http://www.noahbasketball.com/optimal_arc.php

I think you are misinterpreting “usefulness” in order to support your position. What is useful to you as a teacher? Isn’t it things that are “effective” in improving “learning retention” and “student engagement” etc? The quality of useful is determined by the circumstance of use, not by an absolute criteria.

The whole concept of “inherent educational value” applied to resources is a false one. Resources are only as good as their ability to be used to create good educational outcomes. A toaster is no better as an educational resource than a video of a toaster if the teacher attempting to use it as a resource is unable to draw educational outcomes from the lesson for the students.

Multimedia has the advantage of consistency of experience, lower long term costs (in time in particular), wider support from a funding perspective by governments, and in particular in safety for the members of the class.

Consider this: if I showed you a video of a flower growing in a language class what would I want to do with it? If I showed the same video in science would I want you to do the same thing? What would the differences be?

When I show a video of a ball throw in math I want students to think about the curve, and how that might be described mathematically (we are in math class after all). If we go out and shoot hoops, that is what their focus will be on, the physical elements. By controlling their experience I can appropriately direct their attention to the area I want them to focus on, and draw the science, math, language or whatever my lesson is about from that point.

I teach science, and sometimes experiments are good for teaching concepts, but sometimes distancing the student from the task is the best way of getting their attention on what you want them to learn. The difference between learning how to shoot a hoop, and the math that describes the motion of the ball.

I would push back on two things.

a) The very fact that you purchased a digital projector (out of your own pocket, I assume) illustrates the access/cost/material issues that still surround the vast majority of technology even in solvent schools (which, with the hiring of multiple full time lab assistants making 3/4 of my salary, I am also assuming yours is). Correct me if I am wrong. This, admittedly, is not WCYDWT’s problem. But it is Dan’s.

b) As I indicated above, you’ve narrowly defined “value” by two terms: cost, and materials. From the management perspective, I understand and appreciate this. From the educator’s, I find it too simplistic. Multimedia *has no inherent educational value.* It is only a tool. If its use cannot be proven in a multiple-dip rubric of “effectiveness,” running from money to time to quantifiable learning to retention to student engagement and back, I don’t buy it– literally or figuratively.

WCYDWT, as a very specific subset of multimedia, might be a superior use of that tool. It might not. I’m not sold yet. You can probably tell.

Let us for a moment assume that the math teachers of our school were to as a group adopt the WCYDWT methods and do all those for which it is possible practically. We have 10 to 20 math lessons happening every period of the day (its a big school with 5 year levels and 4 70 minute lessons a day). To support every teacher doing WCYDWT practically would require the equivalent of the science prep-room for the math department as well. That is 1 or 2 assistants employed full time to manage and maintain the equipment and have the resources ready for class use.

That is simply less practical than our math department investing in 1 digital video camera, and 4 data projectors and laptops to go with them. It is also far more expensive: $30K for a lab assistant vs $10k for the mulitmedia needs.

Videos also have the advantage that if we find a one online, we can simply download and use it, no need to acquire new physical resources as we have all that we need. In other words a new video we find online is immediately usable in a class!

Editing videos is relatively simple in Windows Movie Maker which is free. Worst case you might need to get another free program to convert file formats so they are compatible.

Considering that a data projector and laptop combo can be moved from room to room, and used for far more than running WCYDWT lessons, the overall value (ie cost vs usefulness) of acquiring them is much greater than building a huge pile of physical resources.

In fact this is exactly what I have found! I purchased a data projector and use it in every lesson basically because I can do so much more with it being reliably available to me. If I want to do the “water tank fill” WCYDWT, I download and run the video. I can make the tank 2m tall on the wall and every one of my 28 students can see it clearly. We can get a ruler up there and make measurements that everyone can see as well. I have a data projector and a laptop. I don’t have a water tank and a hose. Makes multimedia a pretty clear winner in my book.

Dina: For now I’ll just laugh at you yelling at me for conflating multimedia and WCYDWT, when I’m trying to tell you that This Is What You’re Doing. When you say things like “Multimedia Inoculates Pseudocontext.”

Hoisted on my own petard! Humor me, though. Where in this post do I reference WCYDWT?

Kathy: Another way we think about pseudo-context is to use a filmmaking model… We do not care so much whether the scenario is real-world vs. fantasy; we care only whether the audience can suspend disbelief (if needed) and thus be fully engaged in what we REALLY want them to care about and focus on.

The filmmaking model helps me out here. A lot of your Head First texts seem to carry a single scenario through the entire book. The 3D Geometry book I was reviewing awhile ago featured an outer-space hook that the author expanded in each chapter. The initial hook wasn’t real, but once you accepted it (in the same way you accept that Doc Brown’s DeLorean travels through time when it hits 88 mph) the author played fairly within those constraints.

The problem with chapter-length or problem-length scenarios (which are the WCYDWT stock-in-trade) is that I don’t profit from the suspension of disbelief. There’s no time for it.

Dina: As for student interest, you seem to continue to contradict yourself on the importance of such a thing in your protocol. Either it’s nice, conversation-clouding side-bonus, as in “I don’t place the premium on student interest”— or it’s necessary, as in “WCYDWT uniquely encourages students to invest in math problems, and therefore learn math.” We need to know which it is.

It’s only a contradiction if you conflate two different concepts and misunderstand one of them.

“WCYDWT” and “multimedia” aren’t equivalent, though multimedia is an aspect of WCYDWT.

“Pseudocontext” and “uninteresting” aren’t equivalent, though the two correlate pretty well.

“WCYDWT” and “pseudocontext” aren’t opposite. The post to which you originally responded directly concerned pseudocontext and multimedia. It had only a wispy connection to WCYDWT.

I place a high premium on student interest in my WCYDWT curriculum development but student interest doesn’t factor into my assessment of pseudocontext. You continue to conflate two concepts whose association, frankly, isn’t even yet clear to me.

Because you misunderstand the three syllogisms in the first paragraph, when I say, “multimedia inoculates pseudocontext (under circumstances I elaborate on if you’ll kindly read past the title of the post)” you read “Dan thinks multimedia is equivalent to student engagement.”

Dina: The fundamental aspect of WCYDWT is that, in your words, it “either immediately or over its duration connects with a student’s prior experience,” which delineates material far more prosaic than the Eiffel Tower- indeed, available at the grocery down the street— 99% of the time. So once again: why remove it from the kids’ direct experience with digital imagery?

Two things:

One, we are now off the path of “what is pseudocontext?” and onto the path of “things that bug Dina Strasser about WCYDWT.” That’s totally cool. I just don’t want to confuse anybody here. This has nothing whatsoever to do with pseudocontext.

Two, this is bizarre. Are you positive you aren’t being overly exclusive in your definition of a “student’s prior experience?” I don’t even know where to start.

Wait. I do. Speed. Speed is part of every student’s prior experience. Every student has run or watched someone run. The number of contexts within which you can explore the math of speed are innumerable and far more diverse than what the teacher can physically bring into the classroom or what a student has picked up at a grocery store.

For instance, some scientists at Berkeley filmed super-slow video of a trap-jaw ant snapping its jaws shut. Its jaws are moving at something like a million miles per hour. I couldn’t afford to create that video myself but someone created it for me. All I need now is a digital projector and my students and I have some engaging and challenging math ahead of us.

There are plenty of counter-propositions where that one came from.

Dina: Do that [comparison] in an impoverished district which needs to closely question a digital camera and projector because they can’t afford to get the asbestos out of its walls, and you’ve got yourself some real evidence.

I can’t compare the differential effectiveness between the digital and physical representations with the trap-jaw ant because the physical representation is impossible for me to obtain. And even if I could bring a trap-jaw ant into the classroom (or one for every student) it’d be useless to us because its jaws move too fast for measurement without Berkeley’s high-speed camera. The physical fails me here.

So what do I do with this video that will engage many (if not all) of my students and lead to some challenging math? Not use it out of sympathy for the classroom that can’t afford a $300 projector? Or use it and not advocate the intervention for the same sympathetic reason?

The bar you’ve set for “blogger should advocate an intervention” is really hard to take seriously.