Joe,
You might want to look at The Math Forum,
http://mathforum.org
In particular, check out the Problem of the Week and Ask Dr. Math.
Answers to Problem of the Week and questions to Ask Dr. Math are
answered by volunteers, who try to guide the students to understanding
rather than handing them answers. They have an impressive
architecture to triage questions. When the perfect answer has already
been written, it gets sent. New questions are sent to live humans.
Their work is really impressive. So I would start your research with
the question: What can I do even better than Math Forum?
Hope this helps!
-- Amy
On Nov 23, 2010, at 8:16 AM, Joe Corneli wrote:
So far, the best phrasing I've come up with is:
"What stands in the
way of building and supplying low-cost, high-quality mathematics
education via the internet?"
The art of encyclopedia-building doesn't seem to carry over directly
to education. This should be of fairly general concern (the Wikimedia
Foundation's mission is about developing and disseminating educational
content).
I think there's a knowledge gap in there, maybe more than one. It's
much easier for me to think about "engineering solutions" than it is
to precisely specify a research problem question!! In particular, I'm
thinking about
(a) building interactive textbooks that work for self-guided learners
(b) building technologies to support live tutorials over the web
(c) building infrastructure to help in developing good survey articles
or similar content
The faculty here might want me to "pick one", but this is hard for me
to do because I see each of these three approaches as being part of
the puzzle. Asking how well one of them works in absence of the other
is a bit like asking how well a fish can breathe in the absence of
water.
So maybe the "research question" is about asking: What is the family
resemblance of (a)-(c)? How do they work together as a system? Or
maybe the question is about whether a given implementation of (a)-(c)
shows any promise?
I seem to be struggling to switch from a hacking-oriented way of
thinking about things to a research-oriented way of thinking about
things. I'd appreciate some feedback from those of you in a position
to offer advice on these matters.
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