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.
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 brosers. Each chat room as an associated wiki page, where you can share your findings publicly. The VMT wiki is open to the world for reading, but only people registered in VMT can 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. A list of publications about the VMT project is also available there.
Poster of the VMT Project for the NSDL Annual Meeting October 12, 2003
Catalyzing & Nurturing Online Workgroups to Power Virtual Learning Communities
Collaboration Services for the Math Forum Digital Library
Studying Online Collaborative Learning at the Math Forum
Studying Virtual Math Teams (in preparation) Edited by G. Stahl, Springer CSCL Book Series