Raymond Johnson, a mathematics education graduate student, has started a wiki to “bring greater visibility and connectedness to mathematics education research.” The blurb on the site’s front page does a good job of explaining itself, so I’ll just repeat it here.
Why should I read anything here?
If you’re a math teacher, teacher educator, or math education researcher, the knowledge represented here is the knowledge of your profession. Advancing that profession requires, in some part, easy access to that knowledge.
What should I expect here?
At a minimum, this site will document some of the people and literature experienced by one graduate student who is organizing this knowledge as much for himself as anyone else. (One person I showed this to exclaimed, “It’s your brain!” In a sense, it is, and like my brain, there are many, many red links that currently don’t go anywhere.) At or near a maximum, this site could fulfill the needs now served by the NCTM research handbook. There are a lot of possibilities in between. For now the site is mostly people pages and pages describing journal articles, but I plan on adding topic reviews and summaries which can then be linked to people and the articles they’ve written.
Why not just contribute to Wikipedia/Scholarpedia/open access journals?
Wikipedia is wonderful — it would get consideration from me as the crowing achievement of the internet age thus far — but for what I’m doing here it’s (a) not specialized enough and (b) subject to too much external control. I really like what I see from Scholarpedia, but I don’t think they’re interested in article-by-article summaries. (Their blog post Wikifying Scholarly Canons was excellent, however, and its ideas largely apply to this wiki, too.) When I have broader summaries about a topic, I’ll consider contributing them to Scholarpedia. Publishing in open access journals is also wonderful, but journals are interested in new knowledge, not summaries of existing knowledge.
How can I help?
If you have experience with mathematics education research and want to contribute, send me an email at raymond@mathed.net. I think a site like this deserves some purposeful collaboration and editorial control, so I’m not going to open up accounts to the general public. If you’re interested in working with me, or have questions, let me know!
If that sounds like your kind of thing, read Raymond’s blog post announcing the site, and then have a poke around the wiki itself.
More information
Raymond’s blog post announcing the site.
via Vincent Knight on Google+.