Author Archives: Robert Talbert

May 17, 2012, 12:15 pm

What constitutes peer review for textbooks — and who cares?

Via Inside Higher Ed, The University of Minnesota has started a web site to curate “open source” textbooks in a variety of subject areas. Right now, the mathematics selection consists of 15 titles, many of which can be considered open-access classics, including Strang’s Calculus, Bob Beezer’s “A First Course in Linear Algebra”, Tom Judson’s excellent Abstract Algebra: Theory and Applications, and the Whitman Calculus book. In other words, these aren’t new titles created specifically for this website. But it’s nice to have these all curated in the same place. (I don’t know if UMN plans on solicit new works specifically for their website.)

The claim here is that open-access books** tend to have slow adoption rates because of the lack of “peer review” (and also because many faculty don’t know that open-access resources are out there), and the UMN website will provide some of that review …

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May 14, 2012, 7:30 am

Turn to your neighbor… and take a test

By Robert Talbert

Week 1 of the 6-week Calculus 2 course is over, and of course it felt like 2.5 weeks of class because that’s the exchange rate between this course and a normal 14-week course. It was challenging for the students, but I feel like they are on board with what we’re doing. I was especially pleased with the outcome of one of the distinctives of this class: the in-class assessments which are called, er, Assessments.

I said at the outset that the key thing with this class was to force the issue on assimilation of material, and part of that was to engage in early, small, and frequent assessment. For formative assessment, we do daily online homework and clicker questions. There’s no requirement to get clicker questions right at all, and WeBWorK sets have no limits on number of attempts or the amount of collaboration or technology used. For summative assessment, we have a midterm exam and a…

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May 8, 2012, 12:52 pm

A screenshot that illustrates what peer instruction can do

By Robert Talbert

I blog a lot about peer instruction, but I think this screenshot from this morning’s Calculus 2 class is worth 1000 of my blog posts about just how effective a teaching technique PI can be. It’s from a question about average value of a function. Just before this question was a short lecture about average value in which I derived the formula and did an example with a graph of data (not as geometrically regular as the one you see below). I used Learning Catalytics to set up the question as Numerical, which means that student see the text and the picture on their devices along with a text box in which to enter what they think is the right answer. (I.e. it’s not multiple choice.) Here are the results of two rounds of voting (click to enlarge):

After the first round of voting, there were 12 different numerical answers for 23 students! (Some of these would be the same answer if students …

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May 7, 2012, 8:58 pm

How the technology works in Calculus 2

By Robert Talbert

Today we started the spring term, 6-week Calculus 2 class that I’ve been writing about for the last few days. We had a good time today, getting comfortable with each other and doing some review of the basics of the definite integral. Before we get too far into the term, I wanted to outline the technology infrastructure of the course.

For a long time, I’d used the learning management system (LMS) of my institution as the basic technology for the course, and everything else kind of fit around the LMS. At GVSU the default LMS is Blackboard. But I decided after used Blackboard this past year that we have irreconcilable differences. I don’t ask much from my LMS; I mainly use it to archive files, provide a link to a central calendar, post grades, and to make announcements. I don’t need all the dozens of other features Blackboard offers, and the profusion of features in Blackboard tends to…

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May 4, 2012, 4:00 pm

Peer instruction and Calculus 2

By Robert Talbert

Sorry for the boring title and lack of catchy image, but since my first post about the upcoming six-week Calculus 2 course, I’ve expended all my creativity getting the course put together and getting ready for Monday. In the earlier post I laid down some design ground rules for the course. Here, I’m going to say a little more in detail about what we’ll be doing.

It’s especially important on a highly compressed schedule like ours to use the class meetings themselves to jumpstart the assimilation process and then train students on how to carry that process forward as they go to work on the day’s material in the afternoon and evening. This is always an important goal of class meetings in any course — I’d go as far as to say that this is why we have class meetings at all. But when you cram a 14-week course into 6 weeks, it doesn’t take long for one incorrectly-assimilated concept to…

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May 1, 2012, 9:18 am

Building a six-week Calculus 2 course

By Robert Talbert

I took a two-week blogging hiatus while final exams week, and the week before, played themselves out. Now that those fun two weeks are over, it’s time to start focusing on what’s next. Some of those things you’ll read about here on the blog, starting with the most immediate item: my spring Calculus 2 class that starts on Monday.

Terminology note: At GVSU and other Michigan schools, the semester that runs from January through April is called “Winter” semester. The period in between Winter and Fall is split into two six-week terms, the first being “Spring” (May-mid June) and the second “Summer” (mid June-July). It’s quite accurate to the climate here.

Anyway, my Calculus 2 class runs in that 6-week Spring term. If you know anything about Calculus 2, and you have a sense of just how long, or short, a 6-week period is, the first thing you’ll realize is that this is a lot of content…

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April 15, 2012, 10:49 pm

The bubble within the bubble

By Robert Talbert

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leecullivan/

This op-ed from the Times Higher Education raises an important point about the demands placed on the personal lives of academics:

Robert Markley has made it to the promised land, securing a tenured post at a large research-intensive university that would be the envy of a thousand early career hopefuls.

But it’s not all milk and honey. He is on his second marriage (and attributes the break-up of his first directly to his work), sees his new wife only during holidays and on occasional weekends, and spends up to 40 per cent of his income on the travel and two homes that make even this possible.

The professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is among the scholars in our cover feature who go to extraordinary lengths – and accept…

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April 12, 2012, 9:45 am

Can Math Be Made Fun?

By Robert Talbert

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hodgers/

This article in the Chicago Tribune talks about efforts to make math fun:

In the American drive to boost science and math education, it’s science that has all the kid-friendly sizzle: Robots and roller coasters, foaming chemical reactions, marshmallow air cannons.

Math has… well, numbers.

“America has a cultural problem with math. It’s the subject, more than any other, that we as a country love to hate,” said Glen Whitney, a passionate mathematician who worked for years developing algorithms for hedge funds. “We don’t see it as dynamic. It’s rote and boring and done by dead Greek guys a thousand years ago.”

The article goes on to talk about some efforts to spice up math, including MIT’s Labyrinth tournament, DimensionU‘s celebrity-driven “DU the Math”…

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April 10, 2012, 8:00 am

Peer Discussion or Peer Pressure?

By Robert Talbert

In peer instruction, students are given multiple choice questions to consider individually, followed by an individual vote on the question using a clicker. That’s followed up by a small group discussion which is followed by a re-vote. Typically the percentage of students getting the correct answer to the question jumps, often in my experience with nearly the entire class converging on the right answer following discussion. But does that jump happen because peer discussion helps students understand the material better, or because students with a weaker understanding are socially influenced by students with a stronger understanding?

This research paper has some data that suggest the former. The authors administered 16 different sets of PI questions to a large-lecture (n = 350) physics class. The questions were given in pairs of “isomorphic” questions, having different contexts and…

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April 9, 2012, 8:00 am

Programming vs. “Technology”

By Robert Talbert

What I was trying to get across in Friday’s post, Gary Stager did much more clearly in this article. In it, he recalls the time thirty years ago when Logo and BASIC were being taught in schools and kids were programming. But:

Things sped downhill when we removed “computing” from our lexicon and replaced it with “technology” (like a Pez dispenser or Thermos). We quickly degraded that meaningless term, technology, further by modifying it with IT and ICT. Once computing was officially erased from the education of young people, teachers could focus on keyboarding, chatting, looking stuff up, labeling the parts of the computer and making PowerPoint presentations about topics you don’t care about for an audience you will never meet. [...]

What kids do get to do with computers tends to be trivial and inservice of the educational status quo. Gone are the days when educational…