Math Sciences Conference Group on Digital Educational Resources
March 29, 2003
Notes taken by Brandon Muramatsu.
Agenda: http://www.math.duke.edu/education/ConferenceGroup/schedule.html
Attendees: http://www.math.duke.edu/education/ConferenceGroup/participants.html
Project Updates
· NCTM
o lluminations Project working with Marco Polo Foundation to continue
o Reflections Projects video-based snippets of actual teaching, soft launch in 3 weeks with 3 lessons
o OnMath: Online journal for teachers, stories of actual teachers sharing experiences elementary, middle and high-school
§ Published 3-times a year
§ After summer 2003 will be a member benefit for NCTM members,
o Contribute to Math History project, online publication
· ENC
o Dept. of Education extended through Fall of 2004
o Focus Magazine
§ Online weekly publication, with online content focusing on one area
§ Still have smaller (less pages) print publication 4-6 times a year
o Learning Matrix: College level for College Professor
§ Stronger on science than math content
o fedrl
§ Take materials that are already digital, supported by NSF and Department of Education, to create a catalog (either online publications or sets of applets)
· iLumina
o Completely implemented Math Taxonomy (did a mapping of iLumina math taxonomy to MathNSDL taxonomy)
o Encourages folks to upload resource to iLumina
o Are allowing selves to be harvested, scheduled to be harvested to Cornell
· Math Forum
o Math Tools: Digital Library of material for pre-K through Calculus
§ Have list of topics by grade (mined from Table of Contents from texts)
§ Includes a software developer’s area
§ Is basically a referatory
§ Will have Amazon-style user reviews
· Ethnomathematics Digital Library
o Found most of the relevant resources already available on the Web
o Working now with archives to find resources, running into issues of copyright and therefore permission to put an “old” resource online
o Outreach to advocate concepts of Ethnomathematics
· UIUC and Wolfram Research
o Enhance Mathworld and Function site
o Extract OAI-compliant Dublin Core metadata from Mathworld and Function site
o MSC and Math Taxonomy
§ Need to do cross-walk to existing Mathworld taxonomy
o Develop course related material for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at UIUC
o Working with American Institute of Physics to move their production system to XML-based journal structure
§ Will try an map AIP journal’s embedded MathML to link MathML in journal to functions site and identify missing functions in MathWorld
· MERLOT
o New peer review structure coming
· JOMA
o Publishing 3rd volume
o Module in 3rd volume, is a good example of re-use (of Frank Wattenberg’s stuff) leading to a new publication
· Online Book for Mathematical Modeling at USMA (also a Calculus book coming from Duke and Lang Moore and David Smith)
o Students and authors co-developing text
o Desired abilities needed from digital libraries
§ Ability to give students a piece of a resource at a time
§ Ability to annotate the book as the class progresses
§ Access to tools (in this case, modest computer algebra systems)
Federated Search
· QUESTION: Do collections want to collectively embark on federated search (aka Bill Mischo’s broadcast search)?
NSDL Update
· Views of the NSDL
o “1998 View”: NSDL as a centrally developed large, structured digital library for undergraduate education with aspirations to help undergraduate education
o “Classical NSF Program Approach”: Reform education, all of science, traditional NSF put out a solicitation and provide grants
· Concerns:
o NSF funds long-term activates with short term funding
o Resource for integration were not integral to individual projects
o Coverage of content is patchy
· CI Emphasis
o Low-cost ways to do things that can grow to a large level without a large number of staff involved
o Metadata repository (mainly OAI), deployed a portal with search service in December 2002
o Encouraging NSF to put more resources that are structured for the long term
§ “Smithsonian” model: some museums are very autonomous
§ NSF keen on this model, large exemplars that are simultaneously significant projects in own right as well as federation of projects
Pre-Proposal
· Exemplar in Undergraduate Mathematics partially supported by NSF
o Going to MAA Executive Committee for their buy-in
o Build substantial organizations that have longer term funding
o MAA would be longer term home
o Elements
§ Planning Group (this group)
§ Workshops
§ Math in the News feature
§ Provide a home for services (e.g., federated search)
§ Market Research/Financial Planning
Mathematics on the Web
· IBM no longer supporting Tech Explorer
· Design Science really the only group developing a plug-in
· Mozilla/Netscape 7 has MathML (presentation) native support
· Microsoft’s next Office will be XML enabled, Microsoft working with Design Science to represent equations as MathML
· Wolfram can convert presentation MathML to Mathematica kernel type representation
· Types of difficult math typically in applied math
· (Statistics, Calculus typically easy to represent)
· QUESTION: Can this group decide upon an approach to use MathML (content and/or presentation) to use in our projects?
· Quotes:
o Mathematicians are like universities both are slow...
o MathML is the answer, not sure what the question is...
· Robby: Semantically search and discovery of mathematics on the web
o Goes beyond just MathML for presentation
o Number of examples presented that illustrate the problem Robby suggests
o May go beyond education, but be better suited for research audience
o Desire to hold initial meeting(s) with space provided by both AIM and IMA by the Fall 2003
Potential NSDL Proposal
· Robby: Potential NSF proposal on NSDL-wide workshop on standards, learning objects and learning technology
o See handout provided by Lang
Math Taxonomy
· iLumina has converted over to the Taxonomy
· ENC
o Not converted over
o Terry H. wants to know about rolling up
· Math Forum and Math Tools
o See http://www.mathforum.org/wiki/MathForum?TopicsLists/BroadTopics for a list of discussion items
· Ethnomathematics
o Converted taxonomy to alphabetical list
o Catalogers catalog based upon taxonomy
o Searchers see alphabetical list and but results show the full path to the taxon if it exists in multiple paths
o Catalog on three taxonomies: subject, instructional issues,
· ACTION: Begin gathering and documenting individualized implementations, and best practices
Other Taxonomies/Vocabularies
ACTION: Develop Listing Teaching and learning strategies for using the resource
· What types of vocabularies/taxonomies exist (expand upon Terry’s list)?
· What types of vocabularies/taxonomies should exist (really from Math perspectives)?
o Resource Type (BEN, SMETE, MERLOT)
o Process Skills (ENC)
o Instructional Issues (ENC)
· Who’s the audience?
· Are these lists math-specific, or are they more generic?
General Discussion
· For Member Organizations (NCTM), restricting access to membership
o Will the activity generate more memberships
o Or rather is membership dues going to support the activity, and hence the activity should support members
· Further Discussion Items
o Copyright and repository storage
o Interested in doing regular workshops of what’s available and how to do simple development as a lead in to use of resources
· Who else should participate in the Conference Group?
o NSDL CI representation
o AMS participation (namely Patrick Ion)
o Community College representation
§ CCIME/MAA Committee
o NSDL
§ Physics Digital Library
§ Biology Digital Library
§ Other NSDL-funded projects with mathematicians
o Math librarians
o NASA
o Susan Holmes, Statistician at Stanford
o Math Resources in Canada folks
· Suggestion by Frank:
o Introduce working group structure to have subsets work on different areas
o Need to identify things to work on (to affect student learning)
§ Suggested brainstorming activities
· Frank: Outreach to get more use of resources available by users
· Gene: Inreach to examine what affect each of the projects has
· Don:
o Joint surveys of and sharing of results of user surveys