JEM - Joining Educational Mathematics blogs

Math Lookup in Firefox: WikiLook plugin

2008-08-01T12:03:23+03:00

Mika often says how convenient he finds the Dictionary lookup integrated in Safari. I do not know how well that performs on mathematical terms so I tested it and compared it briefly with the wikilook plugin. To make a story short: Dictionary lookup finds terms that wikilook fails to parse. They both resort to checking Wikipedia but one finds combined terms such as ''rational functions'' while the other does not, not yet at least. None of them is able to handle numerical expressions such as the geometric series ''1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ...'', which is on Wikipedia and Google can find.

MKM 2008 blogging

2008-07-30T17:05:26+03:00

I could not attend this year the full week of workshops and conferences, including MKM 2008, and going on now in Birmingham but I found out that the Jacobs JEM partners are there and are blogging about it. I found this because I was going through the posts archived under Planet JEM.

In response to MiKo's quest for a search engine competition: yes. Let us first come up with a survey to catalogue engines in order to define divisions and list the math search engines that are out there. For instance, I have very recently installed the MathWeb search plugin in my browser toolbar. Did not even know I could do that.

MathML support in Word 2007

2008-07-30T16:29:46+03:00

After reading http://blogs.msdn.com/murrays/archive/2008/07/28/improved-mathml-support-in-word-2007.aspx">Murray's blog and getting the invitation ID, I managed to download the stylesheets that should convert OOML to MathML2.0. Now I just need to figure out how to get these working on the parallels installation of Word.

0. Notations and conventions

2008-07-23T20:33:46+03:00

To properly understand Stokes' theorem, it is useful to recall a few basic notations and results from calculus.

These notations and results refer to the gradient of a function, to the curl and divergence of a vector field, and to a few fundamental relations among them.

Contents

1. Integral calculus

2008-07-23T20:21:25+03:00

In this chapter the learner will find the basic facts about line, surface and volume integrals that we will need.

Contents

http://jem-thematic.net/files_private/JEM-Stokes-11-LineIntegrals-8816s.pdf">Line Integrals

http://jem-thematic.net/files_private/JEM-Stokes-12-SurfaceIntegrals-8816s.pdf"> Surface Integrals

http://jem-thematic.net/files_private/JEM-Stokes-13-VolumeIntegrals-8816s.pdf"> Volume Integrals

http://jem-thematic.net/files_private/JEM-Stokes-14-Integrals-Summary-8814j.pdf"> Summary

<!-- {|border=1 |- bgcolor=lightgrey align=center

Zemanta plugin and blogging

2008-07-22T17:34:45+03:00

I have been using the Zemanta firefox plugin for a while now and now the Drupal module is installed on the JEM portal. Zemanta uses the semantic web to scout for images and links that might be useful when you are writing a blog entry. I think the idea is a good one and worth of explorations from the point of view of mathematics, say by integrating search engines and smart scientific text analyzers to suggest possible connections. This brings to mind that MKM2008 is about to start as part of Conferences on Intelligent Computer Mathematics. It will be a full week the next one in Birmingham. Hopefully some participant will blog.

BTW, for some reason Zemanta did not load while blogging this.

Podcasting Problems

2008-07-21T19:04:20+03:00

I got wrong advice. Or perhaps I asked a wrong question.

I have reported earlier in my Blog about the bug in the new version QuickTime, which resulted to Keynote loosing audio of a slideshow when exporting the slideshow to QuickTime. In the meanwhile Apple has published an update to Keynote, and now also the export of a Keynote presentation to PowerPoint fails so that PowerPoint 2008 cannot open the exported file. No improvement in exporting the audio to QuickTime. Even worse, currently the QuickTime export will export a slideshow to QuickTime without the audio channel. iMovie, however, fails to open this exported movie. Remedy to this is to open the exported file with QuickTime Pro, and then save the file as a QuickTime movie.

In my quest to improve calculus podcasts I asked the advice of a professional musician about microphones and audio interfaces. Following that advice I then bought a good condenser microphone, and Mbox 2 Pro from Digidesign (http://www.digidesign.com/), which comes with the industry leading audio system Pro Tools (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_Tools). This created an additional problem: I have not yet been able to get Pro Tools operate with the new Mac OS Leopard. To purchase Pro Tools was the wrong advice that I got. Or maybe I should have asked “What is the best audio editing system for me?” rather than asking “What is the best audio editing system?”

After having wasted several days with these problems I gave up and purchased Apogee Duet (http://www.apogeedigital.com/products/duet.php), a wonderful Mac only audio interface. It works with Mac OS X Core Audio system (unlike Pro Tools), its design is slick, and the system worked right out of the box. In 10 minutes I was already recording my version of “Veronika, Der Lenz ist Da” together with Palast Orchester. No, you will not want to listen to me singing. But I am now looking forward to adding the audio tracks by iMovie to Keynote slideshows exported to movies. We should perhaps have a JEM Training session on these topics in Trondheim.

ICMI and ICME: Mathematics Education at a Crossroads

2008-07-13T03:09:54+03:00

I am right now taking part in the ICME 11 conference, the most important international meeting of mathematics educators. ICME conferences meet every four years. This time the meeting is taking place in Monterrey, Mexico. Together with Olga Caprotti I organized a workshop entitled eLearning Mathematics and participated in the activities of the meeting in general.

Several talks about using technology in mathematics education were given. Most of them focused on the use of laboratories and Computer Algebra Systems in allowing students to experiment with mathematical concepts. The more valuable application of technology, namely automatics assessment, was discussed only in a couple of presentations. This reflects the fact that mathematics educators are not, in general, aware of what can be done with systems like MapleTA, Mathdox, STACK, Webwork, etc. Here the JEM community must do a lot of work, and keep talking about this.

Right now I am attending the final session of ICMI Study Groups.
Seymour Papert’s seminal work has been prominently discussed (http://www.papert.org/). The work of the Seventeenth ICMI Study (http://icmistudy17.didirem.math.jussieu.fr/doku.php) is most relevant to JEM – recommended reading for all JEM partners. See Olga's photo stream at flickr for some very nice photo's of the ICME meeting.

Quicktime bug

2008-06-30T09:23:05+03:00

I have been creating Podcasts using Keynote and iMovie. This has been working fine, and I have created podcasts that cover a basic calculus course completely.

Yesterday I needed to create another podcast. I started my Keynote, produced and recorded the presentation, and exported it to Quicktime. But no sound. The recording did not play anymore when the presentation was exported to Quicktime.

I found out that the culprit was the new version (4.5) of Quicktime. See
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20080617143056579. Downgrading Quicktime 7.5 to Quicktime 7.4 helped, and I got my sound back to my presentations. Observe that you need to downgrade Quicktime, not the Quicktime Player. So I finally got to sleep at 3 am this morning.

Geo-Traffic today on JEM

2008-06-25T12:05:54+03:00

Did you notice the live feed monitor, on the left column, under the "Online Now" header? We just added it yesterday to show you how traffic comes to our JEM pages, what pages are hit mostly, by which search phrases (some puzzling ones too). You can also see the map of the traffic, generated live.

Translations on the Learning Repository guide

2008-05-21T02:11:03+03:00

We now have the guide for building a learning repository on Drupal 5.x available in english, spanish and french; the guide instructs through the process of building a similar learning repository as on the JEM website.

The guide is available currently at:

English version, http://www.jem-thematic.net/en/node/715
French version, http://www.jem-thematic.net/fr/node/787
Spanish version, http://www.jem-thematic.net/es/node/781

I would like to thank the contributors of the french and spanish translations for their effort and I'm glad to announce that the INITE project at Universidad Tecnológica de México is successfully running a repository built on these guidelines.

	French version		Spanish version
	Mr. Ambang Kennedy		Roberto Carlos Cruz Aquirre
			INITE, Universidad Tecnológica de México
			Ciudad de México (Mexico City), Mexico

Please feel free to contribute for the other languages as well, also the current translations could use a revising. Looking forward on seeing multilingual content on the other nodes as well.

Firefox and Quicktime

2008-05-15T11:25:13+03:00

I was very frustrated by the podcast page of Mika since the movies never played on my preferred Firefox browser under Linux. I complained to him and he added the disclaimer These podcasts require QuickTime. They will not run on a generic player. to his Calculus podcasts page.

What happened was that a missing-plugin warning blocked the player and redirected to a page where no Quicktime plugin was to be found for Linux. I spent some time today checking the iWeb template used to create the page thinking that maybe one could modify the scripting and do not require explicitely the quicktime plugin, however it turned out that the code itself does not mandate the usage of the quicktime player rather it checks the mime type. Therefore I searched for generic quicktime plugins and found plugger, a streaming multimedia plugin for Unix Mozilla. Beware and behold, it solved the problem just with one quick install line sudo yum install mozplugger. Now, when I check the plugins (about:plugins), it lists MozPlugger 1.7.3 handles QuickTime Windows Media Player Plugin with the mime type video/quicktime.

Moving the JEM website

2008-05-07T13:41:14+03:00

We have moved the JEM website to a new server due to problems with the old webhost provider and the website should be running smoothly now.

What precisely did we do:

Move the databases
Move the site contents
Redirect the domain http://www.jem-thematic.net">www.jem-thematic.net to the new server by changing the A record
Some apache reconfiguration (virtual hosts etc)

Please comment on this blog entry or through the contact form if you notice any unexpected behavior on the website.

We hope this solves some of the peculiar behavior like page timeouts and 503 errors experienced on the old webhost.

EVLM Portal

2008-04-29T18:43:36+03:00

During the last NORMA08, I was made aware of a Leonardo project called EVLM, European Virtual Laboratory of Mathematics. The basic idea of this project is to establish the virtual lab of mathematics and to promote better understanding and utilisation of mathematical knowledge in a range of other disciplines that are underpinned by mathematics. To do that, the partner institutions offer a virtual database of mathematical resources and e-learning materials but also consultancy services to those wishing to learn about the latest results in mathematics and mathematics teaching. It sounds good. I wonder if any of the partners are registered at JEM. If you are, please comment back!

The project has delivered a portal which offers:

FACTS: Frequently Asked Consultation Topics - like a small encyclopedia (not as extensive as mathworld)
ROLs: Reusable Learning Objects, for complex information about mathematical concepts consisting of a longer explanatory text accompanied by examples, illustrations and applications, or links to webMathematica examples.
PROBLEMs: training by solved problems and examples from basic mathematical topics in which a explanatory text is accompanied by step-by-step solution and calculation.
MODULEs: complex educational materials where explanatory text is accompanied by examples, illustrations, solved problems and applications.
eBOOKS: a teacher's and a student's guide, which sound very similar to the JEM wiki.

I would like to offer them the option to develop the eBOOKS online at JEM, and also to test our repository which offers a number of extra functionalities, like tagging, reviewing, RSS feeds, all missing from the EVLM portal until today.

Ongelmia Pear Media-Wiki suodattimen kanssa

2008-04-20T00:46:24+03:00

Ongelmakuvaus

Suodattimen asennusohjeet ovat varsin keskeneräisiä. Ongelmana oli tietää mihin kansioon suodattimen mukana tulevat tiedostot tulisi laittaa, suodatin tulee zip-pakettina ja PEAR paketit on haettava erikseen.

Ratkaisu

Oikea polku oli /site/modules/all minkä jälkeen moduuli on aktivoitava Drupalin hallintasivuilta. Kun tämä on tehty, ilmaantuu näkyviin uusi "input type" jonka polku on konfiguroitava oikeaksi. Erilliset suodattimeen liittyvät PEAR-kirjastot on purettava kansioonsa site/modules/all alle.