In case of an annual report, describe major achievements (e.g. completion of market and user requirements survey, completion of demonstrator design or implementation, initial reactions and feedback from users, first results).


The JEM network has pursued its goal of bridging the gaps between communities involved in mathematics education by organizing events to bring the major stakeholders together. In particular, the 3rd JEM workshop in Barcelona at the end of January 2008, was attended by a number of participants outside the network. Most notably, the coordinator of the @Science Thematic Network, and several members of the InterGeo project have presented their work during our meetings. This led to further contacts and exchanges, especially with the mathematics accessibility community.

The 3rd JEM workshop was also hosting a special session on the OpenMath3 effort of alignment with the most recent MathML3 specification. This work on standards for electronic communication of mathematics is actively pursued by several members of the JEM network and led by M. Kohlhase on the OpenMath3 side and by D. Carslisle on the MathML3 side. A major rewrite of the chapter on content-mathml is underway and affects the collection of OpenMath Content Dictionaries since it plans to adopt OpenMath symbols in its representation. To be successful, this work has to be carried out in cooperation with the OpenMath Society and user groups (including the Science and InterGeo project). Having the coordination meeting for OpenMath3 during the JEM workshop has allowed all interested parties to partake in the ongoing discussions.

The online proceedings of the 3rd JEM workshop are available from the portal. The 4rd JEM meeting has been postponed to take place in September alongside with the 4th European Workshop on Mathematical & Scientific e-Contents and is organized as a day of tutorials and hands-on sessions. The JEM network has also sponsored smaller seminars, including the second SCOOP workshop on Scientific Communities of Practice, hosted in Bremen at the end of June 2008. This meeting is gaining increasing attention and will be organized also the next year. Online proceedings are available from the JEM portal.

A new repository for learning resources, based on LOM metadata, has been added to the JEM portal. The repository accepts descriptions of learning resources in several languages, these can be tagged by keyword chosen by the user and searched or browsed conveniently via a variety of facets, including topic, author, and language. Community comments and reviews are enabled for the entries in the repository so that end-users of the eContent may give public feedback to authors. This option is not yet being used by the JEM community, probably because not accustomed to open reviewing. JEM resources are made available to everyone without requiring prior registration to the JEM portal whereas it is required for entering a learning resource in the JEM repository.
The sofware running the repository has been created as a Drupal module and is also available for download, together with the vocabulary for classifying the resources. It has been adopted by INITE, Universidad Tecnológica de México, who also contributed the Spanish translation of the repository guide.

The JEM portal is supporting multilinguality, namely pages can be translated to several languages and will appear in the language of choice, if a translation exist. These translations are done on a volunteer basis, like any other contribution to the portal.