JMM 2014

Over 6400 mathematicians descended upon Baltimore January 15-18 for the 2014 Joint Mathematics Meetings. Sessions included current research in math, discussions on pedagogy, content, collaborations across institutions, social events, and more.

The first session on Wednesday 15 January was the MAA Minority Chairs committee meeting at 7:00 am, although there were actually some short courses, workshops, AMS council meetings and MAA Board of Governors meeting on the preceding Monday and Tuesday. And there were dozens of contributed paper sessions throughout the morning and the rest of the day.

The JMM unveiled the theme of the 2014 Math Awareness Month (April 2014): Mathematics, Magic, & Mystery (http://www.mathaware.org/). On each day of April 2014 a new square of the Activity Calendar goes live, giving access to mathematical puzzles and magic. (Once opened, the resources are to be kept available for as long as the AMS exists.)

JMM2014 also included a panel session launching TPSE Math: Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics (@tpsem, http://www.tpsemath.org/). The project is sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation of New York and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

One of the sessions on the last day was The Public Face of Mathematics http://blogs.ams.org/jmm2014/2014/01/18/the-public-face-of-mathematics/.  The panel was organized by mathemagician Art Benjamin (http://www.math.hmc.edu/~benjamin/) and included "Math Guy" Keith Devlin (http://www.stanford.edu/~kdevlin/), NY Times columnist Steven Strogatz (http://www.stevenstrogatz.com/), mathbabe Cathy O'Neill (http://mathbabe.org/), freelance journalist Tom Siegfried (http://www.sciencenoise.org/), and US Congressman Jerry McNerny (http://mcnerney.house.gov/). 

Joint Mathematics Meetings 2012

About 7000 mathematicians gathered in Boston for the 2012 Joint Mathematics Meeting January 4-7, 2012.

My first event was the Mathematics Digital Library advisory board meeting.  One of MathDL director Lang Moore's items was that the MathDL's  Course Communities  now include Developmental Math. These resources are from the Knowledge Exchange Networks spearheaded by Tom Carey of U. Toronto, San Diego State U., and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Haynes Miller (MIT) reported on  MIT's online resource for faculty collaboration.   First developed as an in-house tool to help facilitate writing across the curriculum, the resource is now being opened up for faculty collaborations throughout the US.

The CRAFTY (Curriculum Renewal Across the First Two Years) committee sponsored a contributed papers session on preparing students for calculus, and the College Board/MAA Committee on Mutual Concerns sponsored a panel session  on promoting student success in calculus.  Alison Ahlgren of U. Illinois and Marilyn Carlson of Arizona State University painted vastly different pictures.

Alison believes the UI has found a working solution using ALEKS (Assessent and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces) as both an assessment and placement tool.  All UI students receive ALEKS assessment, and ALEKS placement scores are strictly enforced--even students who pass the UI precalculus course must earn the appropriate ALEKS score to be eligible to enroll in calculus.

Alison has data from many thousands of students on what ALEKS tests.  Analysis of what topics were or were not mastered by successful vs unsuccessful students informs UI about what precalculus topics should receive greater of less emphasis.  For example, UI students all appear to have mastered polynomials, but the great majority of pre-calculus students have little mastery of exponential functions and logarithms.

In contrast, Marilyn argues that ALEKS and other currently popular assessment systems do not measure conceptual understanding, and hence student success with ALEKS does not necessarily facilitate mastery of what we really want our students to learn.  Marilyn led the development of ASU's Precalculus Concept Assessment.

The Committee for Two-Year Colleges sponsored a panel session on math for non-STEM students.  Panelists Bernadine Chuck Fong and Jane Muhich of the Carnegie Foundation spoke about the philosophical and research-based underpinnings of the Statway™ and Quantway™ projects, while Larry Gray of U. Minnesota spoke on his reaction to the actual Statway™ lessons which he has reviewed.  The audience included Mary Parker of Austin Community College and Katherine Yoshiwara of Los Angeles Pierce College, both faculty teaching  Statway™ this year, and both speaking in favor of the project but indicating that there is still much work to be done.

Joint Mathematics Meetings January 2011

The 2011 Joint Math Meetings started for me with the advisory board meeting of the Mathematical Sciences Digital Library (MathDL). Both the MAA Reviews and the Classroom Capsules are currently free on the MathDL site to both MAA members and non-members.  The Reviews are useful mainly to faculty and libraries making decisions about purchasing books, but the "Classroom Capsules and Notes brings together the best of 114 years of the short classroom materials from the MAA print publications" and should be of use to all math faculty.

The MAA now hosts WeBWorK, an open source (free) web-based homework system originally out of Rochester U.  If your institution is unable or unwilling to host WeBWorK on its own server, the MAA will let you try out WeBWorK with up to 100 students from your school.  (And if you want to try it out with more students, ask anyway, and the MAA will try to find a participating institution that can accommodate you.)

Aaron Wangberg of Winona State U. has created an electronic whiteboard to work within WeBWorK.  His students are required to use the whiteboard to show their work before submitting their answers for the instant correct/incorrect feedback.  Mike Gage says this utility will soon be available to all the WeBWorK authoring community.

Warren Esty of Montana State U:  Theorem  The value of math skills has gone way down.  Corollary  We should focus our teaching toward skills that will add value.  Examples:  Being able to read math and to make the right things "come to mind."  (The idea of the latter example is that information and computation are both cheap, but knowing what is relevant to look up or to compute is harder to come by.)

At the CTiME sponsored panel session on the final day I learned a bit more about MathJAX, which is rapidly becoming the standard tool for putting math notation on the Web.  MathJAX is largely the work of Davide Cervone of Union College.

Much of the excitement about MathJAX is that it provides a much needed piece of the puzzle so that the potential of MathML can be realized.  Although MathML has been the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for putting math on the Web for 15 years, it has not been widely accepted by browsers.  MathJAX allows the author of a webpage to use TeX or MathML to specify math notation, and MathJAX instructs the browser how to display the math properly, even for browsers that do not know how to display MathML.

Steve Wilson (AMATYC Central Vice-President) told me that he spent a few hours in the exhibits room.  Besides the major textbook publishers and mathematical software providers, the exhibitors at JMM 2011 included WeUseMath.org, which showcases information and resources for students and faculty about careers, etc.  The ALEKS rep would give me no numbers at all about possible costs, but the WebAssign folks were happy to chat about costs or anything else.

One American Mathematical Society booth freebie was a report on an AMS survey about online homework systems.  By far the most frequently adopted were 1) MyMathLab, 2) WebAssign, and 3) WeBWork.  MML involved the most students (230K), then WeBWorK with over 100,000 and WebAssign with less than 100,000.  There was no effort to rate the relative quality of the different homework systems, but I found it interesting that the study divided the PhD granting institutions into those that were among the top 80 (as ranked by the National Research Council) and those ranking below the top 80.  For example, the response rate among the top 80 was 71%, for the rest of the PhD-granting universities the response rate was 65%.  For the masters-granting universities the response rate was 45%, for bachelor's 30%.  "The two-year college numbers were too small for any meaningful analysis" as "Only 11 responded" of the 30 TYC invited to participate.

WeBWorK

I've been using the open source homework system WeBWorK for the past few semesters.  The first couple of times, my classes were hosted by the University of Rochester (thanks to Michael Gage) and now by xyzhomework.com (thanks to Patrick McKeague).

The bank of problems in the WeBWorK National Problem Library is thin on the types of problems we want to use at Pierce College in our intermediate algebra class, so I've been authoring most of the problems.  The fact that all the authoring tools are made available to instructors is one of the nice features of WeBWorK, probably second only to the fact that it's free.

The downside is that without the huge work force associated with the big publisher-owned homework systems, the product is not so instructor-friendly.  We don't get all the bells and whistles that we might expect if we've only see the popular MyMathLab from Pearson.

I only just learned how to change a student's score on a graded assignment.  It goes like this:

• Go to the Classlist Editor (the first link under Instructor Tools in the Main Menu).
• In the row for the student of interest, click on the "Assigned Sets" value (in the fourth column--it has a form like  "m/n").
• Click on the name of the appropriate set (in the "Edit set for..." column).
• Find the problem of interest, and adjust the value of "status" (typically change "0" to "1") to give credit.

On the other hand, WeBWorK is (like the commercial product WebAssign) publisher-independent.  You could use it with a textbook from any publisher you use, or even (as with our program) if you are using materials that do not belong to any publisher.

The MAA is assuming the responsibility of maintaining WeBWorK (http://webwork.maa.org/moodle/) from its original home at the University of Rochester.

JMM 2010 (continued)

Further points of interest...

The MAA plans to undertake  a huge study of what's going on in college Calc I classes.  They hope to survey 25% of Calc I classes across the US.  Campuses not selected in the random sample will be given the opportunity to be take the survey to learn how they compare with the national sample, but their data will not be included in the national statistics.  (From David Bressoud, speaking at the department liaisons meeting)

States have called for Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for K-12 math and English.  The math group is being headed by Bill McCallum (U. Arizona).   For the first time ever (to my knowledge), "modeling" will occur as a separate topic/strand in a math standards document.  No working drafts have been made public, and public comment will evidently be limited to a few weeks in February 2010.  Although the initiative came from states, the feds will support it by tying Race to the Top funds to compliance with CCSS.  (AMS Committee on Education Panel Discussion, "The common core State Standards: Will they become our national K--12 math curriculum?")

Web 3.0 is the "Semantic Web"--searches  will not be simply over key words but key concepts.  The meaning of each item will be considered in the search.  For example, your search can include the word "red" to refer only to the color and to ignore the name "Red" and the meaning of "communist".  Or perhaps more enticingly, you can search for information about some algebraic expression (independent of Wolfram|Alpha).  (From Tom Leathrum, speaking at the MathDL advisory board meeting)

The Committee on Technologies in Mathematics Education (CTiME) submitted a proposal to sponsor (jointly with the Web SIGMAA) a panel session about the tablet pc and similar mobile stylus-type devices for the 2010 MathFest in Pittsburg.  This session will be dedicated in memory of Howard Penn, a long time CTiME member and supporter.  The committee will attempt to hold an online meeting during the spring 2010.  (Lang Moore, CTiME committee meeting)

Davide Cervone's newly unveiled MathJax looks like an exciting way to present math on the web.  It's still undergoing final tweaking.  (David Cervone speaking at a session of Publishing Math on the Web)  Davide's design also will  provide an improvement over programs like Beamer, which creates presentation slides with editable TeX-like math expressions.  (Mike Gage chatting between sessions)

The Committee on Two-Year Colleges (CTYC) voted to co-sponsor (with CRAFTY) a College Algebra contributed paper session for JMM 2011.  Rob Kimball talked about The Right Stuff, AMATYC's project about revamping college algebra.  AMATYC president Rob Farinelli spoke about AMATYC's Project ACCCESS (a professional development program newly hired in tenure-track position community college math positions) and rapidly developing work on a grant proposal involving the Hewlett Foundation and the Dana Center:  Mathway.  (CTiME committee meeting)

CRAFTY's  Curriculum Foundations II report (revamping college algebra)  is in production.  New committee chair Andy Bennett will investigate acquiring funds so that expenses could be paid to send  CRAFTY/Curriculum Foundation  II gurus to speak at MAA section meetings about best practices for a revised College Algebra.  (CRAFTY committee meeting)

CRAFTY's next big project will be to investigate the course commonly called "Precalculus."    The committee is providing the CBMS suggestions on possible questions for the next CBM survey.  (CRAFTY committee meeting)

The MAA's new VMware and servers will allow the MAA to host websites for all the MAA SIGMAAs and sections.  (John Wyatt, department liaison meeting)

JMM 2010

I'm in my final day at the 2010 Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Francisco.

I attended a several committee meetings and sessions, but the most immediately interesting thing I learned was that Microsoft has a free program that converts freehand writing (using a tablet pc stylus) to typeset math expressions.

I googled "Microsoft equation writer" to find the download site and then downloaded and installed the pack that includes the equation writer.

My first trial worked fine.

But the next several attempts all gave unsatisfactory results.

I never did succeed in getting the program to recognize an upper case Delta, and I'm offended that it thought my handwritten "lim" looked like "sin" and that my "f(" looked like "lim"!

Fractions and radicals look ok, but the spacing is often poor, for example around the "="  or before the "dx" in a integral.

Sessions 

• The meeting tweets are available at http://twapperkeeper.com/JointMath/?limit=1000.
• Derek Bruff organized lots of sessions on the use of clickers:  http://tinyurl.com/jmm2010clickers.
• My presentation about Wolfram|Alpha to the Web SIGMAA (Special Interest Group of the Mathematical Association of America for teaching math on the Web) is at http://tinyurl.com/ycdx2sm.
• A nice quicktime video for visualizing a contour map:  http://tinyurl.com/ydlkkmd