Motivation for this work

The main challenges of innovated software implementations is to fascinate users and to encourage them to contribute in both, the development as well as the usage of the software. The same counts for authoring environments, which strongly depend on motivated users who are eager to contribute new contents and provide feedback. In particular, this requires a sophisticated and all-embracing author support including a discussion environment (such as forum, user manuals, blogs, mailing lists) as well as user friendly design and acceptable usability.

Facing the Facts

The aim of the contributors to this work package is to take the user's need into account, in particular, the needs of mathematician that use novel software to author their documents such as mathematical course material or publications.

Implementation of Author Support Handbook Description

JEM provides an Authors' wiki, which suits as a handbook for authoring e-content in mathematics and using e-content in mathematics as well as science education. It aims to collect the existing expertise of the members of the network and the latest innovation in this area of authoring tools and methods. Please refer to the attached pdf for further information.

Software Contribution to the work package:

The past semester, we have been focusing on the listed activities. For further information, please refer to the projects website as well as the JEM Network Homepage.

• locutor: a change management system that facilitates consistency of collaboratively edited documents.
• SWiM: a semantic wiki for collaborative authoring of mathematical content.
• panta rhei: an interactive annotation and assessment environment for mathematical content, deployed in a General Computer Science lecture.

All software is provided with a documentation, user manual, user and developer mailing lists as well as contacts for further author support. Also, blogs are available for the latest news.

Specification for mathematical education

• OMDoc a semantic markup language for mathematical documents
• OpenMath specification
• A new document model for OMDoc
• A variant module for OMDoc
• Revision of presentation elements in OMdoc
• Demo for flexible elision

Further contributions to the work package

Further contributions to this work package will be made during the upcoming workshop on "Scientific Communities of Practice". Questions to be addressed during the workshop lay in field of communities of scientists and how these can be supported. We will discuss and identify the practice of mathematicians and how software applications should be designed in order to suits their needs more ediquate.

Furthermore, we will launch the case study on "communities of scientific practice" with the collaborative and interactive community tool panta rhei. Results of the case study will be of value in improving web2.0. software to be of better use during the collaborative discussion and assessment of documents, which is also a concern of authors.