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I was reading a great blog post this morning by Lisa Nelson and Karim Kai Logue about how the non-math geeks out here (of which I am one) really need to have two questions answered before we can really learn a math concept:

What does this mean?
When will I ever use it?

After their first example (using percentage to figure out which store had the best sale), I thought that it would be awesome if a website – organized by math topic – could provide math teachers with a library of these real-life examples. Heck – kids could use it too, right? Now – had I not been so ADD I would have discovered further down in the post that one of the authors (Logue) already made such a website called Mathalicious – and a great one at that!

But – alas – my ADD won out and I began thinking of where I could create a site like this where users could work together as a community to build out a library such as this. Aha – wikispaces!!

I hadn’t logged into wikispaces in at least a month or so – the last time being to learn more about Educon 2.2 which, alas, I had to miss. When I got there my ADD took over once again when I noticed the list of my 14 “favorite” wikis appeared on the landing page. I realized that although I belonged to these, I had not been interacting on them – a key part of the success of any wiki. Worse yet, I had created two of them and had not been there after creating them!
So – feeling guilty – and ready to beg forgiveness from my fellow community members – I began clicking into the wikis to begin contributing. To my dismay, I quickly found that I was not the only one who had abandoned the wikis. Out of 14 wikispaces only 2 had any activity in the last year! (That’s 14% for you math geeks.) Wikispaces was a ghost town!

Every wiki represented a great idea that never came to fruition – all for the lack of effort and interest. I started to feel a bit saddened by this, thinking, “Imagine what this world would be like if every great idea was able to be born!” But in the end, I know why these sites were abandoned. They were abandoned for the same reason my wikis were left high and dry: there’s just too much to do and too little time.
Our Web 2.0 networked and interlinked world has opened up vast universes of ideas and opportunities that never existed before. You now have access to the entire world. But guess what? The world is a VERY big place and the online version of it is growing by leaps and bounds. A show on CNBC the other night – Inside The Mind of Google – reported that more than 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. There’s a lot of competition for our time and attention.
So – any ideas out there on how you choose to spend your time when there are so many choices available? How about ideas on how to actually get folks to take part in your wikis or online communities so they don’t end up like so many other online ghost towns? Click “Reply” below and weigh in on the discussion!

A theatre company in the UK, Stan’s Cafe, held an exhibit called Of All The People. In this exhibit, they placed sheets of paper (sometimes small, sometimes huge) on the floor of their cavernous old warehouse space. Each paper had a statistic on it: Number of Immediate Deaths at Hiroshima, Number of People at Martin Luther King Jr.’s I have a dream speech, etc. They then place a grain of rice on each sheet to represent each person in the described statistic. I encourage you to visit the photostream on flickr – it’s pretty powerful, and at times humorous.
This reminded me of a couple of other instances where teachers have been made “real” for me. There is the film Paperclips – a documentary about a middle school in rural Tennessee where students began a multi-year project to collect one paperclip for every person killed in the Holocaust. Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod’s Shift Happens video, highlighting the need to teach differently due to meet the needs of a changing world (to be 1 in a million in India means there are 1,100 other people just like you). The Inner Life of Cells videos from Harvard.
So, what are some other examples you’ve found where someone has found an innovative way to teach something extremely abstract or complicated? How does this change the way students think about their life and their surroundings? How do these change the way we teach?