Friday, April 12, 2013

Slackware for Math Class: Perhaps Not the Disruption NSVF was Looking For

Dan Meyer:

If the deluge of interesting problem-based material on the Internet overwhelms you, as it does Jonathan Claydon, Geoff Krall's curriculum maps are a great place to start. He's taken the Common Core's scope and sequence documents and combed the Internet for items that fit. He's included a few of my own items, some items from the Shell Centre, along with a lot of great lesson ideas I'd completely forgotten. Bookmark it. Throw him some love in the comments.

I don't know if This Is It, but it seems to me we're all waiting around for someone who can somehow grok what the best stuff floating around and assemble a "distribution" in a disarmingly simple way that captures teachers' attention. Basically, the right curator has to turn up at the right time and in a community with sufficient reach.

This sort of thing:

Volkerding had no intentions to provide his modified SLS version for the public, assuming that "SLS would be putting out a new version that included these things soon enough". However, seeing that this was not the case and that many SLS users were asking on the Internet for a new SLS release, he made a post titled "Anyone want an SLS-like 0.99pl11A system?", to which he received a lot of responses. As also his friends at MSUM urged him to put his SLS modifications onto an FTP server, he made them publicly available on one of the university's anonymous FTP servers. This first Slackware release, version 1.00, was distributed on July 17, 1993 at 00:16:36 (UTC), being supplied as 24 3½" floppy disk images.

The most important thing is timing.

Just keep in mind that a project that takes a hundred million dollars in seed money to get off the ground -- I'm looking at inBloom -- is not the disruptor, and it may well be the disruptee.

1 comment:

Michael Pershan said...

I dunno. The "problem-based learning" stuff is fundamentally different than the curricular materials that 70% (?) of math teachers use and need. Most teachers want examples, practice, and homework that can be easily distributed. They aren't looking for great meaty math problems, and all the assumptions about learning that this entails.