Author: Glenn

  • Tracking time for annual reviews

    I have a problem. Or rather, I had a problem. This problem has gone on for the last four years, and this year I am finally doing something about it. In my role as a Master Teacher, I have a role statement on file with my Dean at at the University. It says that I…

  • Comparing the #MTBoS & #ITeachMath hashtags

    Jennifer Fairbanks has been promoting the #MTBoS2020 hashtag, where you create a blog post on the 20th of each month this year. As my contribution for this first month, I thought I would continue my look at how hashtags are used on Twitter by the math community. My last post on hashtags looked at the…

  • Math hashtags on Twitter

    Back in November, Judy Larsen posted this tweet about math hashtags. Judy’s question got me thinking about all the math hashtags that really are used on Twitter. What are they? To answer this question, I downloaded the #MTBoS and #ITeachMath hashtags using NodeXL software, and went through all the hashtags mentioned in those data sets.…

  • How another country teaches the Quadratic Formula

    One of the most enjoyable thing I have done over my career is work with teachers from other countries. The university is a host site for the Fulbright Teacher Excellence and Achievement program which brings teachers from other countries to the US, where they spend six weeks in classrooms and university classes. As a teacher,…

  • Calculating betweenness centrality using NodeXL

    For my dissertation, a statistic I used to determine who was at the “center” of the network was the centrality calculation. This was not done by hand. I used software called NodeXL to do the downloading, calculating, and visualization of the network. The statistic ended up choosing to use is called the Betweenness Centrality, which…

  • Starting fresh after the Ph.D.

    This is kind of odd to write, but I think I need to. I finished my dissertation, and defended in April. That was four to five months ago! I really have done nothing on this blog. I was stressed, and had my head down and working hard on the dissertation and defense. Then, in August,…

  • PhD: Y’all need to get some sleep 2

    Wow. So much to learn when dealing with software packages and analysis. It turns out that our computers do a TON of processing behind the scenes. When I send a tweet, Tweetdeck and / or Twitter shows the time of tweet as being a couple of minutes ago, and then the time counts from there.…

  • PHD: comparing clusters 1 and 2

    What about the different clusters? The entire data set was 1348 nodes, but the software clustered them together based on the communication patterns. If you go back to the first post on this, you can see the different clusters shown. So, what do the individual clusters look like, and behave like? Cluster 1 has a…

  • PHD: Quant analysis draft 2

    In my last post I went through some of the graphs that NodeXL created of my data set. There are additional quantitative elements which need to be discussed. For example, who are the most ‘influential’ people in the data set? There are several ways to indicate influence, and one way is ‘betweenness centrality.’ This measure…

  • PHD: Quant analysis rough draft 1

    PHD: Quant analysis rough draft 1

    First, some context. This is going to be rough. I am trying to wrap my brain around what is important, what is not, and how to frame the important to tell the story. First off, here are the three research questions I am addressing: RQ1: What are the network behaviors of participants in TMathC in…