This book is about the online tutorial to start May 20th.
Contains invitations and preparation instructions for participants to take part to the online-tutorial.
The next online tutorials will happen on Wednesday May 23rd, focussing on the deployment of ActiveMath and the re-use of content-collections, and Thursday May 24th 2007, in collaboration with George Goguadze, focussing on the creation of interactive exercises. Find details below.
Please have an ActiveMath installed and started, see first installation instructions and have it proofed before (please request appointment if you need a new machine to be proofed with a remote-desktop method).
Please also make sure to have a Subversion client installed, such as TortoiseSVN.
We request from each participants:
Online authoring tutorial students will receive live the tutorial broadcast and reading the archive recordings… details are here:
The essential ingredient to get coordinate each other and allow feedback to flow from participants will be a chat system. Please join eds chat as first step of your tutorial connection having logged you in before.
We might migrate to other forms of chat if participants believe eds-chat is imperfect. A Skype conference call might also be arranged.
It is important that each participant receives the broadcast well and we shall take a bit of time to tune this at the beginning.
Because of the network delicacies and to allow lower bandwidth, we offer a real-time-streaming-protocol server. The tutorial will be available as a stream from:
rtsp://media.activemath.org/online-tutorial.sdp
or
http://media.activemath.org/online-tutorial.sdp
You might test your installation on this http test movie or this rtsp test movie. The looping movie should also play sound.
Alternatively, reduced bandwidth versions are available: small and tiny.
It has been experienced that this works well with quicktime-player and with the open-source videolan client. This method of streaming has a chance to circumvent firewalls and will try to use such methods as UPnP at the up-stream router to make the stream as smooth as possible.
Depending on your configuration, plugins may be able to display this right in the browser.
Archives of the first session are lost. Archives of the future ones will be made available.
The next online tutorial happens on Friday the 11th of May and will be focussed on the adaptive behaviour of ActiveMath. A preparation is required. Find details below.
For this tutorial to be fruitful we need urgently sample mathematical content which is sliced in items of various types (definitions, examples, introductions, exercises, …) as is typically found in a text-book. The material will be interlinked by relations we shall encode.
Participants should come with it already typed in jEditOQMath and visible in ActiveMath, ideally.
If not managing this, please take the time to write the structure of the items within jEditOQMath, just the titles and item types.
If not managing this, please send me a pointer to the content visible on the web.
Having an ActiveMath installed, see first installation instructions and have it proofed before (please request appointment if you need a new machine to be proofed with a remote-desktop method).
The next online tutorial happens on Friday the 4th of May and will the topic of mathematical input and presentation in ActiveMath. Find the details of the invitation below.
Having an ActiveMath installed, see first installation instructions and have it proofed before (please request appointment if you need a new machine to be proofed with a remote-desktop method).
Have run and understood the tasks of last session as described in the notes of the first session.
Dear participants to the online ActiveMath authoring tutorial,
As announced, the tutorial will take place on the April 20th and May 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th. The first session will start at 10:00 AM CET (i.e. GMT+2) until 12:00 then 14:00 until 17:00.
For the tutorial we are using the real-time-streaming-protocol transmitting live video and audio signals. For this purpose, the following ports should be opened:
Your system administrator should be able to do this. Disabling firewalls may be an alternative which some consider risky.
Please take login or create an account eds.activemath.org, and describe in your profile your expectations of the ActiveMath server. If you have not done so yet, please send me the data of the computer you intend to use: RAM, operating-system, CPU, network.
Please obtain a subversion client and JDK 1.5 and follow the installation instructions. Also, you should please start a first time, and authorize, the jEditOQMath developer snapshot. Please do so before the installation check.
Please also install Firefox.
A very important step for us to enjoy a smooth usage is to verify the most common tasks can be achieved on your machine. We wish to verify this with our own eyes and mouse during the week before the tutorial, using a remote desktop tool such as copilot.com. Please take an appointment with me from Tuesday till Thursday next week so that we can do this verification. The machine that will be used for authoring and during the tutorial, including its network configuration, should be available.
Please watch the tutorial book for further news and the invitation to next meeting instructions.
We are starting a series of online tutorials for authoring ActiveMath content. The first series will be on April 20th and May 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th. The goal of these tutorials is to introduce practically to the current concepts and tools to create content for the ActiveMath learning environment using a computer that authors are familiar with.
Participants are expected to attend using a computer with at least 1Gb of RAM and 1GHz of CPU as well as a high-speed internet connection (at least 512kb/s).
A familiarity with web-browsing and source-authoring is exptected. Participants’ expectations for the usage of the ActiveMath server will be requested to be presented.
Participants should register to Paul Libbrecht paul@activemath.org providing details of their machines’ environment. They will be requested to install all needed components as a first shot and we shall verify this installation the week before the first tutorial using remote computer control methods. Participants will be expected to experiment the authoring activities in the weeks between the tutorials.
We look forward to your participation. Note that the number of participants is limited to 8.
paul (and the other trainers)
This chapter contains notes following the online tutorial. Links to slides, recordings etc… will all be there. Links to tasks covered as well.
This page contains notes gathered after the first online tutorial, April 20th 2007. It should provide links to all things discussed during this day.
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.
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.
Paul made presentation about the following topics using the slides that can be downloaded in ppt, pdf, or keynote:
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.
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:
Should come here if you would like to change these notes (anyone logged in can do so).
This could be the place to ask questions or provide suggestions arising from the online tutorial from April 20th
Notes about the ActiveMath Online Tutorial, May 4, 2007
Can be found over rtsp in various bandwidths:
I really wish to chapter-tag them, put in a few titles, and cut a few…
… of this day can be found in the web-space in ppt or in pdf.
… was proposed:
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.
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
Material for the next tutorials should also include how to bring ActiveMath to the Web.
Notes about the ActiveMath Online Tutorial, May 11, 2007
Can be found over rtsp :
Other encoding versions have not been recorded as the encoder machine available today was very limited, a tiny Mac Mini.
…can be obtained in PDF format or PowerPoint format.
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.
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.
Notes about the ActiveMath Online Tutorial, May 23rd, 2007
Can be found over rtsp : one speed of about ~600kb/s (with peaks at about 2000kb/s):
…can be obtained in PDF format, In Flash format or PowerPoint format.
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
buildIndex (aka InstallActiveMath.bat on Windows), and took long because LeAM_calculus was also installedfor 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.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).Notes about the ActiveMath Online Tutorial, May 24th, 2007, last of this first series of online tutorial.
Can be found over rtsp : one speed of about ~600kb/s mean (with peaks at about 2000kb/s) :
Note: all links still have to be populated here!
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.
This page is a sketch of the online tutorial content to start on April 20th. It still needs polishing.
