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Levering on the influence and use of social media in students' perception of learning mathematics, this project has a twofold purpose: the research aim is to contribute in breaking away from the idea that digital culture can be considered as opposed to school culture, investigating the epistemic and didactical affordances of mathematical Internet m...
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... forward from this first naïve appearance of memes in the school environment and trying to figure out how to build a significant task to test our assumptions in an almost unexplored territory is, of course, a challenge that can be tackled only by small steps. We started observing students' reaction to mathematical Internet memes found in the web (examples in Figure 4) and used by the teacher to catch and hold attention, to stress specific aspects of already taught topics and to trigger classroom discussion. The quality of the mathematical discourse enthused by these mathematical Internet memes convinced us that interacting with them calls mathematical competencies into play but, to dig deeper into the epistemic of memes, we realised that students had to create the memes themselves and shoot videos to keep track of the explanations of the mathematical meanings. ...
Citations
... In the education space, memes have been used as part of assessment exercise across various domains, such as language teaching (Al Rashdi, 2020;Catelly, 2019;Garg, 2021;Han & Smith, 2023;Harshvardhan et al., 2019;Kayali & Altuntas, 2021), media literacy (Boyle, 2022;Elmore & Coleman, 2019;Harvey & Palese, 2018), communication studies (Paul, 2020), mathematics (Bini & Robutti, 2019), geography (Tarisayi, 2022) and pharmacy (Brown, 2020). Various studies report the use of memes as an assessment exercise (Bini & Robutti, 2019;Brown, 2020;Elmore & Coleman, 2019;Hartman, 2020;Harvey & Palese, 2018). ...
... In the education space, memes have been used as part of assessment exercise across various domains, such as language teaching (Al Rashdi, 2020;Catelly, 2019;Garg, 2021;Han & Smith, 2023;Harshvardhan et al., 2019;Kayali & Altuntas, 2021), media literacy (Boyle, 2022;Elmore & Coleman, 2019;Harvey & Palese, 2018), communication studies (Paul, 2020), mathematics (Bini & Robutti, 2019), geography (Tarisayi, 2022) and pharmacy (Brown, 2020). Various studies report the use of memes as an assessment exercise (Bini & Robutti, 2019;Brown, 2020;Elmore & Coleman, 2019;Hartman, 2020;Harvey & Palese, 2018). In most cases, the assessment involves writeups/discussion/creation of memes as part of the assessment. ...
Internet memes, more commonly termed as memes, are very popular among students in late teens and among young adults. Internet memes usually emerge from popular shows/movies, in which a snapshot is taken and humour is added to present a point of view on some issue of social/cultural relevance. A combination of popular culture, visual appeal, and humor makes them very influential, particularly among young internet users. Hence, memes are no longer treated merely as jokes. Rather, they are increasingly being considered a digital cultural artefact and deemed a very useful medium to approach younger audience. In the education space, memes have been used as part of assessment exercise across various domains, such as language teaching, media literacy, mathematics, and pharmacy. However, the use of memes as a teaching aid is less documented, particularly in case of management education. This study reports the outcomes of the use of memes as part of course delivery of management courses at Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur. The responses were collected via a survey once the course was completed. Analysis suggests that the memes not only help the students in understanding the concept in an engaging manner, but also aid in concept recall during the examination.
... Despite the prevalence of memes in popular culture, there needs to be more exploration of the whole theme of memes in education and, more specifically, in mathematics assessment (Bini & Robutti, 2019). Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the possibility of using mathematical memes to reduce the incidence of common errors in assessment among students. ...
... Also, 79% of 13-17year-olds share memes daily on social media (Digital information world, 2023). Few publications are found in the literature addressing internet memes and mathematics education (Bini & Robutti, 2019;Dongqiang et al., 2020;Bakker et al., 2021). ...
... Dawkins related memes to genes, for they evolve and pass on in various forms to others (Bini & Robutti, 2019;Abrams, 2021;Reddy et al., 2020;Valensise et al., 2021). Mike Godwin, in 1993 re-discussed internet memes and considered them a subset of memes. ...
... The triple-s construct of the partial meanings of a meme (Bini & Robutti, 2019) can provide support in both directions. The triple-s is a semiotic tool that enables the reader to recognise and decode the layers of meanings necessary to understand a mathematical meme. ...
... The interconnected interpretation of these three partial meanings gives what Bini and Robutti (2019) call the full meaning of the meme, which corresponds to the represented mathematical statement. Thus, applying the triple-s, teachers are guided in the process of extracting and interpreting meaningful data to decode image-based memes, connecting the new artefact to a known mathematical object (the statement). ...
... The two cases presented in this chapter are virtuous examples of integrating current technological tools into mathematics teaching practices. Teaching experiments conducted on the use of inquiring game GeoGebra activities with primary and secondary school students (Soldano & Arzarello, 2017;Soldano & Sabena, 2019) and of mathematical memes in upper secondary school (Bini & Robutti, 2019; showed the positive effects of the activities designed with these tools on students' motivation and learning. ...
There is no doubt that the introduction of digital technology in primary and secondary school has radically changed the way of teaching and learning. Specifically, considerable changes have occurred in the field of mathematics education. The aim of this chapter is to highlight such an evolution taking into account different and distinct aspects and points of view which are proper to mathematics teaching and learning. After all, the integration of digital tools into the world of education was unavoidable and necessary, and both teachers and students have been developing new knowledge and skills to face an evolving digitalized society and to become critical thinkers and informed citizens. In the last 30 years, teachers and students have experimented with new ways of manipulating, visualising, representing and treating mathematical objects, new approaches to pose, face and solve mathematical problems, new processes for designing and playing mathematical games, new strategies to assess mathematical skills, and nowadays also new forms of distance teaching and learning. On their side, researchers in mathematics education have detected and studied these new skills, approaches, processes, and strategies in order to provide teachers with the necessary tools and support to exploit effectively the functionalities offered by the technology. The focus of this chapter is on the integration of technology into mathematics teaching, the main issues that have been faced in the last 30 years and the challenges that are still to be faced. A survey of the literature helps outlining the existing landscape, and the current issues are highlighted and illustrated through the description and analysis of some examples. Such examples are properly selected from research studies, projects and didactical experiences in which the authors have been personally involved (Aldon & Panero, Can digital technology change the way mathematics skills are assessed? ZDM, 52, 1333–1348, 2020; Arzarello & Soldano, Compendium for early career researchers in mathematics education. ICME-13 Monographs. Springer, 2019; Bini et al., Maths in the time of social media: Conceptualizing the internet phenomenon of mathematical memes. International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020739X.2020.1807069, 2020; Bini, Robutti, & Montagnani, When they tell you that i^56=1: Affordances of memes and GeoGebra in mathematics. The International Journal for Technology in Mathematics Education, 28(3), 143–151, 2021. https://cloud.3dissue.com/170388/199108/233436/IJTME-Vol28-3-2021/index.html; Soldano & Sabena, Technology-based inquiry in geometry: Semantic games through the lens of variation. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 100(1), 7–23, 2019).KeywordsDigital technologyCritical thinkingFormative assessmentInquiring-games
... Educational potentialities of mathematical memes are being recognised by research in mathematics education, with studies reporting the positive effects of their use on students' engagement, observed during in-person school experiments (Beltrán-Pellicer, 2016;Bini & Robutti, 2019a, 2019bBrito et al., 2020;Felcher & Folmer, 2018;Friske, 2018Friske, , 2020Friske & Rosa, 2021) and distance-learning activities (Abrams, 2021), and by studies in cognitive science, showing that mathematical memes can engage students in educational contexts (Van, 2021). ...
... We summarise here Koestler's bisociation theory of the creative act (1964), which we use to frame theoretically our widened definition of creativity as the result of new connections, and the triple-s construct (Bini & Robutti, 2019a), that we use to understand in what parts and cultural realms mathematical memes can be analytically separated into and how these parts relate to each other. ...
... Yet, to apply Koestler's (1964) theoretical framework to mathematical memes, we need to unveil these narrative strategies to understand what is bisociated and how. To do this, we adopt the triple-s construct of partial meanings (Bini & Robutti, 2019a): according to this construct, the interpretation of a meme is achieved through the understanding of three partial meanings and their subsequent interconnection to build the full meaning of the meme which, in our case, is the mathematical statement. ...
Mathematical Internet memes are examples of how the creative thrust characterising the
Web 2.0 environment reaches the field of mathematics, translating mathematical statements
into a new digital form endowed with an epistemic potential that is capable of initiating
a process of mathematical argumentation. The research presented in this paper aims
to shed light on the creative process of mathematical memes, contributing to building a
body of knowledge on mathematical memes that, prospectively, could enable educators to
profit from these objects in their teaching. Theoretically, this is based on a widened concept
of creativity that focuses on the connection linking digital culture with mathematics, and
on distinguishing and merging three perspectives to disclose the meanings of mathematical
memes. Methodologically, the process of mathematical memes’ creation is investigated
through a reverse engineering approach on a dataset of about 2100 items collected in a
3-year-long ethnographic observation within online communities. The result is a heuristic
action model of the creation process, that is validated by creating two new mathematical
Internet memes that are shared online within the observed communities to explore if they
retain the mathematical and epistemic characteristics of Web-found ones.
... Building of the fact that "as in thermodynamics macro quantities such as internal energy or temperature are due to micro quantities as particles' velocity" (Prodromou et al., 2018, p. 447), this macro-level correlation is investigated through a micro-level analysis. This microlevel analysis is conducted via the lens of the triple-s construct of the partial meanings of a meme (Bini & Robutti, 2019), that allowed to distinguish the semiotic components of the meme and connect them to the observed changes in praxeologies, and to the appearance of facilitators as mentors (Vygotsky, 1978;Wood et al., 1976) and micro-level agents (Prodromou et al., 2018). ...
... We consider both mentors and agents as micro-level elements because they were not part of the macro variables we had direct access to during the experiment (i.e. the components of the activity and the students' praxeologies). Nevertheless, we expect to infer their emergence looking deeper into the macrolevel connection between activity and praxeologies through the lens given by the triple-s construct of the partial meanings of a meme (Bini & Robutti, 2019). According to this construct, the full meaning carried by a meme can be analysed by taking apart three partial meanings: ...
This work aims at investigating the educational potentialities of mathematical memes, digital objects belonging to students’ out-of-school culture, in combination with classic educational objects as GeoGebra applets. To pursue our goal, we observed a group of 29 12th-grade students who design, create and interact with mathematical memes and GeoGebra applets on complex numbers, during an experiment carried out in Turin in March 2019. Our analysis follows three students, from the design and production phases to the group discussion and the interviews conducted the following year. Specifically, we looked for changes in students’ praxeologies (Chevallard, 1992, 1999) and we traced them back to ZPD mentors (Vygotsky, 1978; Wood et al., 1976) and micro-level agents (Prodromou et al., 2018). Results show that the social value of mathematical memes promotes the appearance of new micro-level mediums that enhance the educational potentialities of GeoGebra and contribute to foster changes in students’ praxeologies.
... Their relevance in the online discourse is so widely established that researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently disclosed the results of research aimed at developing a new technology to make memes accessible for people with visual impairments (Gleason et al., 2019). Despite this massive diffusion and accredited potentialities, memes remain understudied in educational research (Knobel & Lankshear 2005, 2007, 2018Romero & Bobkina, 2017) and even less in research focusing on mathematics education, where at the present, only a few exploratory studies have been conducted (Benoit, 2018;Bini & Robutti, 2019a;Bini & Robutti, 2019b). Since memes on mathematical topics dwell at the intersection of the spheres of learning involving personal interests, peer culture, and mathematical academic content, I believe that the connected learning framework (Ito et al., 2013(Ito et al., , 2018 could be a suitable lens to observe the learning experiences involving these artifacts. ...
... Zooming in from the learning setting to the artifacts, I will use the triple-s construct of the partial meanings of a meme (Bini & Robutti, 2019a) to guide the understanding of the memes and of teachers' and learners' interaction with them. ...
Memes are humorous digital artifacts created by web users copying an image and overlaying a personal funny caption. They are virally shared in the web and represent an important part of the online discourse young learners are exposed to on a daily basis. The aim of this paper is to show how memes on mathematical subjects can inspire learning activities that harness the participatory and playful nature of these digital artifacts, connecting positive emotions, focal for learning achievement, to serious mathematical reasoning. The paper presents a collection of 3 examples taken from different learning scenarios: 1 from a spontaneous out-of-school learning environment and 2 from intentionally designed school experiences conducted with 6th-and 12th-grade students, all pivoting on the use of a popular meme based on a Spiderman cartoon. The analysis elicits the core properties of these experiences in order to show how they fit within the connected learning framework. I hope the outcome of this research can shed some light on how educators can leverage on students' popular culture embodied in memes to foster interest-powered learning outcomes in mathematics.
... To unpack memes' meaning, we have identified what we call a triple-s construct of the partial meanings, necessary to grasp the full meaning of a meme [1]. 1. ...
Memes are digital artefacts iconic of the Web 2.0. They are cultural expressions exemplary of contemporary society, made possible by digital technologies, and they embody the inventive participatory culture that permeates social media interaction. For this reason, we believe they can be fruitfully included in teaching practices aimed at eliciting students' creative contributions, with the intent to expand traditional teaching methods. The purpose of this workshop is to show the didactical potential of memes. This goal will be pursued in four progressive steps: getting participants acquainted with memes, guiding them through the unpacking of the social and mathematical messages carried by a meme, analyzing a series of examples of mathematical memes and their possible uses for teaching, and finally experimenting with a guided hands-on activity focused on the creation of mathematical memes, using online devices.
Il termine "Internet meme" si riferisce a contenuti digitali che si diffondono viralmente dopo essere stati mutati dagli utenti. Queste mutazioni narrano storie diverse mantenendo la riconoscibilità del meme originale. Tra questi, i meme immagine sono particolarmente popolari perché sono facili da creare e coinvolgenti. I meme matematici, a loro volta, sono mutazioni matematiche dei meme immagine e presentano potenzialità didattiche: possono facilitare l’apprendimento e stimolare la creatività degli studenti. Tuttavia, l’introduzione dei meme matematici in classe sfida il paradigma educativo tradizionale, il che può mettere in difficoltà gli insegnanti. Questo lavoro presenta il costrutto della Tripla S, uno strumento semiotico per comprendere i meme. Utilizzando dati provenienti da sperimentazioni con studenti di diversi gradi scolastici, viene mostrato come questo strumento possa essere utilizzato nella ricerca per indagare i processi cognitivi degli studenti, e nella didattica per progettare attività basate sui meme matematici.
Introducción: este estudio tiene como objetivo principal caracterizar el contenido de los memes matemáticos existentes en internet y en algunas redes sociales. Se trata el problema relacionado con la evolución del concepto de meme y sus implicaciones en la educación mediada por la tecnología. Metodología: se basó en un estudio exploratorio de corte cualitativo en que se implementó el análisis de contenido como método para examinar los memes y generar temas que evidenciaran las características de los memes seleccionados. Resultados y discusión: proporciona una caracterización del contenido de los memes matemáticos, cuyo contenido aborda situaciones de la vida cotidiana, escenas de caricaturas, películas que invitan a los estudiantes a identificar analogías de la situación presentada con las expresiones simbólicas propias de las matemáticas. Conclusiones: los memes permiten reforzar los conocimientos necesarios para estudiar conceptos matemáticos, fórmulas, derivadas, integrales, por mencionar algunos, y evidenciar el uso los símbolos matemáticos en contextos de la vida cotidiana.
Students process information in two modes: cognitive and experiential. Case studies and stories are generally used as tools for experiential information processing. This article uses memes as an instructional tool to deliver information for experiential information processing in a public speaking course. The effectiveness of memes as an instructional tool is assessed through a questionnaire in terms of their overall effectiveness and its memorability, concreteness, and course orientation. The findings suggest that memes can be used effectively as instructional tools like stories to make the students understand, discuss, and engage with course content.
