Notes of online tutorial 1 day 1

This page contains notes gathered after the first online tutorial, April 20th 2007. It should provide links to all things discussed during this day.

Appreciation

My experience, as trainer was rather good. I believe we need to enhance the participants’ communication methods (probably skype voice, maybe showing their screens) as well as the availability of supporting material during that time (so that people can browse about during this time).

I would look forward for echoes of the participants. A comment here or a blog entry would fit.

Schedule etc

We started at 10:00 but had to wait this or that person which hadn’t received instructions correctly. Then we tuned-up on the eds chat but the echo was catastrophic: some people weren’t seen, some kept coming and going. After a long and difficult exchange we managed to get a skype chat running between all which was faithful.

The seminar lasted till 12:30, restarted at 14:00 and stopped at 16:30. Most people were seeing one of the RTSP streams, although packets seemed to have difficulty to go to south efficiently.

Attended the tutorial were Stefan Buchholz and others from OTA, Maechdel, Dieter, Albert.

Topics covered and sources of information

Paul made presentation about the following topics using the slides that can be downloaded in ppt, pdf, or keynote:

• ActiveMath as a web-server with experience of language adaptation
• overview of content collections ingredients, OQMath and publish process
• presentation of techniques and tools used: XML, Java Web Start, Subversion
• deeper presentation of jEditOQMath (quoted the authoring handbook jEditOQMath tutorial)
• demo of eXtasy being used (referenced the eXtasy manual and eXtasy task steps).
• started jEditOQMath jnlp
• experimented first scribbles of content

• picture embedding in ActiveMath

• moreover an overview of ActiveMath was downloaded using the ActiveMath Videos (in avi, mov, and h264). Which was looked at during the noon break.

Tasks mastered by participants

We have covered the concepts and tasks described above. It will be assumed that each participant tries to achieve all of the following tasks and is familiar with them:

• basic installation
• add content and see a bit
• add picture and OQMath and see it
• new document and new page
• …

Further wishes

• more precise jump on board instructions
• Skype voice session
• a break in the afternoon

Should come here if you would like to change these notes (anyone logged in can do so).

Notes of online tutorial 1 day 2

Notes about the ActiveMath Online Tutorial, May 4, 2007

Raw Recordings

Can be found over rtsp in various bandwidths:

• full (1Mb/s): morning, early afternoon,
  late afternoon
• medium (700kb/s): morning, early afternoon,
  late afternoon
• small (800kb/s): morning, early afternoon,
  late afternoon
• tiny (150kb/s): morning, early afternoon,
  late afternoon

I really wish to chapter-tag them, put in a few titles, and cut a few…

Slides

… of this day can be found in the web-space in ppt or in pdf.

Example Content

… was proposed:

• simple-sampler, by Albert, in pdf and its TeX source
• exercise sheet by OTA team in doc

The document simple-sampler was typed live, with the difficulty of having to add many new symbols, a good demonstrator but a wild one. The resulting OQMath file. Note about the many missing geometry symbols: intergeo will certainly change this since OpenMath CDs for geometric constructions is one of the main deliverables.

What happened

• present OTA team, Dieter, Albert
• synced with Skype chat then voice
• discussed the question of Dieter explaining the error seen on this screen.
• presented slides about collections, theories, references and imports
• demoed a few usages of references (DnD of ActiveMath also)
• introduced OpenMath
• explored OpenMath example: ActiveMath (using the context menu), OpenMath website, the ActiveMath symbol-presentation-list
• inserted some math, using OpenMath copy and paste
• introduced QMath, also the QMath symbol types
• produced a few more demoes
• example content request, including some formulæ, was followed up

• got bitten by a copy and paste which contained characters below 32 which jEditOQMath did not show but which made QMath or OQMath break

• introduced the notations elements

• presented how and why to declare new symbols
• set to work to encode the exercises of Albert’s sampler
• made the nice discovery that presenting the notations is really something useful to identify how to input OpenMath (and QMath) expressions
• recalled the content of the collections’ directories
• demoed how to add a new, manually edited table-of-contents as recorded-book
• got bitten by AMATH-1074, which meant that no formula was rendering correctly anymore, workaround introduced
• finalized the encoding of Albert’s sampler; we really need to have better content-dictionaries for elementary-geometry and their notations.

Things to enhance

• several participants complained that running ActiveMath along with Skype conference and receiving the stream was too demanding for their machine
• sometimes the video-compositing of the speaker’s face was covering some of the demonstration slides/screen display
• sometimes the quicktime stream was not loud enough to hear the voice of the participants
• listening to the stream and the skype call does not work… need to mute or cut one of them
• the stream is generally somewhat late, about 5-10s, this lowers the interactivity
• support for participants to do the tasks at the same time should be more explicit, e.g. using the tasks

Revised Schedule of forthcoming tutorials

• We discussed the schedule. We agreed that the next tutorial will be scheduled on Friday May 11th, from 11:00 till 16:30 CET.
• We still need to discuss the suitability of Friday, May 18th.
• We agreed to move the tutorial from Friday, May 25th, to Wednesday, May 23rd.

Material for the next tutorials should also include how to bring ActiveMath to the Web.

Notes of online tutorial 1 Day 3: adaptivity

Notes about the ActiveMath Online Tutorial, May 11, 2007

Raw Recordings

Can be found over rtsp :

• one speed (~700kb/s) of poor quality: morning, early afternoon,
  late afternoon

Other encoding versions have not been recorded as the encoder machine available today was very limited, a tiny Mac Mini.

Slides

…can be obtained in PDF format or PowerPoint format.

What happened

The morning started with a question of Dieter: Why do my files not show up as pages of the book? resolved to be that the files need the .oqmath suffix for them to be processed and, moreover, need all to be embedded within an omdoc or oqmath header.

Then, on air with Carsten Ullrich from China, we browsed through the slides asking questions here and there. Mainly, this was a presentation of the knowledge representation.

Among others, the ActiveMath Metadata Report was referenced.

We worked during the afternoon on the example content of Dieter Kriesell, three scanned pages about Pythagoras Theorem.

We encoded one page which is now part of the subversion of the authoring training. Checking out dieterscollection/ using a subversion client into a directory called dieterscollection inside the content directory is a way to obtain this content and be able to update it in the future.

Similarly, a few examples that I made then and mostly the two last times are to be found inside my attempt-1 collection.

Interesting discussions happened about the classification of each of the items, especially with the focus on schools’ requirements where the formality of a proof is not considered appropriate. As example, the type of the paragraph just before the theorem of Pythagoras on page 80 could have been an example, an elaboration, or even a proof.

Participants were OTA-team, Dieter, and Albert.

Homework

We now have about ten days until the next two last tutorials. We wish participants to continue and/or start encoding their few pages and provide questions and requests for support.

Thus far we know that Dieter will continue on his Pythagoras theorem pages and that Albert will work on files in TeX. Clearly, the content needs to be rather text-book for now since interactive exercises come only at the end of the tutorial.

Revised Schedule of forthcoming tutorials

• We agreed to move the tutorial about interactive exercises from Friday, May 18th, to Wednesday, May 24th.
• We agreed to move the tutorial about integration, sharing, and deployment from Friday, May 25th, to Wednesday, May 23rd.

Notes of online tutorial 1 day 4: deploy and re-use

Notes about the ActiveMath Online Tutorial, May 23rd, 2007

Raw Recordings

Can be found over rtsp : one speed of about ~600kb/s (with peaks at about 2000kb/s):

• morning 1
• morning 2,
• afternoon

Slides

…can be obtained in PDF format, In Flash format or PowerPoint format.

What happened

• participants were Albert, Adrien, OTA team, and Dieter (joined late)
• we first revised the collections provided thus far and introduced Adrien, a new tutorial member
• we then covered a typical installation of ActiveMath for an institution and how it is possible to make this server accessible to its members (e.g. the pupils) from within the institution, as well as from outwith (e.g from home)
• we delved a bit into the ActiveMath configuration, and demoed it

• an introduction to versioning servers was done with specific instructions how to update one’s own ActiveMath or a third-party’s collection (task checkout a collection and activate it)

• we then explained in more detail how to publish one’s own collection and how to exchange it

• a few words about the licensing issues were delivered, complemented by an excursion to the Creative-Commons License your Work and how to apply such a licence to your content
• we followed with a round providing advice for technical issues encountered in the current content collections’ development:
  • OTA team encountered all formulae to only show in prefix form, which got solved by a buildIndex (aka InstallActiveMath.bat on Windows), and took long because LeAM_calculus was also installed
  • several errors experienced got resolved by emptying the omdoc directory and running building-again
  • Adrien (as well as Dieter) encountered difficulties when inserting values for the for and definition element attributes. In both cases, it was accepted that the symbol was not particularly semantically valid since the definition was a very broad one. It was agreed, though, that linking to concrete symbols actually used in the expressions would be nice but would have created too many definitions which would be awkward.
  • Dieter had a reference to Flächen in der Ebene, a concept that would come, one day. A discussion followed about how to rely on content to come (e.g. dummy ids etc).
• we also reviewed who would deploy where, OTA team, Albert, and Adrien will deploy at their school, Dieter will prefer lecture.activemath.org for now

Forthcoming tutorials

• Tomorrow exercise authoring

Notes of online tutorial 1, day 5: interactive exercises

Notes about the ActiveMath Online Tutorial, May 24th, 2007, last of this first series of online tutorial.

Raw Recordings

Can be found over rtsp : one speed of about ~600kb/s mean (with peaks at about 2000kb/s) :

• morning
• afternoon

What happened

Note: all links still have to be populated here!

• We started by reviewing the participants’ projects, each had one:
  • OTA team wish to encode their exercise-sheets as interactive ActiveMath exercises, the collection is still in test phase, it will probably rely on LeAM_calculus
  • Adrien, of HEG Fribourg, is working on encoding their admission exam content, made of texts and exercises, collection hegadmexa started and a first book is visible on lecture
  • Dieter wishes to go further into encoding pythagoras’ introduction and start another about pythagoras page 1 and page 2. collection started here
  • Albert provided us, this time, an exercise sheet being an introduction to vectors and its TeX source, such content is a nice challenge to the semantic macro-structure characterization and potentially to the re-use policy… to be followed in the forum
• the tutorial then went with a relatively elaborate demo of eXtasy in the morning, presenting all features of this graphical authoring tool and ActiveMath exercise system
• doing so, we took the time to encode an an exercise of page 8 of HEG admission book where the learner should simplify fractions.
• the practical realization of a the large multi-steps exercise of OTA followed in the afternoon. It yielded many comments and questions and helped to deepen the knowledge of the tool
• we concluded with a wrap-up with feedbacks. Here are a few, I would love that participants comment further!
  • a pity we spent so little time on eXtasy
  • I intend to go further and authoring, I now have a good background but will certainly need help
  • I have a good grasp now
  • streams recordings are important, I will use them
  • seeing in video what an expert is doing to solve a task we’ve set us is really helpful
  • I keep wishing minimal tasks description that I could reproduce for anything we’ve met during this tutorial, keep going the tasks book, having videos of tasks being achieved would enhance this
  • the streaming technology used worked really fine, the delay between skype-calls and quicktime is annoying but livable.

Forthcoming tutorials

This tutorial was the last one of this series. A few feedback has been provided which shall be echoed here. Among others, desire for more tasks-as-videos and for more tutorial about extasy is requested.