The JEM Network was active for three years: from August 2006 to August 2009. The Network organized 19 workshops, seminars and schools during three years: about one event every two months. The purpose of the network was to advance the use of information technology in education with a special focus in mathematics. These meetings have certainly contributed to that goal.

The first few talks, that I have attended today at the International Conference on Web-based learning 2009, have been about metadata. Erik Duval gave first a powerful keynote talk, and several session speakers have continued on that. We need perhaps some sort of metadata of metadata etc. We already have repositories of repositories, which Duval is promoting.

This semester I have been using the Interwrite Personal Response System (see http://www.interwritelearning.com/products/prs/radio/detail.html) in the classroom. Instructor using this system prepares questions that will be shown to the students on a video projector screen in the classroom. The questions are multiple choice, and students answer by clickers.

Zoom H2 microphone

I have been in the business of producing calculus podcasts for a while. Now we experimented reproducing a mathematical talk as a podcast. Together with Emil Volcheck and Tony Shaska I organized a special session at the Joint Meeting of the AMS and MAA that took place in Washington, DC this January. Emil had a Zoom H2 portable audiorecorder that we used to record Peter Buser’s talk. Together with Buser we then recreated the slideshow, and matched that with the recorded audio. The result is available at http://gallery.me.com/mika.seppala#100437.

To get a true picture of the performance differences, I took snapshots of CPU and memory usage of Mac Pro and of MacBook Air while the computers where producing the movie discussed in my previous blog entry.

The picture above shows the CPU usage of my Mac Pro, and the picture below that of my MacBook Air.