Math Education Technology Round Up!

Here's what you missed and what I thought about it.

Here is a summary of some of the most provocative recent articles from the world of math, education, and technology, along with some of my own commentary. Do us all a favor and hit the comments below or press reply with something you read that you enjoyed recently and a few words of why you enjoyed it.

Math Education

It’s big-time math education conference time.

I’ll be at the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in Washington, DC, this week. If you’d like to learn together, here is where you’ll find me.

• Make Yourself a Technology-Proof Teacher. Thursday - 11:00 AM. Our tools use us just as much as we use them. How are your tools using you? Which tools can support your highest ideals for mathematics, students, and teaching? (With apologies to Megan Taylor.)

• The Teacher’s Superpower: How to Build Your Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) and Put It to Work. Friday - 8:00 AM. Completely new material. I’m very excited to work without a net at math education’s biggest show.

• Math Teacher Lounge Live. Friday - 2:30 PM. The program lists a mystery “special guest” who I will spoil now as Dr. Jennifer Bay-Williams! We’ll do an interactive session and live podcast recording on fluency-building games.

In between my sessions, I’ll be attending yours, hoping to hear some ideas that draw blood, ideas so sharp they cut deep below the surface of our work and leave a mark. You know the kind I mean. If you see me walking around, say hi, and let me know what makes you excited and / or angry right now.

How to make the most of the 2023 NCTM Annual Meeting #NCTMDC23. Carl Oliver. 

Speaking of the conference, check out some tips from conference chair, Carl Oliver.

Mathematics Teacher: Learning & Teaching

The latest journal of Mathematics Teacher is incredible. Don’t miss it if you’re a subscriber and, if you aren’t a subscriber, it honestly on its own might be worth asking your school or district to put up $99 for the lowest-tier membership. Here’s editor-in-chief Angela Barlow:

We had over 50 manuscripts submitted to be considered for possible publication. You read that correctly: over 50! We were blown away by this response, which represented about a 300% increase over the special issues from previous years.

Every article foregrounds big ideas in modeling, ethnomathematics, technology, identity, with a task as the background. I hope the editorial board is thinking hard about why this theme was so popular in comparison to others.

What was happening on this plane flight? Barbara Blanke.

Long-time readers know my enthusiasm for stories encoded in graphs runs pretty deep. So I got a lot of mental mileage out of this flight graph from Barbara Blanke.

Generative AI

How Are Boise Schools Adapting to Increased AI Use? Idaho Statesman

Specifically, Ching said AI could aid in reducing teacher burnout following the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Ching said educators could use AI tools to generate tests and multiple-choice questions. Instead of students using ChatGPT and other AI tools to generate work, Ching said students could instead learn to use the technology as a learning companion. (emphasis mine)

My main question in response to near-future speculative fiction articles like this one (of which there are simply loads) is, at what point should we expect “AI could aid” to turn into “AI is aiding” and “students could use” into “students are using”? At what point should we expect all of the potential energy we are told that generative AI represents for students and teachers to turn into kinetic energy, into transformation for their work? (See also: Few Campus IT Leaders See AI as a Top Priority. I can’t be the only person noticing the difference between rhetoric and reality right now.)

Back to School with AI Hype in Education (feat. Haley Lepp). Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.

Insta-subscribe podcast. Co-host Emily Bender is one of the authors of an infamous paper in AI circles which worried with a lot of prescience about the risks inherent to large language models. Their episode on education is great.

New AI-Powered Sensors Could Tell Teachers What’s Really Going on With Students. Education Week

Researchers at Michigan State University have received a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to test wearable technology that senses children’s location in the classroom and the orientation of their bodies, as well as their movement and speech.

We’re really doing AltSchool again. NSF needed someone on the review panel who remembered the startup that collapsed seven years ago after raising over $100M to put cameras and sensors throughout a school. Only an extremely small fraction of those terabytes of sensory data can help a teacher answer the question, “What should I do next?” The rest gets stuffed into a black box or an overdetermined data display.

The Near-term Impact of Generative AI on Education, in One Sentence. David Wiley.

Wiley is thoughtful about technology in education IMO but his sentence doesn’t scan quite right to me: “Generative AI greatly reduces the degree to which access to expertise is an obstacle to education.” I generally have more pressing concerns about generative AI than its still-rampant hallucinations. But those hallucinations mean, for now, that effective use of AI requires significant domain expertise in order to separate fiction from fact.

Machine learning: could ChatGPT become just another tool for Australia’s year 12 – like Wikipedia? The Guardian.

“Just another tool” feels probably right for a sentence to me. Lately, I have wondered how to weigh the impact of generative AI in education next to the invention of web search, the invention of the internet, or the invention of the personal computer itself. Schools look, in many ways, quite similar before and after each of those inventions. I’m not sure how to rank the significance of generative AI next to the others on that list but I would certainly not put it at the very top, which tempers my expectations for its revolutionary potential. 

American Federation of Teachers partners with AI identification platform, GPTZero. CBS News.

Deeply disappointing from AFT. The second largest teacher’s union in the United States needed to make some kind of gesture in the direction of generative AI. But if you’re even lightly tuned into generative AI research, you know these AI identification platforms don’t work well and result in kids getting wrongly accused of, effectively, plagiarism. I would have massively preferred to see AFT partner up with basically any other kind of AI edtech company, promising to help them figure out teaching and teachers perhaps.

Schools keep buying online drop-in tutoring. The research doesn’t support it. Jill Barshay.

No one in the education press is operating on Barshay’s level right now. If I worked in corporate PR and Barshay’s number showed up on my caller ID, I would simply not answer the phone.

How it works is an education corporation releases a self-serving study with methods or interpretations that don’t withstand scrutiny and Barshay … scrutinizes them. In this article, Barshay scrutinizes the online tutoring industry which was made massively lucrative through COVID-era funding.

On a related note, I would love to know how advocates of generative AI chatbot tutors are reckoning with the dismal results of online drop-in tutoring. Perhaps they see the two solutions as unrelated, and I’d agree there are a lot of differences. But if I were working on a generative AI chatbot tutor, the similarities would worry me.

Effect Sizes and the 10-Foot Man. Robert Slavin.

A vintage piece from researcher Robert Slavin explaining why we shouldn’t fixate so much on extraordinary effect sizes like the two standard deviations Bloom found in his famous tutoring study. Slavin offers five guidelines for interpreting extraordinary claims in research (e.g., the kind of claim that reads, “students gained seven years of learning from my four-day program!”). I generally think Bloom’s study has completely broken the brains of many thousands of people working in education technology. They’re chasing a mirage that is always a few hundred feet off in the distance.

Accordion Editing and Apple Picking: Early Generative-AI User Behaviors. Jakob Nielsen.

I’m a huge fan of Jakob Nielsen’s studies of how humans use computers and I think he’s coined a couple of fantastic names for some common ways people use generative AI tools.

Miscellaneous

One big reason webinars suck. Bryan Alexander.

Great piece. Includes the header: “Signs of a webinar that despises you.”