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ICLS 2014 Workshop

"Interaction Analysis of Student Teams Enacting the Practices of Collaborative Dynamic Geometry"

=> FULL Day, Monday June 23, 9:00 am – 5:30, Room: DLC 1B50, University of Colorado at Boulder

The workshop will be limited to people who contact the organizer at Gerry@GerryStahl.net in advance.

See the workshop announcement on the ICLS 2014 conference site.

=> Workshop Aim

The workshop will consist of a series of focused data sessions of interaction analysis of excerpts from interaction logs. The data sessions will focus on logs taken from a sequence of eight hour-long online chat sessions involving three middle-school students recorded in Spring 2013. For the workshop, a series of three excerpts have been selected to capture changes in the student team’s ability to engage in collaboration, mathematical discourse, software-tool usage and geometry-task accomplishment.

Analysis will aim to display and document how the team learned the underlying practices of engaging in collaborative dynamic geometry. How did transitions in group practices take place in each of the excerpts? What took place that contributed to the increased group cognition in terms of (a) moving from attention to visual appearance to attention to structural relationships, (b) seeing relationships of geometric dependency and constructing them or (c) discussing relationships of dependency as explanations of geometric behavior.

=> Workshop Background

The Virtual Math Teams (VMT) Project is a design-based research effort that has been developing a CSCL environment for collaborative math problem solving since 2003. The tasks that teams of students in schools are given are design tasks involving the construction of geometric figures with specific dependencies designed into them. Learning to accomplish these tasks in a collaborative online setting requires mastering practices in collaboration, software usage, problem solving, mathematical reasoning, creative exploration and design of construction sequences.

This workshop will engage in microanalysis of detailed logs of a selected team of students in order to observe the team gradually enacting these practices. The results of the workshop will contribute to the future work of the VMT Project, redesigning the environment. The workshop will be facilitated by researchers from the VMT Project.

The students interacted in the VMT collaboration environment incorporating GeoGebra dynamic-mathematics software. Each session was guided by a prepared topic involving GeoGebra tasks. The logs capture all chat posts and GeoGebra actions (e.g., opening a GeoGebra tab, selecting a GeoGebra tool, creating or dragging a GeoGebra object, etc.). The logs will be available as spreadsheets that can be configured and filtered in useful ways. In addition, the sessions can be replayed in a digital VCR system, allowing for detailed study of actions and interactions.

=> Experience Dynamic Geometry

Workshop participants are strongly encouraged to experience using GeoGebra first hand before the workshop.

This will give you a personal sense of what the student team engaged in. This experience is specially designed as preparation for the workshop.

Follow the instructions on the Experience Dynamic Geometry page when you have a few minutes to spend on your computer with Internet access.

=> Analysis, Data and Materials to be Studied Before the Workshop

Workshop participants are provided with the following materials. Due to the limited time of the workshop, participants should study these materials prior to the workshop:
* A monograph analyzing the selected student team’s interaction during its eight sessions: analysis.pdf (135 pages).
* A book providing background on the many aspects of the design-based research of the VMT Project: "Translating Euclid" (200 pages).
* The student workbook including the topics for the eight sessions: topics.pdf.
* Detailed spreadsheet logs of the eight complete sessions, with focal excerpts highlighted: Topic1.xlsx, Topic2.xlsx, Topic3.xlsx, Topic4.xlsx, Topic5.xlsx, Topic8.xlsx, Topic13.xlsx.
* The VMT Replayer app: vmtPlayer.jnlp. This app opens the files listed below to replay the sessions.
* Replayer files to step through the sessions as they were displayed to the students: Topic1.jno, Topic2.jno, Topic3.jno, Topic4.jno, Topic5.jno, Topic8.jno, Topic13.jno.

=> Workshop Schedule

The workshop will be a full-day event:

=> Data Excerpts:

  1. Topic 3, lines 64-98 (esp. 79-87): (Constructing a perpendicular bisector.) How does the team move from a visual to a structural approach? That is, how does the team shift from discussing how diagrams look to how dynamic-geometry figures involve necessary relationships? How do the team’s practices evolve? (Topic3.xlsx, Topic3.jno)
  2. Topic 5, lines 34-75 (esp. 51-68): (The team constructs inscribed triangles.) The team explores many construction approaches and then sees a key insight. How does this insight arise into the inscribed triangles? How do the team’s practices evolve? (Topic5.xlsx, Topic5.jno)
  3. Topic 13, lines 28-91 (esp. 73-80): (The team discusses dependencies in polygon #2.) The team has an involved discussion of dependencies, but then complains it is confused. What happens at the end of this excerpt? How do the team’s practices evolve? (Topic13.xlsx, Topic13.jno)

=> Practices:

Following are some practices that one might want to consider. How do they evolve over time in the interaction of the team?
  1. The team’s collaboration practices.
  2. The team’s engagement in productive mathematical discourse.
  3. The team’s responsiveness to the topics.
  4. The team’s use of geometrical ideas.
  5. The team’s usage of dynamic-geometry tools.
  6. The team’s use of dynamic dragging of figures.
  7. The team’s engagement in dynamic construction of figures.
  8. The team’s understanding of dependencies in dynamic geometry.
  9. The team’s use of spatio-graphical vs. theoretical/structural/geometric reasoning.
  10. The team’s use of mathematical practices from Common Core Standards.
  11. The team’s progression through van Hiele levels of explanation and proof.
  12. The team’s problem-solving and design skills.

=> Workshop Program Committee

Gerry Stahl, Anna Sfard, Timothy Koschmann, Sten Ludvigsen, Keith Sawyer, Heisawn Jeong, Diler Oner, Alan Zemel, Murat Cakir, Richard Medina, Stephen Weimar, Arthur Powell, Lorreta Dicker, Muteb Alqahtani.

=> Workshop Proceedings Paper

Download the theoretical paper for the conference proceedings at: http://GerryStahl.net/pub/icls2014workshop.pdf