My husband is teaching himself Trigonometry. We have interesting math conversations.
He brought home an article from The Wall Street Journal today. Wolfram Alpha is a new search engine and people are debating mastering algorithms when "computational power is always at hand."
Check it out! I say it is a website that can be useful tool , just like a calculator is (at times) in my own classroom. I wonder where this search engine will take us.
Rita
4 comments:
How interesting, Rita. I just yesterday received an email from a colleague on that very subject. The following is a url for another article on it.
http://chronicle.com/free/2009/06/19910n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
I'm not sure yet where I position myself on this... I'll have to read more about it. Right off the mark though, I'm inclined to draw an analogy to the calculator debate, as you are. Calculators can aid rather than inhibit problem solving in that they free the mind from the tedious calculations to 'inhale' the problem. In my opinion, that freedom is what gives birth to creativity. Creativity is an essential ingredient for real problem solving. HOWEVER, I continue to believe that they in no way replace concepts and skills.
A simple example of a technology we use all the time and hardly ever think about is word processing. Do you know anyone who uses a typewriter anymore... with all of the tedious business of white-out or starting over again? I have written and published 7 books now... a job that would have been impossible just a few years ago. It has made me a better writer... allowing me to shape my words to convey a precise message. The freedom of knowing that I can back up, adjust, restate, etc. frees me up to be as creative as my mind will allow. I'm certain my writing has not deteriorated because I don't write everything out long-hand, but that is probably because I was already firmly grounded in writing before the technology arrived.... and that is what I believe needs to happen in math... understand concepts/ideas and be fluent in computation so that you always have the option to deal with real life without a calculator. Then the sky is the limit... just imagine the possibilities when we step back to see a 'bigger' picture!
Wow! What an amazing site. I don't envy H.S. teachers or college profs trying to figure out which students understand the concepts though. More "go up to the board and show me," or oral exams perhaps? What an extraordinary resource.
Steve, your comment is a good one and worth reflection. Good assessment that reflects what we espouse in our daily teaching is always a cause for concern. This really ups the ante doesn't it?
I asked my own kids and daughter-in-law (all twenty-somethings) to react to the article about Wolfram Alpha since they all have mathematical backgrounds and aren't that far removed from college (one's still in grad school.)
This is my daughter-in-law's reaction which summarizes what most of them thought: "I just read the article and checked out Wolfram Alpha. It looks like a pretty powerful tool. I can understand professors discussing the possibility of cheating with this kind of tool. But I don't really think it's a big deal - students who want to cheat will find a way no matter what tools are available or 'banned'. It's easy enough not to allow using it in class for tests. We used similar tools in school - the kind of expensive packages they mentioned. For some classes we even had access to them during tests. The reality is that these tools are available in the real world, so it seems like students could benefit from them if the lessons and approach were designed for it."
I agree that teachers/professors would need to rethink their way of teaching and incorporate, rather than fight against, this kind of tool.
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