The AMATYC TiMES Fall 2001 The Newsletter of the  Technology in Mathematical Education Committee  of AMATYC

Inside This Issue:

• TiME Committee Chair Report-Jerry Kissick
• Setting up and managing discussion groups-Darrell H. Abney
• Using Blackboard for Distance Learning-Renae Weber

This Fall newsletter of the TiME committee is the third edition since the Chicago conference. I want to thank all who have contributed and who have volunteered to contribute in the future.

This newsletter continues to be published totally electronically on the TiME committee homepage. Suggestions for other items to add to the homepage are welcome. Please send them to me at

The TiME committee will again be joining the other AMATYC committees in a Committee Showcase near the registration area at the AMATYC conference in Toronto on Thursday. I would appreciate any suggestions the committee members have as to what we should put on display to encourage AMATYC members to join and support the committee. Last year we displayed our goals and objectives, position papers, and samples of the TiME newsletter.

As the time for the conference grows near, I want to prepare an agenda for the committee meetings. Anyone who has a technology related topic which you would like to discuss, please e-mail me and I will add it to our discussion list for the conference. To help with your planning for the conference, our committee meetings are scheduled for Friday 11/16 from 11:00 AM–12:00 PM and on Saturday 11/17 from 12:00 PM–1:00 PM.

After my request for volunteers to be the TiME committee representative to the Distance Learning committee, I received 2 volunteers. After letting them "discuss" who would be our representative, Andrew Perry emerged as the person who will represent us at their meetings. Thank you Andrew and I also want to thank Wayne Mackey who also volunteered.

There continues to be considerable discussion on the MATHEDCC discussion list on a variety of subjects and I encourage everyone to continue to use that list for any mathematics related educational topic.

Anyone who would like to submit a technology article for a future newsletter, report on a technology event attended or advertise upcoming technology happenings of interest to the TiME committee members, please submit your article or information to myself.

I hope that everyone has enjoyed their summer and that fall classes are going well, or will go well for those of you who have late starts. I hope to see everyone at the conference in Toronto and especially at our TiME committee meetings.

Jerry

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Have you ever wondered how much trouble it would be to set up and manage a discussion group for a class you are teaching, an organization you belong to, or for family members?

I wondered the same, and asked my friends Dan Kesterson and Kathy Mowers about the lists they had setup for discussion groups. Dan was manager of a list for developmental educators and Kathy for KYMATYC. Both lists used a free service at www.listbot.com. They said that it was not difficult to establish a list, so I logged onto www.listbot.com and registered as a list owner. The advantage of setting up a list at one of these sites is that it's free. The disadvantage is that you will get ads at either the bottom or top of messages from the list.

I created several lists for committees at MCC and one for my family. The ones at the college were not too successful, but the one for the family has been a great success. I come from a large family, five brothers and three sisters, and we live all across the eastern United States. All of my siblings have opted to belong to the list along with many of our children and various other family members. It is not unusual to get 15-20 messages a day from the list. In fact, my children belonged to the list, but they asked me to remove them because they did not want that much family information.

It was easy to establish the list and to invite members to join. Actually, there were two ways to join: (1) prospective members could send a message to the list and ask to join, and (2) I could send a message to prospective members. There was very little management involved with my main duty being to accept new members.

Trish Smith and Rene Hales, MCC Title III Consultants, set up a list for us last year using different service, www.egroups.com. This site provided more options including allowing member to post documents, photos, etc. for other members to download. This proved a real advantage since it was difficult to attach many documents and photos to messages at the listbot site. Now egroups has become www.groups.yahoo.com/. If a user goes to the www.egroups.com page, the will be redirected to yahoo groups.

Rene Hales has the following comments on using lists.

"As a professional, I frequently use lists related to my work activities. Lists provide support from actual users for software used in my business. I also monitor several groups focused on design, development and delivery practices in Web-based teaching and learning. When interviewing potential employees in technical fields, I expect them to say that lists are one of the sources they use to keep current on developments in their field and for assistance with computer applications. Many of the lists I belong to and use are like communities and provide ongoing support, new resources and GREAT ideas."

This summer, Dan, Kathy, and I were presented an opportunity to learn more about list sites when listbot announced they were closing down. We explored several options for moving our lists. Dan and I choose to go with www.groups.yahoo.com/ and Kathy chose to go with www.smartgroups.com/.

Here are comments from Kathy about moving the KYMATYC discussion list.

"It was extremely easy to set up the group from www.smartgroups.com. Unfortunately, just like the former www.listbot.com, you must invite members to sign up. I certainly understand why they do such a thing, but it sure makes it slow. Since I already had a list of all the members of the kymatyc@listbot.com, I just chose the file where they were located, and smart groups did the rest. You can apparently send large files, a problem that we had with www.listbot.com. Currently, the ads are at the bottom of the email, which is how www.listbot.com also started."

Dan had the following comments about his experience with discussion groups.

"I like www.groups.yahoo.com because of its many features, some of which I will list below. The main advantage of eGroups over Listbot (now defunct) is that there is no limit on the size of the message. This becomes important especially when sharing attachments as PowerPoint presentations or articles.

Setting up the eGroups list is very easy; just fill out a simple form, which gives you clear instructions about the options available. Most options concern how much control you as moderator want to have – from almost none to monitoring every message before delivery. I prefer almost none as my lists tend to be "discussion" lists. A discussion list can be frustrating to new members who are used to information lists, which basically are not for group conversation of ongoing topics or building community. If a member is used to an "information only" list, they will think that the rules of etiquette are being broken.

A potentially valuable tool available at eGroups is the ability to conduct polls, which are a great way to get feedback from your group. You can create a question with up to 25 choices. Results are automatically tallied until you conclude the poll.

The Reading/Academic Success program at Jefferson Community College has several eGroups lists, since communication is a premium with 33 instructors, 91 sections and 6 courses in reading and academic success. This is a real time saver."

My experience was that moving my lists was not difficult. It presented me an opportunity to eliminate some ineffective lists and only keep the two that were operational. If you are interested in improving communication with a group of people, go ahead and log onto one of the sites and register as an owner. Set up a list and invite some members. You will probably never be lonely again!
 
 

As a member of a Mathematics Department that has been tasked with teaching distance classes we have been faced with an educational dilemma. Can you effectively teach mathematics at the Community College level via distance education? The administration says yes, the students' hope so and the department is in chaos.

A method that has just come to our attention is an interface called Blackboard. It has the capability of allowing students to have online discussions, posting assignments directly to the instructor, emailing the instructor and an array of testing and communication options that make instruction possible from a distance.

The set up is menu driven and interfacing with students is possible at a variety of levels, depending on the instructors' desire. As I was setting up a College Algebra course I wanted to make sure that students were doing homework as well as communicating with me on specific problems. As I set up the discussion board for each week I posed a problem for the students to explore. I required that each student had to post some comments on the problem two times, on two separate days during the week. At the end of the week they had to write up the problem and submit it to me using the drop box. It allowed them the opportunity to interact with each other in a learning environment.

Each week there was a quiz posted in the student tools area that asked five questions regarding the homework for the week. They could take the quizzes two times and I would record the best score. It may have given them an opportunity to look at the quiz once and go back and learn the material before taking the second quiz. If that is when the learning is taking place, I was happy to encourage them in that fashion.

As the course is underway, learning about the possibilities for using distance education and technology as a mode of genuine learning in mathematics challenges the department. Questions arise regarding the educational best practices in the area of mathematics and extend to time commitment. It is a beginning for us. We are encouraged by the future possibilities.

Any comments can be directed to weber@tvcc.cc