I have just finished reading Seely Brown and Adler (2008) Minds on fire: open education, the long tail and learning 2.0 and was interested to learn about the Hands On Universe project, which “invites students to request observations from professional observatories and provides them with image-processing software to visualize and analyze their data, encouraging interaction between the students and scientists” (Seely Brown and Adler, 2007, p.24).
This project seems to be still going strong in 2016, as the website indicates that there was an annual conference which took place in 2015. I was also able to use Google Scholar to find scholarly articles from 2009-2012 which talk about the project. It seems that the project has been extended from its home at Berkeley, California to Harvard and across Europe.
In reading this article, the perennial question occurred to me: “How does this apply to maths?”
I remember when I was an undergraduate, pursuing an individual project in a mathematical topic of my choice, one of the assessment criteria was how well my research contributed something new to the field. I had chosen a particularly pure mathematical topic, and so I was reading about difficult abstract concepts that had been known for 100 years or more. Just understanding these concepts was difficult enough, never mind trying to contribute something new of my own! To do so would have required 4 years of postgraduate study in itself!
Is it any wonder, then, that mathematics is rife with “pointless” word problems that are artificially constructed in order to test students’ understanding? Is it possible for high school students or undergraduates to engage in “legitimate peripheral participation” of pure mathematical research, if it requires graduate study just to learn what the questions are in current research? Does this explain why so many students are turned off from maths? Does the inability to see the immediate applicability of their studies make students think that there is nothing left to discover, and so their mathematical studies are pointless? I can’t count the number of times someone has said to me, “How can you do research in mathematics? Isn’t everything already discovered?” This fundamental misunderstanding in what maths is resulting from the gulf between “learning mathematics” and “doing mathematics” may well be the reason!
Does anyone from a different subject discipline feel similarly? Or is maths the only one who suffers from the difficulty of finding legitimate peripheral activity in mathematical research that learners can actually access?
thebrodieset 