Supplementary Reading:
Notes for a longer CCP Workshop, July, 2000, with updates to 2001

Frank Wattenberg, who originated the concept of the Connected Curriculum Project, until recently was the director of Math Forum -- he will soon join the faculty of the US Military Academy. Frank's CCP material is still available at Montana State University.

In the beginning of CCP, we also worked with folks at California Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo. Their materials are mostly longer, interdisciplinary projects.

Another important member of the CCP development team is Bill Mueller, until recently an employee of Mathsoft, where he worked on the Mathsoft Learning Site. Bill worked with us on the layout of the site and the format of web pages. His Design Principles, located on the CCP site, includes examples of good and bad design for onscreen materials, along with summaries of the research on design principles.

A new development is the NSF-sponsored National Science Digital Library. NSF has made the first awards, one of which went to the Mathematical Association of America to create the Mathematical Sciences Digital Library (MathDL). The technical side of the MathDL is handled by Math Forum.

MathDL has three components, only the first of which is operational at this time:

• The Journal of Online Mathematics and its Applications (JOMA), an MAA online journal showcasing exemplary materials and also containing articles about student learning using online materials. David Smith is the founding editor.

• Digital Classroom Resources, a library of reviewed, student-tested, online materials. We expect that most of the the CCP materials will find a long-term home here.

• Commercial Product Listings, which will contain listings of all commercially available learning materials in mathematics, including books, software, and commercial online materials. Each entry will have a summary of the materials, a review by the publisher, a second review from MAA, and a link to a discussion site for users.

Another development to watch is the soon-to-be-functional Mathematics Markup Language (MathML). This will be a language implementation in XML, a language for writing web pages, and will allow the correct display of online mathematcs without using graphic images. Morover, MathML will allow formulas to be captured from a web page and pasted as "live" formulas in a variety of computer algebra systems.

Yet another activity of interest is the development of metadata for mathematical materials. These "tags," included in the source for a web page, will identify such features of the page as the type of content, the educational background required, and any additional software needed. This will enable sophisticated searches of online materials, including cross-disciplinary searches throughout NSDL. Here is a link to the task force working on this effort: Mathematics metadata. The CCP materials do not have these tags at present, but when they are deposited in MathDL, the metadata tags will be added.