<<Is “discoverability” even actually the problem with resources getting reused, or is it possible that the whole model is so flawed, so disconnected from how educators construct course materials, that it wouldn’t make any difference..?>>

Commenter Mike Caulfield followed up on this with

<<the really interesting thing is how many people said they wanted that, and how few people contact us for help>>

Some educators want a complete package provided by a publisher while others want to develop their own way of engaging students with the material.

In the space between those two extremes it would seem that there was ample room for a style of preparation which involved searching for and combining the best of what is available, and many of us think that is where we belong - but when push comes to shove we bifurcate and either go with a complete package or “roll our own” completely.

As variously a creator, organizer, and user of OERs I think I may have gained some insight into why this is the case.

Perhaps those of us who can’t live with the flaws we see in a ready-made publisher’s package also tend to judge OERs more harshly, and/or the work involved in selecting and incorporating the best OERs (even after “discovery”) is not sufficiently less than that of actually developing our own “perfect” alternatives..

They missed their chance to up the bet and didn’t accidentally see any more hearts, but later on after they went home Andy (who is a bit of a math geek) showed Barb (who is supporting him through school) how the same problem had been solved by students in a discussion near the end of the ‘Playground’ problems section of the latest ‘Math Horizons’ magazine (see the section headed “Five more minutes, kids!” for the argument he showed her). The calculations (which Barb didn’t really understand) showed that the conditional probability for getting two aces given at least one heart is actually 1/195 while the unconstrained probability is only 1/221

So who do you think is right in this?

Click Here to vote (password is “glimpseheart”)

<<

Although American students on the whole rank well behind many countries in mathematics, American math Olympiad teams regularly finish among the top teams. While aiming to inspire and entertain, Hard Problems provides an insightful and thoughtful look at the process that produces successful teams, and ultimately, great mathematicians of the future

>>

The first part of the above quote raises some interesting questions about how educational effort should be prioritized.  Does effort directed to strong performance at the top levels compensate for, or compete with, that needed to maintain the basic levels of verbal and mathematical literacy that are needed for effective democratic decision making (as opposed to the woefully ill-informed nonsense that passes for debate about health care in the US for example)?

I haven’t read the book but am suspicious of any attempt to draw conclusions about social policy from statistical analysis - especially in reviews and commentaries that isolate particular statements about how variables are correlated (and even more so if they include references to “predictive power” going “below zero”, since statistical power is defined as a probability and  a correlation of minus one has a very strong predictive power in any reasonable sense of the term).

A common “paradox” pointed out to students in an introductory statistics course is that it is possible to have a variable S (for, say, SAT score) that is positively correlated with some measure, say G, of success (eg graduation) in each of several subsets making up the whole of a population - while being negatively correlated in the population as a whole.

One way this might happen, for example, would be if there was a characteristic I (for, say, Inspiration) which was very highly correlated with G, and such that among the high I part of the population S was only weakly correlated with G but in the low I population S was very strongly correlated with G.

If among the population as a whole (in this case university entrants) low I was correlated with high S, then entrants with high S would be more likely to be in the low I group and so less likely to graduate and so S might be negatively correlated with G - even though in each of the low and high I groups separately, higher S does contribute to increasing G.

Of course, many readers of this  (if in fact there were any) might then say “but if I is the best predictor of G, let’s just use it and forget about S”.

And maybe they are right.  At least if the goal is soley to maximize the G rate we should just ignore the low I group and concentrate all of our efforts on those with the magic I factor.

If only we could identify it we could do away with all that “high stakes testing” and give our attention to those who deserve it.

Well the good news is that I have found I.

The bad news is that it is not Inspiration.

It is parental Income.

(And the reason S and I are negatively correlated is because low S students have more chance of getting into the population of university entrants if they are lucky enough to have high I)

My reason for posting this is just to inject a note of caution about throwing out those “horrid high stakes tests” without being clear as to how they might be used more positively. For example, if they were used as an alternative admission path as opposed to an additional requirement, then they might be providing an entry option to students with high talent but low high school gpa due to poor family circumstances.

The choice of Math and Climate as the theme of this year’s Math Awareness Month emphasized this connection, and Murray Bourne at squareCircleZ  today points to a number of articles in which he has used related topics as a source of examples for teaching mathematics.

A good source of background on the science of CO2 related climate change is this excellent history prepared by Spencer Weart at the American Institute of Physics, as is also the RealClimate site managed by a team of well-reputed climate scientists, and the question of how to compare the effectiveness of different policy choices is addressed in this on-line book by UK physicist David McKay (reviewed by theRegister).

The fact that no amount of restraint or conservation can counterbalance the harmful effects of increasing population is not often noted in the CO2 debate so I was a bit disappointed that Murray did not include his discussion of that topic in his list.

It takes much more time (and mental effort) to correctly recall and decode one of  these than anyone who needs to use the terms can afford. And there is a much better way.

Just think ‘Sine is the Side’ or  ‘Cos goes Across’ (we don’t need both)

This takes negligible time to decode, reinforces the concept directly, and is immune to the vagaries of failing memory. (Was that “All Old Teachers, Happily Out Camping, Have Amnesia Sometimes ” or “Odd Aged Teachers Are Happy Campers On Hot Sundays”?)

What disappoints me about Skype as a result of this is not the fact of the problem per se (making different programs interact is often difficult and it is not surprising that things go wrong), but rather the fact that there has been no loud public warning from Skype of a problem which has been around for some time (in fact the extension is still loaded automatically without warning during Skype upgrades).  If Skype had acted appropriately there would have been a high ranking Google hit which resolved the issue but in fact on Googling Facebook and Firefox I found many discussions which did not identify Skype as the source of the problem, and there has been no warning transmitted during several recent Skype upgrades.

One weakness of the WB is that it forces the presenter to face away from the audience for writing - something we are all used to and try to mitigate, but which could be avoided with the old style projector.

A possibly distinctive use of the IWB might be to have students come up and interact with it themselves, but the interviewee actually seemed to be saying that she tried that but found the benefits outweighed by the distraction of having people moving about so much.

Here are my thoughts:

Fundamental Principles

The safety and security of a civil society is dependent on having a population which willingly accepts the laws to which it is subjected and respects the way in which they are administered.

In order to maintain the respect of the population, laws must be seen to be fair and fairly administered, and in order to achieve this they must also be clear - both in their intended purpose and in their specific details.

The basic purpose of the law must be broadly accepted as a fair one, and the means provided for implementing that purpose must also be fair.

Most Canadians accept the fairness of providing some opportunity for control by the creator over reproduction of creative work – mainly for purposes of achieving financial reward and other acknowledgement. But on the other hand, the right to mimic behaviour and copy objects is inherent in our identity as human beings as it represents the exercise of one of the fundamental characteristics of us as a species and to deny it is to remove from us what makes us human. For this reason it must never be the act of copying or investigating that is itself proscribed or limited, but just the transmission of results – and this only when that is done in a way which limits or denies due credit and reward to the original creator of the work.

Specific Recommendations

1 – No extension of the term of copyright restriction

Extension of copyright restriction benefits only the current owner of the copyright and not the original creator. Anyone who has sold copyright is cheated by such extension and it provides unfair unearned windfall profit to those who have previously purchased rights at a price based on the more limited term.

2 – Private copying should never be restricted

Restrictions on the making of backup copies and “format shifting” are totally unacceptable and this includes “tampering” with DRM software to whatever extent is needed in order to achieve such purposes. It should only be the distribution of copied work that is ever restricted as this is the only activity that can be seen to impinge on the rights of the creator or the creator’s heirs and assignees.

3 – Fair Dealing should be defined more broadly

Duplication and distribution for non-profit educational and research purposes should not be restricted and the permissible categories should be described in general terms (with language like the “such as” which occurs in the US “Fair Use” provision). Specialized exceptions are less useful and ought to be used sparingly because they likely wouldn’t be able to keep up with technological change or accommodate a range of reasonable educational practices.

4 – Protect and Extend Public Domain

Cultural and economic growth depends on the free flow of ideas. Copyright restriction is a (maybe) necessary limitation on this, but should always be kept to the minimum level needed to achieve its intended purpose (which is only provision of adequate reward to the creators). In addition to keeping copyright ownership terms limited, and probably eliminating Crown copyright entirely, this requires also limiting the extent to which an adaptation of a public domain work can be placed under copyright restriction. It also requires making the penalties for false claims of copyright much more severe than they are at present.

5 – Rationalize Penalties

The civil penalty applied for violation should not exceed the actual damage done to the copyright owner. This means that there should be no statutory damages in such cases. Also, since false claims of copyright steal from the public as a whole they should be criminalized and subject to penalties that are severe enough to deter the practice – and so the fines charged should be defined in a way that is proportional to the net worth of the offending party.(Actually this is a principle which should apply in all cases of punishment by financial penalty – but that’s another story.)

6 – No Penalties Without Proof in a Court of Law

The so called “three strikes” provisions as well as “notice and take down” violate the most fundamental principles of justice and must not be included in Canadian law. Our current “notice and notice” system must be maintained and mere accusations of copyright abuse must never be used to allow interference with a person’s fundamental right to communicate – which in the modern world requires free access to the internet. Such a fundamental freedom should never be removed from anyone without full due legal process.

7 – Allow Buyer Opt-out from Media Levies

Media levies may provide an effective means of compensating copyright owners for the loss of revenue that results from non-commercial non-private sharing. And the fact that this makes permissible the natural human tendency to engage in such sharing is a definite social benefit to all Canadians. But heavy users of blank media for other purposes (such as for maintaining collections of their own work) should not be made to support the media sharing activities of others. This is presently one of the most serious sources of perceived unfairness in our current laws and is likely to seriously damage respect for the law among those affected. Fortunately there is a simple solution. Namely allow the purchase of specially marked media on which it is a criminal offense to record copyright material without explicit permission (similar in principle to the coloured tax free fuel that is sometimes provided for agricultural purposes).

If such a provision were in place I would not object to the extension of the media levy to ipods and other personal recording and playback devices.

Thank you for your attention.

sincerely,
Alan Cooper

I recently came across a Tutorial written a couple of years ago by Teli Adlam which helped me to what I think is a bot better understanding but still leaves me wondering whether I am missing something.

When reading A-Blog you can always comment directly (if comments are permitted) and and, so long as A-Blog actually allows links in comments, you can include a link to YourBlog (preferably to a related post) .

And if you don’t yet have a relevant post to link to you can always make one and then go back to A-Blog and make a comment linking to it.

So far as I can tell, Trackback and Pingback are just ways to shortcut this process by having your blogging tool send a link to your post as a comment to the one you were reading on A-Blog.

If a Trackback url or link is displayed after the post in A-Blog, then if your blogging tool supports trackback it will provide a location for you to paste a copy of that url when you publish your new post.

Alternatively, if both A-Blog and yours support Pingback (and, in particular, this is true of WordPress), then just including a link to the A-Blog posting in yours will cause your system to send an excerpt from your post and a link back to it as a comment to A-Blog - with result very similar to that of a Trackback.  An advantage of this is that it doesn’t require the extra step of copying a special url. Disadvantages include perhaps less control of what is excerpted (apparently it is always the paragraph containing the link), and lack of an easy way to determine if it will work. If a blog posting includes a trackback link then presumably trackback will work, and if it is a WordPress blog then pingback will also work (so long as you are also using WordPress and have set your blog to send pings).

The Tutorial by Teli Adlam that I mentioned above shows (among other things) how to tell if a WordPress blog posting will accept pingbacks, but unfortunately this seems to require checking the html source code of the page rather than being readily apparent. This makes it hard for me to see the value of relying on Pingbacks rather than just going back and making a comment with a link back to my own posting.