This was from the blogger meetup/dinner from the ICTCM. If you look closely, Scott Franklin is in there giving, as he called it, his “into it face”. And Maria Andersen is taking some photos there on my left.

I didn’t get home till 11:00 PM last night and didn’t fall asleep until 3:00 AM, so this is pretty much all the blogging I am capable of today.

The ICTCM is all wrapped up, and I’ll be heading downstairs to check out of the hotel and head back home. It’s been a very good conference — one of the best I’ve attended and much better than most of the mathematics-only conferences I’ve been to. I feel in many ways like Scott Franklin does — whereas at math conferences I’ve always struggled to fit in, find a niche, and enjoy what I am doing, here at the ICTCM I feel like I’ve found some of “my own people”.

And I am coming away with almost too many ideas and provoked thoughts. You can tell from the output of this blog over the last few days that I am actually struggling to brain-dump fast enough to process the next idea coming in, like a basement sump pump in the middle of monsoon season. And I consider that a good thing. Certainly at most conferences I attend, I tend to come away at the end wondering if it was worth the expense of attending. When I set out a year or so ago to find conferences other than MAA or AMS conferences that were smaller and more targeted towards specific interests of mine, the ICTCM was the first one to come up, and it’s been everything I’d hoped it would be.

I believe I still owe everyone a couple of blog posts. That’s the danger of putting “…but I’ll write more about that later” in the middle of a post. But since there’s no free wifi in either the hotel (grrr…) or the San Antonio airport (grrrrr….) or the Memphis airport (gggrrrRRRRRrr….), I’ll most likely be resuming blogging tomorrow after work is over. However, thanks to the magic of Twitter I may occasionally be micro-blogging from my cell phone in between flights, so do check in there.

[photo by ChaosInJune via Flickr.]

One of the real treats of the ICTCM was the Saturday 8:00 AM session titled “Three Decades of Handheld Devices: How Mathematics Teaching Changed Along with Them” given by John Kenelly. Prof. Kenelly has a long history of involvement in the development of calculator technology, and he gave a fascinating talk full of good thoughts on the direction of handheld technologies today, war stories from the past, and good jokes. (Example of the latter: “Getting a spreadsheet to work on a calculator is like getting a dog to walk on its hind legs — it can be done, but it ain’t pretty!”)

I will try to say more about Prof. Kenelly’s ideas about the future of handheld technologies in a later post, but for now I wanted to share one of the really cool parts of his talk — the calculators themselves, some of which are now antiques. He had a bag full of these old-school devices (some of which are less than 10 years old but still old-school) which he generously let us paw over.

Here is a Hewlett-Packard HP 35, the world’s first handheld scientific calculator, from 1972. Check out that red LED display and, in contrast with the NSpire, the sheer paucity of keys on the keyboard:

Here’s a rare example of a Casio fx7000, from 1985 — the world’s first handheld graphing calculator.

I was downright startled to learn that sitting right across the aisle from me at this talk was Hideshi Fukaya, the lead engineering on the development team for the Casio fx7000 and the person rightfully considered to be the inventor of the graphing calculator.

Moving ahead up the timeline, here is a Casio Cassiopeia. More of a palmtop computer than a calculator, and it ran Windows CE. Anybody remember good old WinCE and why that abbreviation was particularly apt?

I guess I am just a sucker for old-fashioned calculators.

Aside: I’d love to do a spreadsheet in which one column has the year in which a calculator was made and another column has the number of buttons on the calculator, and run a regression analysis on it.

One of the biggest conversation pieces here at the ICTCM is the Texas Instruments NSpire, their most recent entry in a long line of calculators. Here’s a firsthand look at it; click to enlarge, and then just take your time to look at the thing and think about it:

On the right there is a normal-sized TI-30-something scientific calculator. That should give you an idea of the scale. Here’s another shot with me holding it, which should also give an idea of the size of this thing; and another shot which gives a better view of the screen.

But let’s go back to that first photo. First of all, yes, the NSpire does actually have not one but two keyboards. They snap in and out; the one that’s un-snapped is just a duplicate of the TI-84’s keyboard. The one that’s snapped in is, well, let’s just say “busy”.  The first thing you notice is that there are buttons between the buttons. The little rounded buttons are a kind of alphanumeric keyboard. Well, really the first thing you notice is that this thing is big. Really big. It’s hard to get past the big-ness of the thing. How can the massive size not be a factor in getting kids to use the thing? Would you want to whip this out on the bus to do your homework, knowing that doing so clearly identifies you as the kid that needs to get beaten up?

From what I can tell, the NSpire is supposed to be a full-featured computer algebra system in a handheld device. If that’s so, then it certainly wouldn’t be the first time TI has tried to market such a thing. That honor would go to the TI-92 graphing calculator, which I owned about 10 years ago and, honestly, I really liked it, even though apparently I was the only person who did, because it was a marketing disaster and got banned by the AP Calculus exam to boot. (It was banned from the AP not because people didn’t like it but because it had a QWERTY keyboard.)

I am not sure what the NSpire brings to the table in terms of CAS functionality that isn’t already available in industry-standard CAS computer software like Maple or Mathematica. I overheard one person giving a rave review because it treats functions as geometric objects, whatever that might mean. I don’t think that a function is a geometric object — the graph of one certainly is — so I’m a little in the dark here.  I believe it means that you can enter in a function and view it dynamically in multiple representations, so if you have a graph of a function with the tangent line drawn at a point, for instance, you can go to a split-screen view and set up a spreadsheet that shows all this data, and then if you move the point of tangency the stuff in the spreadsheet changes as well. More here (complete with annoying music).

There is also a computer software-only version of the NSpire, so you can use the CAS without owning the calculator. That sounds more likely to be useful. The downside is that, according to the TI rep with whom I spoke at the vendor booth this morning, TI is ditching Derive — its simple and very serviceable CAS that has been around since forever — to focus solely on the NSpire line of products. They have already quit producing Derive and will cease tech support for it in 2010. I think this is a huge mistake, and TI will end up paying for it in the end. But that’s the subject of another post.

Isn’t the NSpire just really, really over the top here? I think so. After a certain point, you simply cannot cram more and more stuff onto a proprietary device. You will either make the device too expensive, too bulky, too confusing to use, or too proprietary in the sense that the device is trying to reinvent software applications that already exist in a simple, affordable, and ubiquitous way. (Think MS Excel, versus the proprietary spreadsheet on the NSpire.) I think TI crossed all four of those boundaries years ago, and the NSpire is just a step further — several steps further — in a direction that is really just a dead end.

The thing doesn’t even have a touch screen, for goodness sake, which is so easy and cheap to implement that it’s unfathomable why you wouldn’t build one into the calculator instead of having hot-swappable keyboards. Swapping keyboards, for gosh’s sake. What kind of user interface is that? Are students — who are used to iPhones and, at worst, the 12-15-button interface of a cell phone — supposed to see the NSpire as a device they will actually adopt and use?

The session I attended this morning went into this issue, regarding just how far can you possibly push the technology of the graphing calculator before you simply must abandon the format and move through a paradigm shift. More on that later, though.

It was a full day yesterday here at the ICTCM, and the day was capped off with a very enjoyable dinner with Maria Andersen and Scott Franklin, along with two of Maria’s friends who (if I understood Maria right) are soon-to-be math bloggers. I have photos and a video forthcoming.

Today will be no less busy:

• 8:00-8:45: Session on handheld calculating devices over the last 30 years and how they have changed teaching. Very interested in this talk; I’ll have more to say about some of the handheld technology I’m seeing here.
• 9:00-9:45: Session on using Maple 11 in the advanced calculus and modern algebra classroom.
• 9:45–10:30: Exhibit hall surfing.
• 11:30-12:05: Session on labs in mathematics classes.
• 12:30-1:15: Session on using Geometers Sketchpad alongside computer algebra systems.
• 1:30-2:15: Session on Winplot.
• 2:30-3:15: Take a break!
• 3:30-4:15: Session on blogging with concept maps. Two of my favorite things put together, so this ought to be fun.
• 4:30-5:15: Haven’t made up my mind yet — either a session on CaluMath or a session on using Geometers Sketchpad in calculus courses.

Unfortunately the internet access I am paying $10 a day for isn’t wireless — or at least, there is wireless but yesterday it didn’t play nice with me. So I won’t be blogging continuously. Which is probably a good thing because I need to pay attention at these sessions. Speaking of which, it’s time to head down to the first one.

I only have about 15 minutes before I head for dinner with Scott Franklin and Maria Andersen — both of whom are also conference-blogging — so all I can whip up for now is a quick bullet list. I’ll elaborate later.

• My talk went fine. I think I clocked in at 12 minutes, a little over but not disastrously so. All the technology worked fine, although the room was quite cramped and the projector was in the center of the room — meaning that my Macbook had to be in the center of the room and there was not much room left over to move around. But that’s minor stuff.
• Attended a session on a freshman-level course at Ithaca College called Mathematical Experimentation. Very intriguing. I’d like to do something like this at our place.
• Instead of bumming around the exhibit hall, I ended up simply taking a half-hour walk along the Riverwalk, since I’d been cooped up in the hotel all day and it was gorgeous outside.
• Attended a session on Octave. Matlab has been in the discussion mix in my department, so Octave was a product of interest.
• Went to another session which was supposed to be on how to choose an online homework system — we’re thinking about moving to online homework too — but left after 15 minutes because there had been no mention of how to choose an online homework system yet, nor was there any coming up in the Powerpoint slides. So I went to the exhibit hall to talk to the online homework vendors firsthand. Had a nice discussion with the head honcho at WebAssign. Pretty impressive product, there.
• Finally, a session on symbolic geometry software. This was simply amazing. I’ll have to describe this in more detail later, but Geometry Expressions is the name of the software being demoed, and it rocked my world. Think dynamic geometry front-end for a computer algebra system. All I can say is that this so far has been the only technology product I’ve seen here and come away thinking I MUST HAVE THAT.
• Scott Franklin and Maria Andersen are just as attractive and intelligent in person as they are on their blogs. And I mean that in a good way!

I just returned from the Camtasia workshop. The originally-scheduled speaker, it turns out, got stranded in Dallas after that city got six inches of snow last night. (This is Texas, right?) So the conference organizers were scrambling to find somebody with Camtasia experience. I suggested that they go pull somebody from the TechSmith booth in the exhibitor area, and a few minutes later they returned with Dave McCollom and Mike [sorry, can't remember the last name]. Those two proceeded to put on a fun, engaging, and hugely informative workshop on the fly with zero preparation time. They even ended right on time.  I think that says a lot about the company and the product it makes.

Very, very impressed with Camtasia. It has a simple user interface (very similar to iMovie) and lots of options. My partner and I in the workshop put together a 3-minute Flash video on xFunctions, complete with callouts and transitions and the whole nine yards, and honestly we never really felt like we were working that hard. (For the Flash-haters out there, you can also save in something like eight other video formats, including Quicktime.) I didn’t realize that TechSmith also operates Screencast.com, and you can upload Camtasia-produced movies directly to that hosting service. They also have a connection with Jing somehow, although I’m not completely sure what exactly that connection is. (I don’t see it listed as a TechSmith product, but they had Jing stuff all over the TechSmith booth in the exhibition hall.) (Update: On the Jing website, there’s a blurb that says “A project by TechSmith”.)

Anyhow, Camtasia blows Snapz Pro X (which I currently use) out of the water when it comes to screencasting. The only problem is that there’s no OS X version right now. I can run Camtasia under Windows XP on Parallels; I asked David if I could capture stuff outside the Windows XP window if I were running Camtasia under Parallels, and he wasn’t sure. That’s an experiment for later. But he did say that they hope to release a native OS X version, rebuilt from the ground up, some time this year, and he got my contact info to be on the beta-testing “team”.

Now it’s time to get ready for my contributed paper session talk, which is in about 20 minutes. I’ll report on that later in the afternoon since I have a full slate of stuff until dinnertime.

In this post, I put forth three questions that are good for creating a little objective distance between you and that shiny new technology you saw at the conference are MUST HAVE in your classroom. On the plane to San Antonio, I was thumbing through the SkyMall catalog and found another question to add in to that mix. It was inspired by this:

This is the “Learning Tower and Playset”. As you can see, it’s intended for kids to climb, so they can get up and see what’s happening on a table or countertop that’s normally too high for them. It also doubles as a playset; the platform that the child stands on can be removed and the kid can get inside it, and there are accessories that come with it so the child can use it as a puppet show theater or a make-believe drive-through window.

This product, like the technology we teachers use and think about using, does solve certain problems. My kids love to get up on a chair or stool and watch me cook and sometimes help me cook. But chairs and stools can be unstable, especially given that kids tend to lean over when they are looking at or reaching for stuff on a countertop. Both of my girls have fallen off whatever they were standing on for this very reason. So the Learning Tower solves the problem by giving the child a stable platform with a big base and a sort of enclosure at the top to prevent the child from falling off.

But this product also creates problems as well. The base of this thing is two feet square. That doesn’t sound very big, but that is an enormous chunk of real estate in my kitchen. Even the stepstool that L often uses, which is maybe 12 inches by 10 inches, seems to get under my feet at the worst possible moment all the time. I can’t imagine putting a playset in the kitchen.

So that’s the fourth question to ask when evaluating new technology:

• What problems does this technology create?

And rest assured, every technology creates problems. Take something like Maple, for instance. It’s a hugely useful tool that solves many problems for math students and mathematicians. But it also creates problems. We have to train students, and ourselves, to use it. We have to put up with network installs that never seem to work. We have to think about where the money is coming from to pay for it and maintain our license. And so on. Even the computer itself creates problems, not the least of which is the environmental problem created when the computer is manufactured.

So it seems that to evaluate a new technology, you have to look at a sum balance given by the usefulness of the technology in solving an existing problem, minus the redundancy that technology has with other existing technologies AND the minus the extent to which the technology creates new problems. You’ll never have a problem-free technology, so the question is whether, on balance, the technology solves more problems than it creates is really the key.

I might corner one of the exhibitors here at the ICTCM and ask her/him all four of those questions; a vendor who gives a straight answer to the fourth question might well be worth doing business with.

I’m back in from the ICTCM keynote address, which was given by Frank Hughes of Tietronix Software. Hughes is an educator of sorts — he has been the trainer for astronauts and other NASA employees since the 70’s. At Tietronix, which develops simulation software for NASA, he is working on a project to take the 3D modeling technology used in space simulations  and adapt it to teaching math and science. He gave us two web sites with some web-based 3D simulations. Unfortunately, one of the links didn’t work when I tried it just now, but this one — the “Virtual Astronaut” — at least goes where it’s supposed to.

It was interesting to see what they are doing, and I was especially interested to hear that they are working on developing haptic devices for using the software. I would have liked to hear with a little more specificity just exactly what Tietronix has in mind regarding classroom use of this stuff. The talk mainly focused on demoing the software with  statements such as “All you have to do is plug in your math or science problem here!” But what math problem? And how do we plug it in? I guess that’s why they are looking for educators with whom to collaborate.

Coming up: Camtasia workshop in about 50 minutes. First, down to the Exhibit Halls to get a look-see.

As you can see in this photo, I made it safe and sound to San Antonio and the ICTCM. The image here is the ICTCM logo being projected on to the floor of the lobby. I guess that makes more of a splash than just putting the names of the groups who are meeting on a board somewhere.

Except for a 90-minute delay in Detroit for a mechanical problem, the trip here was uneventful.  That’s something of a big deal for me, since I am breaking a ten-year long boycott of Northwest Airlines on this trip. The last time I flew NWA was in 1997 when I was interviewing for jobs, and I had to make three trips on NWA. Every leg of each trip encountered a delay of at least two hours. But this time around it was pretty smooth sailing. The pilot even managed somehow to make up 30 minutes of lost time while in the air.

All I have done since getting in to the hotel is check in, get my conference packet, go roaming for fast food, and plan my schedule out. The hotel here is connected directly to the famous San Antonio Riverwalk, and while looking for dinner, I exited the hotel directly into these scenes (click to enlarge):

…which were accompanied by the heavenly smells of the Southwestern fare of the riverwalk restaurants. I’ll be lucky to escape here having only gained a dozen or so pounds.

As for the conference itself, it will be a busy and informative couple of days. Tomorrow we have the keynote address from Frank Hughes on “Real-time virtual environments for teaching mathematics” which sounds like it’s going to be about immersive, virtual-reality-type technology for teaching mathematics. That sounds interesting, and strangely enough this is exactly something that one of my linear algebra students was telling me he hoped I would see while I was here.  Then I will have my Camtasia workshop, followed by my contributed paper session talk at 1:10. Then at 2:10 there’s a contributed paper on a first-year mathematics course on mathematical experiementation; then a session on Octave; then a session on how to choose an online homework delivery system; then a session on something called symbolic geometry software which is supposed to be a hybrid of a computer algebra system and dynamic geoemtry software.

And that’s just Friday, and only a very small sample of the great variety of stuff being presented here. Saturday is just as busy, and I’ll talk about that tomorrow. As the Riverwalk is a feast for the smells and tastes of food lovers, the ICTCM promises to be a feast for the creativity and ideas of people who are passionate about teaching and technology.

At various points throughout tomorrow and Saturday, I’ll have chances to go to the exhibit hall as well. Although I have to say I am a little disappointed, because evidently there are fewer than 20 exhibitors in all here. I was expecting something like at the Joint Meetings where the entire convention center floor is wall-to-wall exhibitors. At least this will allow me to get some face time with each one, and who knows, maybe even some impromptu video interviews.

Unfortunately, the internet access at this hotel is not wireless except in the lobby, which means that I will only be able to post when I am back in the room. I will publish some of the posts on a delay to spread them out during the day, but they won’t all be in real time. I will refrain now from the rant I so desperately want to give against the Marriott hotel here — which advertises high-speed internet but charges you $10 a day to have it. Come on Marriott, what would it cost you to set up a few wireless routers and offer net access to guests?

Anyway, stay tuned for more.