You may have noticed a significant drop-off in posting here lately. Well, there are several big projects afoot and they rob me of writing time. While I can’t openly discuss some things I’m involved in, I can tell you about the Social Media course I’m teaching this semester.

I’m team-teaching the course with a colleague from the Business Department (@cvmuse) and it is cross-listed as a Business / Communications course.  We’ve been planning the course for almost a year and it’s been great fun to teach so far (we’re two weeks in to it now).  I will say that my day of teaching Calculus II, then Social Media, then Calculus II makes me feel like I have mental whiplash by the end of the day.  You couldn’t find two topics that are more different to study or teach than these two.

The course consists of three units:

1. Relate (looking at the human-aspect: psychology, identity, psychology, anthropology, relationships)
2. Connect (how we create communities, share ideas and information, interact, and manage all these things)
3. Protect (examining the legal and ethical issues surrounding social media, like privacy and copyright)

Social Media is an open course, which means all the materials, assignments, and class summaries are publicly available and you can participate by using the class hashtag on Twitter (#297SM).  Just follow the RSS on the Studying Social Media site if you’d like to join us.

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There are lots of email annoyances that make us groan:

• When “Reply All” is used instead of “Reply”
• When someone has a bad grammar or spelling error
• When someone replies to the wrong person (the “wrong Bob” problem)
• Weird formatting errors (like sudden font changes)

I was intrigued by Chris Anderson’s Email Charter (from June 2011) but I didn’t think it was quite right for my organization (a Community College) and a little too technical when dealing with students.  So I wrote the following “Email Manifesto” that I think would improve dealing with the most time-sucking email problems at my college and presented it to the faculty yesterday.  It consists of eight basic axioms:

1.  An email should have one clear subject.

2.  Emails should be simple to respond to and to dismiss when completed.

3.  When an email “conversation” takes a U-turn into new territory, a new subject line is in order.

4.  Need to arrange for an in-person meeting? Suggest several possible meeting times in the first email communication.

• If the person has a secretary, include them in the meeting request.
• If there are several people involved, use a Doodle.

5.  If you want the recipient to take additional action outside their normal routine, make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

• Don’t place the text of the message within an attached document if it can be pasted into the body of the email.
• Include an easy-to-share blurb and link to website for more information for events, in particular.
• Don’t link to files on drives that are only available on-site.

6.  If the message contains a lot of information, make required actions clear (bold them or use another color of text).

• Use phrasing like “What I need from you is …”
• Consider placing the actions at the beginning of the email, followed by the rationale.

7.  There’s nothing wrong with a short email message or response – don’t take offense when you get one. The important thing is that the recipient took the time to read and respond. Lots of emails get answered from a very tiny keyboard or touch-keyboard.

8.  Because it’s difficult to read voice inflection, facial expressions, or body language from an email, consider using emoticons or expressions to convey these emotions.

• Perhaps this is a jestful comment: Are you kidding me?
• Perhaps it makes you sad: Are you kidding me?
• Perhaps it makes you angry: Are you kidding me? <fuming>
• Perhaps you are sympathizing: Are you kidding me? <hug>

There are handouts (short and long) and a slide presentation.

Please feel free to share the Email Manifesto, modify it, and give the presentation – just include the author slide with my contact information.  Just a note about the presentation, when you get to the slides about Axiom #8, have your audience read each statement out loud.  This will quickly make the point about why we should use emoticons in email.

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After reading this list of “10 Things our Kids will Never Worry About Thanks to the Information Revolution” from Forbes, I was inspired to remind people that technology usually creates just as many problems as it solves.  So here’s my list of the new worries created by the Information Revolution.

1. [Will never have to worry about Taking a Typing Class] They will have to worry about … Mastering multiple input methods and keeping track of which ones autocorrect which words badly.  Now you have to master typing on a keyboard, typing on a tablet device, sliding over touch-keys on a Smartphone, using a numeric-only keyboard on a cellphone, using the voice-input from Apple, using the voice-input from Google, or using the voice-input from Microsoft. Each one of these uses different AutoCorrect features and has different oddities.  That’s plenty to worry about.  One bad autocorrect could lose you a job if you’re not careful.

2. [Will never have to worry about Paying Bills by Writing Countless Checks]  They will have to worry about … Losing control of finances because it’s too easy to make impulse purchases.   When all it takes to make an impulse buy is one click on your phone, tablet, or computer, it’s pretty easy to overspend your income.  And, while $0.99 or $4.99 is a pretty inexpensive purchase, those small impulse App purchases add up pretty quickly.

3. [Will never have to worry about Buying an Expensive Set of Encylopedias] They will have to worry about …  Evaluating the Source of their Information.  I’m sure you know an educator or parent who has “banned” Wikipedia.  Now information comes from Twitter, Facebook, Internet Search, online journals, firewalled “scholarly” research journals, Wikipedia, and more.  Is it good information or bad information?  Well, now you have to make that determination too.

4. [Will never have to worry about Using a Pay Phone or Racking Up a Long Distance Bill]  They will have to worry about … Racking Up a Roaming Charge or Data Overage Bill.  The last time I roamed on my phone in Canada (for about 30 minutes), it cost me $27.  The current overage on a wifi hotspot on Sprint is $50 per GB (after you surpass 5 GB a month).   And, for the record, most phone plans DO come with a limitation on certain types of minutes, and the overages on those are NOT cheap.

5. [Will never have to worry about Having to Pay Somebody Else to Develop Photographs]  They will have worry about Managing the Storage and Rights on their Digital Photos and Videos.  Now they need to decide on their photo- and video-sharing strategy.  Where will they store their photos?  On a hard-drive only? (better have a backup system in case the computer is stolen or lost)  In the cloud? (Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Vimeo, YouTube …)  What kind of access do you want to give to your photos?  Should they be private or public? Private to specific groups or all your friends?  Do you want to copyright the photos?  If so, which copyright should you use? Oh, and did you still want hard copies of some photos? Then you’ll have to purchase and maintain a printer that is capable of printing color photos (together with proper toner or ink + special photo paper).

6. [Will never have to worry about Driving to a Store to Rent a Movie]   They will have to worry about … Violating Copyright by Accident when they Make their own Videos.  The U.S. Copyright laws have become so complex and confusing that you can accidentally violate them when you make a home movie in your living room while some copyrighted song plays on the radio in the background.  One can imagine a future when being sued for copyright infringement is an almost daily occurrence for the average person.

7. [Will never have to worry about  Buying or storing music, movies, or games on physical media.]  They will have to worry about … Being Locked in to a Single Media Device (and Format) Forever.  Kindle books won’t work on Nooks, Nook books won’t work on Kindle, and iTunes songs won’t play on Android.  Once you make your choice of digital format for books, music, and note-taking, you are either locking yourself in forever, or facing a very expensive switch to a new provider at some point.  The choice of media network not only locks you in to a format, but might lock you out of a sharing network with some of your friends.

8. [Will never have to worry about Having to Endlessly Search to Find Unique Content.]  They will have to worry about … Managing the flow from the firehose of information. When I was a kid, you could write a research paper after consulting your school library and your set of Encylopedias.  With the information now available (and having recently written a dissertation) I can say that having too much access to information can make it incredibly difficult to know whether you’ve thoroughly researched your topic.  How much searching is “enough” to say you’re done?

9. [Will never have to worry about Sending Letters.] They will have to worry about … Responding to Communication on a Multitude of Platforms and Networks.  A professional will have to communicate with their colleagues through email, several social networks, texts, and synchronous communication systems.  Not only is this a lot to manage, but each medium requires different etiquette. If you screw up the etiquette of the medium (for example, you use text-speak in an email) you’ll look like an idiot to the receiver.

10. [Will never have to worry about Being without the Internet & instant, ubiquitous connectivity.]  They will have to worry about … Getting enough Sleep and Managing Stress.  In an always-on world, you have to be able to disconnect to stay sane.  Many youth go to sleep with their cell phone on their pillow, unable to disconnect from their social network for even one minute.  As these sleep-deprived teenagers become adults and parents, one can only imagine the damage to their psychological well-being if they are unable to learn to disconnect.

So, yes, there are some things that our kids will not have to worry about thanks to the Information Revolution.  However, I don’t think technology has exactly made it less worrisome to grow up in today’s world.

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I am really getting fed up tired of having to explain Wolfram Alpha graphs to students.  For some reason, the default in Wolfram Alpha is to graph everything with imaginary numbers.  This results in bizarre-looking graphs and makes it near-impossible to use Wolfram Alpha as a teaching tool for undergraduate mathematics, a real shame.  Now that Google has entered the online graphing fray, I have a wary hope that the programmers at Wolfram Alpha might finally (after two years of waiting) fix the problem.

Here are a few examples.  I’ll show you the graph in Wolfram Alpha, on a TI-84 Plus emulator (TI-SmartView), from Google Search, and from Desmos Graphing Calculator.  These are all the “default” looks.  Wolfram Alpha consistently shows this confusing imaginary view as the default whenever working with graphs involving variables in radicals.

Example 1:

Example 2:

Example 3:

I was hoping to really teach my College Algebra students to use Wolfram Alpha next semester.  But, between the Logarithm Issues and this graphing issue, I’m afraid I’m going to have to abandon ship on using Wolfram Alpha as a teaching tool for students. Students simply don’t have enough mathematical sophistication to look at the graphs and realize that they aren’t seeing what they are supposed to be seeing and I’m seeing far too much confusion on assessments that are caused by the oddities in graphs and logarithms on Wolfram Alpha.  What a shame that we can’t work this out, huh?

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I’m pleased to announce that we’re going to start offering a “Tech Bootcamp” for non-math faculty.  Our first offering of the MCC TaLDA Workshop (Teaching & Learning in the Digital Age) will be in May 2012.  Registration opens today!

The MCC TaLDA Workshop is a week-long immersion in Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age for College faculty from all disciplines. This workshop is modeled after the MCC Math & Technology Workshop, which MCC has hosted for four years now. Over time, this workshop has been dubbed “Technology Bootcamp” by its participants. Participants come from all over the country to get an “upgrade” to their technology skills as they relate to teachinging and learning in the college setting.

Participants go home armed not only with new technology skills, but also software and hardware to help them on their journey, all provided by donations from our commercial sponsors. Participants in the 2012 Workshop will receive the latest versions of Camtasia Studio, SnagIt, and a 1-year subscription to Mindomo.  Thanks to TechSmith and Mindomo for being sponsors of the 2012 MCC TaLDA Workshop!

Organizers and presenters at the workshop donate their time for a “good cause” – that is, we hope that participants will go back to their own schools and wider educational communities and spread what they have learned. The 2012 Workshop will be facilitated by Maria Andersen and Barry Dahl (see Workshop Staff page for more info). Both have considerable experience in the realm of leveraging technology for learning, and are invited to speak and conduct workshops at many national events.

The TaLDA Workshop will be May 7-11, 2012 in Muskegon, Michigan. There are 40 spaces for participants, so register as soon as possible if you’d like to attend. For the first month, only one participant per college will be accepted.

Register here! 

Math and physical science faculty (those subjects that involve a lot of equations and graphs) should consider the MCC Math & Tech Workshop instead (August 2012).

Oh … and did I mention? Muskegon has a beautiful beach!

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If I had to produce tactile graphs for the visually-impaired, or have such a student produce a graph for me, I think I would spend an hour to create one of these velcro and wool yarn slates for the blind.

I stumbled across this Touching Slate “toy” in MAKE Magazine’s current issue and realized that this simple slate solves a key problem in teaching higher-level mathematics to visually-impaired students: How can a teacher or student quickly produce graphs of functions to share during a class, study session, or exam?  I think you could use yarn of different thicknesses in order to put multiple functions on the same graph.  With several of these easy to produce slates, you could have several pre-made graphs for exams, lectures, on-the-fly questions, etc.

Here’s a one-minute video with instructions for making the slate.

For other resources to create graphs for the visually-impaired, you should also check out Tactile Maps and Graphics, and for those of you who need to teach Calc III, you should check out Andy Long’s function machine or make friends with someone who has a 3D printer (the Industrial Technology department on our campus has one now).

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I just stumbled upon this great little video about Ancient Numeration Systems.  It does not go into depth on any particular system, but it wanders through the following:

• Tally marks
• Sumerian symbols
• Babylonian symbols
• Egyptian symbols
• Roman symbols and modifications of it
• Number systems based on the body (Zulu)
• Commerce-based number systems (Yoruba in Nigeria)
• Number systems involving knots and string (Persians, Incans)
• Numerals 0-9 (invented in India)
• Place value
• Fractions as a solution for “fair-share” situations in culture
• Unit Fractions (Egyptians)
• Fractions with base-60 (Sumerians and Babylonians), still used for time measurements today
• Abacus (Chinese)
• Use of the “bar notation” in modern-day fractions
• Computation by the double-half method (Russian)
• Computation by a doubling procedure (Egyptian)
• Computation by an abacus (Europe and Asia), the “handheld calculator of its day”
• Introduction of Arabic Numerals in Europe
• Importance of mental math algorithms to check for reasonableness

This would be a great introduction video to a unit that involves Numeration Systems.

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The page of digital and non-digital games has grown too long and unwieldy, so I’ve finally taken the time to reorganize the content by topic area. I’ve also added all the new “Block” games on various topics in Trigonometry, Rational Exponents, and Logarithms.

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Yesterday I had a short talk in the ITLC Themed Session called “Change the Classroom, Change the Learning” about the necessity of math classroom redesign.

Without changing the classrooms, it is unlikely that we will see much change in the instructors or students.

Here is the video from the talk, called “What does the Classroom Say?” and the slides from the presentation.

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The “colored counter” method is an old tried-and-true method for teaching the concept of adding signed numbers.  However, to show subtraction with the colored counter method has always seemed painful to me … that is, until I altered the method slightly.

Now all problems are demonstrated within a “Sea of Zeros” and when you need to take away counters, you can simply borrow from the infinite sea.  Voila!  Here’s a short video to demonstrate addition and subtraction of integers using the “Sea of Zeros” method.  You can print some Colored Counter Paper here.

Video: Colored Counters in a Sea of Zeros

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