The Virtual Math Teams (VMT) Project
Virtual Math Teams (VMT) is a research project that I have directed since its inception in 2003 at the i-School and the Math Forum at Drexel University in Philadelphia. A group of PhD students, Math Forum staff, interdisciplinary faculty and visiting researchers collaborate on the project. We are developing an online service for math students to meet in small groups online to discuss challenging mathematical topics. We study the usage of the technological environment that we designed for this service, using a method of chat interaction analysis that we have refined. The project is guided by theories of collaborative learning, community knowledge building and group cognition, that we are exploring. A popular report on the VMT Project in the iSchool Bridge provides a good introduction: download it here.
Much of the VMT research takes place in weekly data sessions, as pictured here.
The VMT online environment consists of a Lobby and many chat rooms for the collaborative discussion of math. In the Lobby, you can define your profile and browse the profiles of other people. You can send messages to other people. Mainly, you can see what chat rooms are already defined. Most chat rooms are associated with a math subject and an interesting problem or topic to explore and discuss. The chat rooms include a number of shared whiteboards for drawing and organizing ideas. There are also web browsers. Each chat room has an associated wiki page, where you can share your findings publicly. The VMT wiki is open to the world for reading, but you must register in VMT to post information there. You can also create a new chat room and invite people to it.
If you register and log into the VMT Lobby, you can enter the VMT Sandbox room to explore the functionality available there. You can also join a chat room or even create one to invite people to for collaborative online chats. There is an introduction to VMT for students, parents, teachers and researchers at the Math Forum VMT web page. An extensive list of publications related to the VMT project is available (pdf); the best source is "Studying Virtual Math Teams".
After the 6-year IERI grant ended, the VMT project continued through an NSF ALT grant to explore agents in the VMT environment; a list of publications related to the ALT grant is available (pdf). An ONR CKI grant also supported continuing data analysis. During this period, we did a proof-of-concept port of the Open Source dynamic math system, GeoGebra, into the VMT system. This created the first multi-user version of a dynamic mathematics environment.
In September 2011, a 5-year DR K-12 grant revived major work on VMT. For funding details see the web page on Research. This grant allowed us to implement a more robust version of VMT-with-GeoGebra, with Math Forum technical support mainly by Tony Mantoan. Through weekly project meetings, we tried out different curricular approaches and developed a series of activities and tutorials for VMT-with-GeoGebra during 2011-2012.
