleahmad and Ido Roll were giving practice talks for ITS2008. Turadg presented on an online authoring tool designed for teachers to use to create worked example ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/07/09/teacher-authoring-and-metacognition-at-the-pslc/ JCDL 2008 trip continued: I've watched Alice with interest for a number of years and my children and I have played with it. Naturally, Randy's last lecture renewed my interest. Wednesday morning I visited Drew at the Entertainment Technology Center that Randy co-founded. Drew was very kind to give me ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/07/09/visiting-the-entertainment-technology-center/ JCDL 2008 trip continued: In Education and NSDL: Past, Present and Future, David McArthur presented the future of the NSDL as a platform from which to build. This is the right direction to head... hopefully not too late. The NSDL should provide additional services beyond search, it should provide web ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/07/09/measuring-the-wrong-things/ JCDL 2008 trip continued: I talked with Bryan Chapman about aligning content with standards (see his paper Exploring Educational Standard Alignment: In Search of ‘Relevance’). He pointed me to the CNLP's Curriculum Assignment Tool and to the Teacher's Domain cross walking service as potential sources of tools and providers of ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/07/09/aligning-content-with-standards/ I recently attended JCDL 2008 to present a poster on OER Recommender with Brandon. As usual, the interactions with people were the best part of the conference. Monday night I enjoyed good dinner with at Lidia's with David Tarrant and Max Wilson, PhD students from the University of Southampton England. ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/07/09/jcdl-2008/ After years of keeping them in boxes, I recently got out my University Physics and Math books and put them on my shelves. Just getting them out inspired me :-). This morning while testing the Open Yale Courses feed that I had added to OER Recommender, I ran across the ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/05/23/r-shankar-small-coincidences/ 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 ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/04/22/component-fluency-hypothesis/ 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 ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/04/22/pslc-theoretical-framework-wiki-opened/ 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 ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/04/22/i-am-no-good-at-math/ 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 ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/04/21/multi-lingual-google-search-mashup/ 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 ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/04/21/moved-to-slicehost/ 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 ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/04/21/jennifer-suh/ 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 ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/04/03/mixing-awt-and-swing-is-no-fun/ 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. ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2008/04/03/lucene-and-multi-lingual-updates-to-oer-recommender/ Every time we update the NLVM website like we did a few weeks ago we receive email from people that are no longer able to access the applets. Often times the causes are somewhat mysterious. Some of the problems are caused by proxy and browser caching; some of the updated ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2007/12/13/debugging-browser-incompatibilities/ Every time I look at this picture it makes me smile so I thought I would share. She smiled big like this for about two days straight. http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2007/12/11/things-that-make-you-smile/ Here is the updated OER Recommender White Paper. Yesterday we released the OER Recommender system that I have worked on. There are still many things that could be added or tweaked, but it does something useful already so out the door it goes! I'm concerned that we are calling it ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2007/08/23/oer-recommender-released/ Justin and I have been debating whether or not we really believe that Rails can scale. As we talked about this issue, we realized that ozmozr is probably a good test case. We stopped working on ozmozr months ago, realizing that it needed additional work. We needed to move on ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2007/08/23/scaling-rails-debugging-ozmozr/ One way to define a community is by the problems it cares about. How does one begin to participate in a community? If you accept my characterization of a community, you begin participating in the community when you begin caring about the same problems that the community cares about. If you wanted ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2007/05/19/a-community-is-its-problems/ Last night we listened to the hilarious Ze Frank. Amongst the laughs I gleaned a few principles which I think apply to things I care about. Playing with something is a better way to begin learning about it than to be told all about it. When people begin creating things they begin ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2007/05/19/posing-and-solving-problems/ In summary: write tests, run tests continually, design modules so that they are open for extension but closed for modification (you can add functionality without changing the existing code) refactor periodically, clean up your code before it stinks. Here are some interesting quotes: "It was too easy to make a mess ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2007/05/18/rubyconf-clean-code/ RailsConf2007. We ran in circles last night trying to find a restaurant that had been recommended to us and ended up eating at Wendy's. Yum ;-) Apparently the double tree didn't have our reservations. Gratefully they gave us a room anyway. I'm here at the First Day with JRuby on Rails ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2007/05/17/railsconf2007-your-first-day-with-jruby-on-rails/ I'm going to start implementing a recommender system soon. It seems like recommender systems get a bad rap from many people. My experiences with them have not been so stellar either. I think my basic gripe is that they speak up when they shouldn't, that is when they don't really ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2007/05/09/implementing-a-recommender-system/ About a month ago we received funding notification of an NSF IMD grant titled Extending and Enhancing the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives. We have launched a developers website here. We are in the process of organizing teams, working on prototype eModules, planning workshops, etc. http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2004/05/19/enlvm-launch/ Saturday I attended and presented at the Utah Association of Math Teacher Educators (UAMTE) meeting in SLC and benefited greatly.Catherine Lewis of MILLS College presented an excellent keynote on Lesson Study. Catherine illustrated the process using video vignettes and made a strong case for its benefit. Resources she suggested for ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2004/03/01/uamte-meeting-report/ I just read an article by SRI researchers that reports on a user study of the Math Tools DL. As one of the participants in the study I was interested to see what they had to say. The basic structure of the report was to: (a) summarize the results, (b) ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2004/03/01/d-lib-math-tools-dl-article/ Here are my notes from a presentation titled Multimedia Learning that Dr. Mayer gave at USU on January 27, 2004. I had read his book by the same name previously, but it was good to hear it from the horse's mouth. Over his 30 year career he has focused his ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2004/01/30/richard-mayer-comes-to-usu/ For the record, I successfully defended my dissertation December 12th. I have a running joke with my wife about how human nature is to think that when such and such happens, then I will be happy. After completing my defense I smiled and told my wife, Now I'm happy. Since ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/12/30/my-defense/ I have six cool sisters, but only one reads Blogs, so I dedicate this post to her. She is an amazing sister, very smart, very fun, very supportive. A month or so ago I spent a day in a rider truck with her driving to SF where she was moving. ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/10/31/my-cool-sister-karen/ I've scheduled my defense date for Nov 24 and the end of Oct to give my committee the final draft of my dissertation. I wrote a first draft and gave it to my chair before edits. Since then I've stepped back and asked myself did I write something good? I've ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/10/23/count-down-to-defense/ Check out 3D-XplorMath 10.0. http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/30/3d-xplormath/ Yesterday in a discussion with an NSDL evaluator who is also an ElEd Prof., he told me that research has shown that teachers would rather be given the parts from which to build lessons, than pre-completed lessons. I have asked him for more details about the claim and what data ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/26/do-teachers-want-lessons-or-the-building-blocks/ The fear that technology will replace teachers has a long and storied history. It merits a close look.As has been repeatedly claimed, the use of the technology in the classroom is changing the role of teachers (or at least has the potential to change the role of teacher). My experience ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/26/technology-replaces-teachers/ This morning on my way to work I was thinking about what I would like to see in the developers forum of the Math Tools DL. The following issues seem most pertinent to me: user interface design, user centered design, cross platform issues, authoring tools for teachers, free and open ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/25/developing-mathlets/ I just ran across a five part series of articles titled: Copyrights and Copying Wrongs at Education World. It provides a nice overview of copyright issues for teachers as they relate to reusing web based resources. My research with teachers indicates that many are largely unaware of copyright issues. They ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/17/copyrights-and-copying-wrongs/ One definition of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is computer based instruction that uses AI methods. To me this does not seem like a good definition, since it is quite possible that a piece of instructional software that does not use AI methods could appear and behave to a learner ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/17/what-is-an-intelligent-tutoring-system/ I've been re reading Lite Applets at Joma and looking at the Java Components for Mathematics website and imagining that I could quickly make those applets configurable from within TADRIOLA. It shouldn't take much and I believe it will make teacher use of those mathlets much more likely. http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/16/configuring-mathlets/ I'm not a big fan of rote learning, but I realize that kids need to learn to efficiently recall basic math facts. My boy is in 3rd grade and is learning his multiplication facts and is still a bit weak on his addition facts. The strategy they use in my ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/11/learning-basic-math-facts/ My dissertation study is titled Theory for Authoring Tools that Support Adaptation of Mathlets (TATSTAM). So a main thrust of my research is to identify the characteristics of tools that support teacher reuse and adaptation of interactive online learning activities. As a result I'm continually looking for projects that are ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/11/authoring-tools-for-teachers/ I just ran across an interesting research report titled Inside US Math and Science Classrooms. The abstract is:A total of 364 mathematics and science lessons were observed using a structured observation protocol. Each lesson was rated on four components: the lesson design, implementation, math/science content addressed, and classroom culture. Observers ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/11/inside-math-classrooms/ I've been visiting recently with colleagues here at Utah State University discussing the initiation of a new project to help improve math education here in the state. If you were given an infinite supply of money, time, and personnel, what would you do? If you were given a small amount of ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/10/how-to-improve-student-math-learning/ Thanks to Doug for the link to an interview with Clark Aldrich. http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/08/simulations-and-the-learning-revolution/ I just ran across Lilia's post about case study research. I've been thinking about my own and doing some writing this morning. I'm still looking at how to best analyze my data. I've looked at QSR N6. I am also familiar with and have access to free format text database ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/05/case-study-research/ Another issue I am thinking about is how to generate categories to characterize the different teachers I have worked with. Dr. Lancy, an experienced qualitative researcher, encouraged me to try sorting the teachers into categories just using my gut instinct. While this seems like a reasonable approach, my natural instinct ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/05/ideas-for-analyzing-my-qualitative-data/ This past week I attended and presented (PPT) at the USU 15th Annual Instructional Technology Conference. Highlights for me were presentations by Sanne Dijkstra (PPT) and Wes Shumar. Dr. Merrill's presentation (PPT) made me think as usual. Wes's Presentation Wes gave a helpful overview of the main services of the MathForum. While ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/03/15th-annual-it-conference/ My fascination with Tesselations continues. I just read Andrea's post which pointed me to a tesselations site I hadn't seen before: Tesselating Animation out of Japan. Other tesselation and wallpaper resources that I like are: Shodor's Tesselate!, NLVM's pattern blocks, Stephen Weber's JTiling, David Joyce's Hyperbolic Tesselations, Escher and the ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/09/03/tesselations/ The Deafening Silence David speaks of is ringing in my ears. I've tried to to read and understand the discussion of the CC-EDU license and feel like I still don't understand it well enough to be able to say anything meaningful about it. Here is my jumbled understanding of it. CC ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/08/13/the-ringing-in-my-ears/ Last night while typing focus group data into my palm pilot I watched a program on PBS titled The Trouble with Testing. My interest in this area is in the potential for using mathlets for alternate forms of evaluation. I believe that they could be used to record solution paths ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/08/13/the-trouble-with-testing/ Yesterday I met with David Lancy, a Prof here at USU considered to be somewhat of an expert in qualitative research. He has been very generous with his time in visiting with me. His input has been very helpful. I shared with him where I am currently at in my ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/08/13/retiring-on-a-graduate-student-salary/ Absolutely....While rooting around the blogsphere I ran across Brian's All over for blogs? post. What a let down, after only two days of having a blog, my visions of granduer are ruined, my bubble is burst. Surely he is being both sarcastic and realistic. I guess when writing a blog you ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/08/13/is-my-blog-destined-for-irrelevance/ Joel has begun blogging. Not nearly as irreverant as I understand a blogger should be, I'm excited to begin authoring in addition to lurking. Many thanks to my Ph.D. chair David Wiley for getting me started. My primary interest is in completing my dissertation study titled Design Theory for Authoring Tools that ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2003/08/11/warning-will-robinson-warning/