User talk:StuRat

Hi StuRat,

Thank you for your comments. While I'm very new to this whole wiki thing - I did notice that not much had been done with this topic and so I started boldly editing, not even knowing if previous contributors were planning on ever being active again. I noted that the very first sentence of the page declared that the book was for teachers and parents. Yet, eventually, I came to the realization that much of the work that had already been done on this topic (at wikibooks) was meant to teach math. In my opinion, parents and educators are not interested in a book that re-teaches math. If they don't know the math their students/children are learning, they can learn it from the very texts that the children are useing. And a book that teaches elementary/primary mathematical concepts to actual children would have an even smaller audience. In my career as a grade school math educator, I have yet to meet any grade school age children who were motivated to learn math independently, much less who could parse the language used to teach the subject presented in an on-line format. Regardless, a book that teaches how to teach math needs to be presented in a much different manner - with entirely different language, even for non-professional educators such as home-schoolers. So essentially I have had a copy of this topic moved to wikiversity for the express purpose of using it as a template for teaching adults how to teach math to the primary grades. Please read the title page to get a sense of the direction I am taking with the "course". I think you will agree that I am taking it in a very different direction than the one here at wiki books. Because I am currently enrolled in a Education of Mathematics (k-8) Master's program, I plan to combine my classroom teaching experience with my formal learning into this course. In this sense, I expect it to take a few years as I become more aware from my own studies of the pedegogical considerations that apply to each mathematical discipline.

I currently have no intentions of further editing these pages at Wikibooks, so please feel free to revert any work I have done. I apologize for some of the bolder deletions that I have made.

Over time, I plan to change the format of the "copy" that I am working on at Wikiversity (for instance, I plan to expand the section on connections and manipulatives/modes to separate pages), and possibly change the title of the course as well. It occurs to me that links to the the wikibooks pages would be appropriate for readers who need more specific help with topics, which means people need to do a lot of work on this end as well. I invite you to edit and contribute to the pages at wikiversity if you are interested. Even the occasional comment sent to my disscusion page or posted on the discussion page of each section would be appreciated. I don't log into Wikibooks nearly as much as I do Wikiversity, but my name (Leightwing) is the same there. Regards, Leightwing 13:36, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Link to new location and other stuff
StuRat,

I think I put a link in my last missive to you. Check out the word "copy". Anyways, the URL is: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/School:Mathematics/Primary_School_Mathematics. While I'm not sure it belongs in the Mathematics School, I think there should be certainly be links from that school. I'm thinking the portal should be more aligned with the Education School. But for now it's a work in progress and I need to learn more about wikiversity before I bother the higherups by changing my mind too many times.

Yeah, I'm still trying to streamline the editing process. On the one hand, I always like to write things in Word. But on the other hand, creating links, equations, images and testing them is much easier if I write right into the Wiki editing box. One of the drawbacks of this is that I tend to save the page often to see if these things are working.. but then the process of documenting my work with edit summaries becomes cumbersome. Nonetheless, I'm making an effort to summarize anything that I think might be significant. Because a lot of material already on the pages is remedially oriented (I'm talking about the course, not the book), I am trying to delete it as I replace it with material that is more suited to objectives of the project. I'll start making a habit of cutting and pasteing from these pages back into Word to check spelling with each near completion of the segments I'm working on.

I can see that it might be very important and advantageous for these two projects to be linked quite a bit. Probably with more links from the course to the book than from the book to the course. I'm thinking that if (for example) the parent looking over the child's shoulder doesn't understand something even after visiting the course, a link from each section to the corresponding page in the wikibook will serve to even more deeply cover the basic skills needed to help them to understand what's going on.

If this is the goal, then it makes sense for the writers and editors of each of these entities to be aware of what's going on in the corresponding sister pages. Especially the writers of the wikibook, because those pages will often be reached via someone who is having trouble understanding something from the course.

Though I said I wasn't planning on writing any more material for the wikibook, it occurs to me that in many cases, as I write material for the course and link it to the book, it might make sense for me to explain in more detail these concepts (in the book). If I do this, I will make a point of not deleting additional material that already resides there.

I hope this makes sense. Thanks again for your thoughts, Leightwing 16:46, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Hi,

"I noticed that the 3 pluses in the answer for the last illustration are not in an oval like the first two; does this have any meaning ?"

No, I just forgot to put it there - I don't think it's that critical - unless you think it might be. If you want, you can import it into your favorite editor and fix it if you like.

In the course, my explanation of integer tiles starts with may seem like a simple equation, but there are even simpler equations that perhaps should be used to introduce the model on your end. For instance, those requiring no zero-sum fields. Don't forget, in the wikiversity course, I will have covered the more complex equation. 2 + (-3) under the assumption that the reader already knows how to add negative numbers. They just need to see the model used to teach it, so I provide them with one that has several layers of lessons behind it, but I will also provide a link to your work for those who don't quite understand it. May I suggest that you consider starting with even more simple equations, like -4 + -3, where no zero-sum fields need to be found.. Starting with the graphic I have provided will be very confusing for those who have never seen integer tiles and are just learning how to add negative numbers.

Also, I notice that the homepage of the wikibook you are working on has a big notice on top (This Page has been Moved). It was there even before I began editing it. You may want to make sure it is not scheduled for deletion and have someone take care of the notice. Also, our two projects have the same name. This is bound to cause confusion. I suppose I need to change the one on my end. ;-(

Thanks for your suggestions. I am using the Show Preview button more and I already use most of the keyboard shortcuts. I will check out your crosslinks soon. Leightwing 18:09, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Welcome
Hey Sturat I think I recognize you from the mathematics reference desk. I am certainly glad to see you here, I would just like to point you to our Naming policy for the subpages of books on the project, we have adopted a naming convention in subpages are named like this:

basepagename/subpagename, for example Calculus/Functions. This makes it so that links back to the main page will automatically show up on the top of the page, and keeps everything consistent across the project (the cookbook is an exception since it has its own namespace).

I've also seen that you've been doing some edits to a wikiversity course on the wikibooks site. The wikiversity pages on this site are outdated because all of the information on them has been moved to its own project (see the wikiversity home page), so if you are interested in contributing to the wikiversity project, I suggest that you make your edits there! Wikiversity is mostly for lecture outlines, syllabi, and other things that are addenda for classes, as far as I can tell, whereas wikibooks is intended mostly for textbooks (see the page that defines the Wikibooks project goals).

If you have any questions about the wikibooks project itself, feel free to ask me. Thank you for your contributions! Mattb112885 (talk to me) 22:56, 18 September 2007 (UTC)


 * 1) Thanks, can you give me an example of how I should have named my pages differently ?


 * 2) We've recently created a content fork between Wikibooks Basic Math (now written for students, whether adult or children) and Wikiversity Basic Math (now written for parents and teachers). I've tried to add links back and forth where a comparable lesson exists in the other area.  My interest is mainly in writing directly for students (mainly adults), so I primarily contribute to Wikibooks Basic Math. StuRat 03:16, 19 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I can give you an example, if you dont mind me butting into the conversation. On the page Primary mathematics:Introduction to significant digits, for instance, you use a colon ":" to separate the name of the book from the name of the page. Instead, you should use a forward-slash "/" to separate them. For example: "Primary mathematics/Introduction to significant digits". Both the colon ":" and the forward-slash "/" are "special characters", in that they both perform special tasks. The colon is used in link-prefixes, such as a namespace or an interwiki link, while the slash is used to separate pages. I hope this helps. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 03:28, 19 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Ouch, that will require a lot of work to fix. I just copied the format of the existing lessons, like .  How did they get so messed up ?  Were they copied from Wikiversity (which I'm guessing uses a different convention) ? StuRat 02:37, 21 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I've fixed the pages names. And no actually, Wikiversity use to be part of Wikibooks before it became a separate project entirely and Wikibooks use to use a different convention. I also removed that misunderstanding from Primary mathematics which was the result of my renaming School of Mathematics:Primary School Mathematics, because Wikiversity had already imported that page, Wikibooks doesn't have schools and it was being used as a table of contents for the book. --dark lama  18:02, 23 September 2007 (UTC)


 * OK, thanks, I'll try to stick with that naming convention. StuRat 18:30, 23 September 2007 (UTC)