CEP 909Nov 16, 2000

• The Big Picture of What We’ve Done so Far

• What We’re Going to Do

• The Big Ideas Behind Simulations

The Big Picture

• Exploring Ways in Which New Technology has Potential to Change the Way we Learn or Think– Electronic Portfolios

– Writing and Reading on the Web

– Linked Representations

– Simulations

• Tried to Address the Scholarship of these Topics Along with some Exemplar Hands-On Activity

Electronic Portfolios

• Theory and Scholarship– Portfolios as a way to foster reflective learning

– Portfolios as a form of assessment

– New possibilities offered by electronic portfolios (sharable, modifiable, dynamic, multi-media, etc)

• Hands on Exemplar– Making your own portfolios for this class

Writing and Reading on the Web

• Theory and Scholarship– Design of websites

– How to structure information in non-linear (or linear) sites

– How people navigate (move around) sites

• Hands on Exemplars– Design of your portfolios

– Representing information in two different ways

– Tracking and representing how a person moved through the Digital Divide web site

Linked Representations

• Theory and Scholarship– How the new possibilities of dynamically linked

representations might lead to better learning

– An argument for how this might “play out” in mathematics education

• Hands on Exemplar– SimCalc example of learning about the relationship between

characters walking, position representations, and velocity representations.

Where We’re Going

• One More Context where Technology Potentially Affords New Ways of Thinking, Teaching, and Learning (i.e. Simulations)

• Ways in Which Technology Impacts People (from a Cognitive Stance)– Gender Equity in Technology

• How gender impacts views about technology, how access to technology might impact these views, and how software design interacts with gender.

– Online Communication• How conversing online is “different” than talking face to face

Simulations: What’s the big deal?

• Simulations afford students the opportunity to do otherwise impossible, difficult, or impractical (e.g., launch a rocket)

• Simulations can focus on the relevant, and ignore the irrelevant (i.e. they can make the “phenomena” more ideal)

• Simulations can allow students to make manipulations and see their effects

Simulations: What’s the big deal? continued

• Simulations can make stuff that is hidden in the real world visible in the simulation (e.g. vectors of momentum, a trail of movement, color to represent temperature, etc).

• In one view of science, theory building (and by extension modeling) is paramount to “doing science”. By simulating, the process of modeling becomes visible, accessible, assessable, and sharable

Simulations: Strengths or Weaknesses

• Simulations afford students the opportunity to do otherwise impossible, difficult, or impractical (e.g., launch a rocket)

– IMPOSSIBLE: Distorts reality (e.g., shooting someone in a video game)

– DIFFICULT or IMPRACTICAL: Virtual pendulum, why not a real one?

Simulations: Strengths or Weaknesses

• Simulations can focus on the relevant, and ignore the irrelevant (i.e. they can make the “phenomena” more ideal)

– Who gets to decide?

– What if the “irrelevant” is relevant?

– Danger of oversimplifying

– Confusing the theory with reality

– Hiding the process of theory building and modeling

Simulations: Strengths or Weaknesses

• Simulations can allow students to make manipulations and see their effects

– Manipulations might not be possible in the real world.

– Cognitive overload: requires reasoning about multiple causations

Simulations: Strengths or Weaknesses

• Simulations can make stuff that is hidden in the real world visible in the simulation (e.g. vectors of momentum, a trail of movement, color to represent temperature, etc).

– Lack of correspondence between reality and the simulation

– Obscures the process of deciding what to make visible, and what representations are profitable for that phenomena

Simulations: Strengths or Weaknesses

• In one view of science, theory building (and by extension modeling) is paramount to “doing science”. By simulating, the process of modeling becomes visible, accessible, assessable, and sharable

– Who’s doing the science?

– Hides the complexity of science, (e.g. “The Mangle of Practice”)