InSITE: ICTs and Network Relations

Inge Hermanrud of Hedmark University College in Norway had a talk on ICTs and Network Relations. He has been working with people from two different “distributed” organizations – the workplace security organization and part of the tax authorities. What they have in common is that there often comes up cases which look like nothing they have seen before, but which may be similar to something from another part of the country. It is, of course, a goal that similar cases are treated similarly across the country, so a certain amount of sharing of experiences is needed.

It turned out that people who had frequent relations used several communication channels, for instance both phone and email simultaneously. Those having infrequent relations, on the other hand, had problems with “multitasking” (doing other things while supposedly taking part in a discussion online) and individual drop-out.

As a lot of the Norwegian government is based on this kind of organizations, it would be important to improve the cooperation between different geographical regions. Therefore, Inge’s research is important.

AT&T Mathematics Error

I'm currently following donttrythis on twitter - he apparently was quoted a price of .015 cents per kb when he signed up to a service, but was charged 1.5 cents per kb. When he complained, they said that "data is charged at .015 cents, or a penny and a half, per kb".

Apparently, the difference between .015 cents and 1.5 cents is lost on AT&T. (On the other hand, his more than 50,000 Twitter followers (at the moment: 63,856) seem to help him get them to accept his claim - even though I'm not sure they still understand the mathematics.)

This case is of course similar to a maths problem Verizon wireless had some time ago.

InSITE: Meaningful Learning in Discussion Forums

Raafat Saade and Qiong Huang’s paper was on Meaningful Learning in Discussion Forums. In online courses with maybe 1300 students and where use of online discussion forums (ODF) is mandatory, there is obviously needed some smart strategy to evaluate the participation.

One could look at what the students do in various levels of detail. At the macro level, one could look at numbers showing each student’s 1) participation and 2) interaction. At the micro level, one could analyze 3) the interaction or 4) cognition. One of the claims in the talk was that, from a learning point of view, cognition is the most interesting of these, while participation is obviously the easiest one to measure.

However, in my context I think that I can find a measure that is both interesting and (quite) easy to measure. I will come back to that later if it proves useful.

I will surely have to read this article closely, as the topic is so close to one of my projects for next semester.

InSITE: Departmental Collaboration for the Community

Joseph Chao gave a talk about Cross-Departmental Collaboration for the Community. The talk centered on a project where programmers and technical writers work together in projects with real-world customers to solve real-world problems. One major problem detected was – unsurprisingly – that the programmers was so busy programming to meet the deadline that they didn’t have time to discuss documentation with the technical writers. Thereby, the technical writers were left to themselves trying to figure out how the program worked.

It’s an interesting project, although not very relevant to my setting.

HPM Newsletter 71

The new issue of the HPM Newsletter (no. 71) was published today. It is available from the HPM website.

In this issue:
- a note on Giorgio T. Bagni, an Italian colleague who tragically died earlier this month
- information on new books: Geir Botten's book on the first Norwegian textbook in mathematics and three books related to Paulus Gerdes' work
- the first announcement for the ESU 6, which will be in Vienna, Austria 19th-23rd of July 2010
- information on how Narges Assarzadegan uses history of mathematics in her work
- a call for possible collaboration on history of mathematics for primary school students.

In addition, there are the usual stuff (information on new articles in the field, interesting links and announcements of events).

InSITE: Design Alternatives for a MediaWiki

Sumonta Kasemvilas had a talk about Design Alternatives for a MediaWiki. Earlier attempts at using Wikis in higher education have made apparent that there are some challenges. For instance, only using watchlists to keep track of changes has turned out not to be sufficient, students feel that the wiki is not easy to navigate and an overall “summary table” of what is going on is missing. Her efforts to enhance MediaWiki to make it better suited for higher education seems promising.

InSITE: Learning objects vs informing objects

A panel discussion with participants Robert Skoriba, Alex Koohang, Fred Kohun and Richard Will discussed the novel concept of “informing object”. As far as I understood, the main problem with the concept “learning object” was considered to be that one should not call something a “learning object” before one has established that learning has taken place. I never got round to ask this question, but I suppose that the same goes for “informing object” – that some sort of informing has to take place before that name is warranted.

To me, who is not familiar with all the preexisting concepts, the discussion soon turned confusing. Someone asked how “informing object” would relate to “information object” and “knowledge object”. And all the time, what the “object” would be, was a bit unclear.

I was, however, made aware of the depository of learning objects called Merlot, which I should look at.