MathEd.net Wiki:Community portal

Meeting Notes

November 25, 2013

Attendees: User:Raymond Johnson, User:Kimberly Morrow Leong, User:Vincent Knight

Major Issues Discussed:

Who is the audience?

Kim emphasized that there's a real value in giving teachers something accessible that they can take to their principals, to parents, and to the school board. Raymond agreed, but felt the site could also serve researchers. So how do we find that balance? Several possibilities:

• Topic summary pages could be teacher-friendly, while article summaries could be more researcher-friendly
• Article summaries could include both brief and detailed summaries (Like a 500-word version vs. a 1500-word version.)
• Categories or some other label could be used to indicate the teacher-friendly versus researcher-friendly

What should an article summary look like?

We briefly discussed the value in having a summary written as paragraphs, or paragraphs in defined sections (sort of how Teachers College Record structures its abstracts) or just bullet points/outlines. Finding a common structure with defined sections seemed like a popular idea, although it's going to take some time to see how they work in practice. We can experiment with these ideas and see what advantages they have.

From what perspective should summaries be written?

Raymond explained that while blog posts feel most natural in the 1st person, wiki summaries feel (due to our experience with Wikipedia, probably) like they should be written in the 3rd person. However, the math teacher blogging community really seems to connect to 1st person perspectives, so where's the balance? Raymond offered two suggestions:

• Review sections or pages about articles that are written in the 1st person
• Links to blog posts that write about articles in the 1st person (the wiki already does this, see bottom of Skemp (1976) as an example)

What content is worth putting in the wiki?

Kim mentioned a need to include information from conference presentations. Raymond said a site, http://www.mathrecap.com/, already does this, but Kim thought the wiki could better facilitate multiple points of view than a 1st person blog post. Raymond talked about summarizing review or handbook chapters/articles, which are themselves summaries. It was agreed that while such chapters/articles should be represented in the wiki, especially when they contain new ideas, it would be better to write a new summary than to summarize the summary. (See http://mathed.net/w/index.php?title=Stein,_Remillard,_%26_Smith_(2007)&oldid=674 for an example of a summary of a summary that Raymond started before it began to grow out of control.) An advantage of writing our own summaries is that they can be much smaller than, say, an NCTM Handbook chapter. We'll just need more of them.

Technical issues

We briefly discussed some technical aspects of linking, disambiguation, and templates. While there's no perfect solution, we can continue following the same structure Raymond has developed so far. We also discussed the use of categories. While also imperfect, it does allow us ways to group pages together. The trouble is managing a cataloging system and potential duplicates. Raymond said he's struggled with that himself but thinks it's something that will gradually take shape over time. Also, it might not be as important as we think, as most people find wiki pages through a web search, not by starting at the top of the wiki and working their way in.

Next steps

Raymond would create accounts for Kim and Vincent (note: Done!) and Kim and Vincent can start exploring where/how they'd like to contribute. Kim suggested she might repurpose some article summaries she's written. It was agreed that a short page is better than no page at all, so that leaves a lot of room to simply turn red links blue by adding title/author/publication info, abstracts, and citations.

--Raymond Johnson (talk) 19:16, 25 November 2013 (UTC)