With proper use of information and communication technology, ICT, we can industrialize instruction by making the delivery of education more effective, and by offering instructors tools that alleviate routine things such as grading of papers. ICT has the potential to industrialize instruction.

We have not, however, seen the right applications and services, which really make the difference in education. On the contrary, sometimes the use of ICT in education has resulted to worse outcomes.

With proper use of information and communication technology, ICT, we can industrialize instruction by making the delivery of education more effective, and by offering instructors tools that alleviate routine things such as grading of papers. ICT has the potential to industrialize instruction.

We have not, however, seen the right applications and services, which really make the difference in education. On the contrary, sometimes the use of ICT in education has resulted to worse outcomes.

In a virtual learning environment with contents that follow textual and graphic (image) formats the correct reading of formulas and mathematical expressions is not feasible. The students of such non face-to-face simply do not “hear” how the formulas are read and therefore they can not access that important competence.

Technologies for classifying mathematical digital educational materials are often based on the adoption of metadata formats facilitating machine processing and management of information. A specific standard, called Learning Object Metadata (LOM), was developed to describe e-content in education and to accommodate the requirements of archiving, searching and retrieving learning materials. Metadata itself does not specify how to classify content and many taxonomies and vocabularies have evolved over the years.

In informal collections of collaboratively created knowledge like wikis, there is no well-defined way of reporting issues with knowledge items. When something is wrong or needs improvement, users are hardly supported to communicate this in a focused way: discussing about an issue, coming up with ideas on how to solve it, agreeing on the best idea, and finally putting this idea into practice in a retraceable way. This workflow is sometimes standardised in terms of best practices and social conventions, but not supported by the system in terms of knowledge management.

I recently posted a poster at the 4th European Workshop on Mathematical and Scientiffic e-Contents in Trondheim, Norway. As the main goal was to get the most possible feedback before I start working on the project, I thought it would be nice to post it here too...

Building a mathematical LCMS on top of a light, open CMS

Authoring, editing and publishing [mathematical] learning content adapted to today's environment (that is, the web) is still an unsolved problem.

At the Jacobs University Bremen we offer a lecture on General Computer Science to an international student body. We are challenged with the students' different mathematical backgrounds. The majority of our students believe that these mathematical discrepancies are very problematic, especially in the beginning of a course. Students reported that they had problems to get acquainted with the professor's notation systems; some had the feeling that the pace of the course was inappropriate, while others did not face any problems.

Michael Kohlhase (JacU) has led the development effort for content MathML in the Math Working Group at W3C in collaboration with the JEM partners David Carlisle (NAG), Paul Libbrecht (DFKI), James Davenport (Bath), Chris Rowley (OU), and Olga Caprotti (UH). In this effort, the two leading formats for representing the content of mathematical formulae are harmonized and put on a sound semantic basis. As an effect, the XML encoding of OpenMath3 and the core of content MathML3 (strict content MathML3) will be simple syntactic variants.

Description of the available and needed tools to implement eLearning in the mathematics area.

Murray Sargent will be replaced by Dave Brooks.