tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes...)

Jeremy comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5840)

2010-06-08T07:26:14-07:00

@Andrew: Okay, I agree with this. What you mean when you say "Why not make MO one part of a bigger framework?" is morally equivalent to what I was thinking ;). I would have called the different n-sites each parts of the n-community so I would surely be in favor of something like this here. Although, as something like that does not as yet exist, I would still support seeing these kinds of questions discussed here until it there is an extended MO community, too!

Mark Meckes comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5839)

2010-06-08T07:22:07-07:00

@Andrew: +10 (last two posts). I keep considering writing posts making these points, but you keep making them better than I could anyway.

gilkalai comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5838)

2010-06-08T06:57:43-07:00

In general, I support pluralism in MO questions based on the belief that for a question being interesting/useful for some is a more important factor than being uninteresting to others or not being completely in agreement with the written words of the faq. I asked a single question of a similar nature regarding taking notes in lectures. http://mathoverflow.net/questions/12638/taking-lecture-notes-in-lectures . In spite of being a one-liner it was certainly something I paid attention to for many years. My feeling was that it was a good question and especially Anton's answer giving advice on live-texing http://mathoverflow.net/questions/12638/taking-lecture-notes-in-lectures/12673#12673 was very surprising (to me) and useful.

Andrew Stacey comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5837)

2010-06-08T06:25:22-07:00

The basic difficulty with what you propose is that MO does not split. Anton does not have much control over the software and could not (if he wanted to) split it into segments.

But I have a problem with the suggestion that MO should be partitioned. Why do that? Why not make MO one part of a bigger framework? Stackoverflow has several components (stackoverflow itself, it has a "meta" site, there's also superuser and some others). We limit the potential if we say "one site = one community". The "nGroup" has three sites: the nCafe, the nLab, and the nForum. So far, no-one seems to have gotten confused.

The beauty of having lots of sites doing one thing well is that it's then up to each individual as to how much attention they pay to each one. I make certain choices, you'd probably make some others. Having small components that can be linked together means greater choice and so a much higher probability that all will find something that they like.

To my mind, the two greatest innovations of the internet are:

Hyperlinks. No site is an island; with judicious use of hyperlinks I can link together lots of small sites to make them into one coherent whole.
Feed readers. Each person can make different choices about what's important and customise the internet.

Jeremy comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5835)

2010-06-08T05:28:31-07:00

@Andrew: Good points. But you say "But that detracts from MO. MO is very good at one thing, and forcing it in to other moulds weakens it." But why should that be the case? I do not see that this is the case. I think having a diversity of discussion topics is good, and will help keep the community healthy, and help to keep people involved.

You also suggest people could set up another community, but, we already have a community! It seems silly to make a separate community to do what's already going on here. In my experience, that's only going to split visitors and cause one site to die and other other to take on the roles of both! Although, I don't have any problems with "virtually splitting" it by, say, having different tabs at the top for "hard" and "soft" discussions!

Andrew Stacey comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5833)

2010-06-08T05:18:38-07:00

@Jeremy: I should make very clear that I make a distinction between "questions that I find interesting" and "questions that I'd like to see on MO". This is, in fact, a question that I think is extremely interesting and very important (as I said, I've recently shifted my own opinion on this and as with all recent converts to anything, I'm keen to proselytise!). Which is partly why I don't want to see it buried on MO! It's too important for that.

I think that mathematicians as a whole have actually been a bit late in realising the potential of the internet and MO may be, for many, their first realisation that they can interact with mathematicians from all over the world very easily. For such (and in it's initial days, I was one of these), it can be tempting to have all discussions on MO. But that detracts from MO. MO is very good at one thing, and forcing it in to other moulds weakens it. That there is no other place for these discussions should spur us on to find such a place (actually, setting up such a place would be very easy - about 10 minutes for me - but finding people to administer it would be more difficult) rather than trying to cram everything in to MO.

This particular topic is something I want to talk about when I can interact much more with the other people. Precisely because actual research is so hard to come by, I want to be able to interrupt with "but don't you find ..." or "how exactly do you do ..." and things like that. I need to come up with my own answer to questions like this, and no answer on MO is going to be an exact fit.

Jeremy comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5831)

2010-06-08T05:01:08-07:00

@Andrew: I like hearing other people's opinions, even if I don't agree it makes me thing about things in different ways (e.g., I think: why does he think what he thinks, and what does this mean; how could I hypothetically explain based on this why he's wrong; why does he make these assumptions; etc) and this kind of thing often makes me realize, e.g, assumptions I've made are faulty or incomplete, there may be other just-as-good solutions I was unaware of, etc. Maybe this is because I come from a more qualitative field, and this kind of reasoning is somehow more valuable there, but I assumed sufficiently many people would think like this here that it would be useful?

So, even if it does not change my mind, and is just your opinion, I can still find it valuable so long as it is not literally completely identical to what someone else has said to me.

On this topic in particular: Regarding specific research, I have found education research in physics (and to the limited extent I've looked into it, math as well) to be notoriously, well, we'll say "difficult to do properly." It's extremely hard to get proper representative samples, account for biases, do sensible statistics with, etc. And it is not always clear what the exact meaning of statements like "x% of students improves after doing A" is, or, even if it is meaningful. So, aside from the very few papers out there that do painstaking studies over decades and carefully report every detail (which are often inconclusive!), I would find anecdotal statements more valuable, at the least because they give me new ideas to think about.

Andrew Stacey comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5829)

2010-06-08T04:48:51-07:00

I can think of a lot to say in response to this question, since I've recently switched to a system where I do now give out typed notes, but I'm not going to say it on MO.

If I post my experience now, who's going to read it?
It's just my opinion, so why should anyone heed it?
It's highly unlikely that it will change anyone's mind, so why should I take the time to type it?
If someone wants to follow-up on my experience and ask for more details, how do they do that?

My difficulty with questions of this type is that the answers are anecdotal; there is no specific research mentioned. I'm sure that (as has actually been said), with a fantastic lecturer then it doesn't matter what system they use. So anecdotes from fantastic lecturers are useless for the rest of us. What I'd be interested in is actual research that shows what are the advantages and disadvantages of the various styles. Then I could match them up against my own abilities and see which is the best fit. Trying to say that X is always better than Y is going to be wrong - the best method for students at Oxford is not going to be the best method for students at some other place (and before you jump to conclusions, the point is that Oxford has a tutorial system so lectures are not so stand-alone as in other universities).

On MO, I want to read definite answers that I can trust as being the best that I could find because they are the answers of those who ought to know, not random suppositions and anecdotes. I can read them on blogs (actually, I've pretty much stopped reading blogs now).

Jeremy comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5825)

2010-06-08T01:15:18-07:00

Well I didn't see it happening with those other communities until it was too late either ;). All I'm saying is the possibility is something to be aware of.

Harry Gindi comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5824)

2010-06-08T01:03:59-07:00

I don't see that happening with MO, and if anything, the rules were enforced more strictly in the past.

Jeremy comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5823)

2010-06-08T00:59:44-07:00

I have certainly read it. But it's not really well-defined to say there can be no discussions! Plenty of carefully stated quantitative questions that have been posted have had lots of "discussion" and "opinions" about them, and I don't feel it's appropriate to draw an arbitrary line at the amount of discussion one particular group of people likes. Although I think it's okay to *categorize* by arbitrary conventions.

I don't say this out of personal preference, though. I say it because I've had experience in seeing communities like this in the past deteriorate because of well-meaning rules like this. They have a tendency to cause new people to be reluctant to contribute, to feel punished when they make mistakes (even when they aren't!), and to drive existing people away who feel like their opinions aren't respected, even when things are conducted in a careful and civil manner. And I would hate to see things like this happen to this community. So I would always err on the side of allowing too much discussion (with the constraint that things be about math and kept organized) than too little.

There have been a few attempts like this to start theoretical physics communities that have suffered from this (and other) problems, that've started with well-known big-name people involved, but've eventually died due to a lack of people contributing. (Both on-line and real-life communities!)

We have to remember, that we want people to regularly be showing up to make a healthy community. And being able to contribute to easier, less technical, and more entertaining questions occasionally will keep people coming here more frequently. The longer people go without making a contribution, the less likely they are to make contributions in the future.

Harry Gindi comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5822)

2010-06-08T00:39:52-07:00

I agree that there's room for improvement, and the specific question you suggest is certainly good, but I don't agree that specific questions are necessarily better. I think qualitative discussion and opinions from random experienced people can be very valuable (even when I don't specifically agree with them!), and there isn't really an alternative good forum to hear these kinds of things from this audience. I mean, meta threads can be used for that, but as they will always have less exposure I think it would be a good idea to keep them for discussing internal things like this, rather than, math-related-but-not-math questions.

I've highlighted the key phrase in your post that gives precisely the reason why this question is not suitable for MO. If you read the FAQ closely, you'll see that MO is not for discussions (not to say that you haven't already done so, it's more of a rhetorical point). Another point, as Scott C. noted is that the question does not admit an actual answer. It's also subjective and could be interpreted as argumentative.

Jeremy comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5821)

2010-06-08T00:35:51-07:00

@Scott: I agree that there's room for improvement, and the specific question you suggest is certainly good, but I don't agree that specific questions are necessarily better. I think qualitative discussion and opinions from random experienced people can be very valuable (even when I don't specifically agree with them!), and there isn't really an alternative good forum to hear these kinds of things from this audience. I mean, meta threads can be used for that, but as they will always have less exposure I think it would be a good idea to keep them for discussing internal things like this, rather than, math-related-but-not-math questions.

Though, as I mentioned in the "less known conjectures" thread, I wouldn't be opposed to having a separate page for these kinds of questions to segregate "math" v.s. "math related" questions.

Scott Morrison comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5815)

2010-06-07T22:56:58-07:00

+1 Scott C!

Scott Carnahan comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5807)

2010-06-07T18:02:42-07:00

Even with Noah's helpful edits, I feel that the question has plenty of room for improvement, since it does not admit concrete answers besides bold assertions of preference (which we are now seeing as the answers accumulate). I'd prefer a question that specifically asked about math education literature, e.g., have there been studies concerning the effectiveness of lecture notes in college mathematics classes, and if so, what conclusions have been drawn? At this point, I don't think changing the question to one of this form is reasonable, since several people have already responded to the old form.

Harry Gindi comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5801)

2010-06-07T13:14:50-07:00

@David Speyer: One of my main criteria for a vote to close on a soft question is "How much effort did the OP put into the question?".

theojf comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5798)

2010-06-07T12:41:57-07:00

I don't like the question as written. As other commenters have said, it sets up a false dichotomy between different ways of presenting material to students. I think a question like this one should be asked on MO, but not this one. I am tempted to vote to close, but I think I will not, because I worry that voting to close would discourage people from improving the question.

I have thought a bit about how to improve it, and cannot come up with any reasonable ideas. In particular, I do not see a good way to improve the question without also making it even more discussiony. But I think that someone else might be able to do what I cannot.

Regardless, the question is not one that I will participate in. I have my styles about teaching, and I'm interested in sharing them and hearing others' styles. But not this one.

David Speyer comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5797)

2010-06-07T12:05:22-07:00

I find questions about pedagogical practice to be very interesting, and they are relevant (or should be!) to all academic mathematicians. I absolutely think this question should remain open.

I'm also puzzled by the complaints about one line questions. When a question can be asked in one line, with all the relevant facts included, that means it is a well written question. For those who can't see the edit history, the original question was

Title: Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes at the beginning of the semester?

Body of Question: Or is it more instructional to use the blackboard to develop the theory?

Now, I don't like the style of using the body as a continuation of the title. But I can't think what more needs to be added to this to make it a well-focused question.

François G. Dorais comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5794)

2010-06-07T11:17:00-07:00

I think the comments have cleared things up a bit. I think some might be interested in improving the question. Now that the question is cw, almost anyone can edit...

Jonas Meyer comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5791)

2010-06-07T11:09:12-07:00

Quoting Scott Morrison from the comments:

"I'm not voting to close, but I wouldn't object to this question being closed. Not because there's no underlying interesting question, just that the question is too terse, provides no context (which really does matter in this case), and as such only allows the possibility of subjective and argumentative answers. "

"On the other hand, I certainly think that the subject matter is "on-topic" for mathoverflow. "

I agree. (And thanks for the wiki hammer.)

Jonas Meyer comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5784)

2010-06-07T10:31:21-07:00

(Disclaimer: I can't vote to close.) The question is an understandable one to which I can imagine there being useful answers. A comment that currently has 6 upvotes says "This is drifting away from mathematical research." I don't think that in itself is a problem. Focused questions on pedagogy "of interest to mathematicians" can be appropriate here.

The problem I have with it is that it is a one line discussion question with zero context. It is better than the user's other question, but I can understand votes to close. I don't think I would vote to close, but if I had the time and energy I would at least campaign for context and effort to be put into the question.

Added: I also agree with the point made in the comments that the question "sets up a false dichotomy."

Harry Gindi comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5783)

2010-06-07T10:28:05-07:00

I vote to close any soft question that is only a single line long (so now it's three votes to close).

François G. Dorais comments on "Is it more beneficial to given students a set of typed lecture notes..." (5782)

2010-06-07T09:56:09-07:00

Question 27344 has two votes to close, but I don't (yet) understand why...