Dear colleague,

We are starting the edition process of the new IGI book: Teaching Mathematics Online: TEACHING MATHEMATICS ONLINE: EMERGENT TECHNOLOGIES AND METHODOLOGIES (http://dpcs.uoc.edu/emath)

We kindly invite everybody interested to submit a 2-5 page chapter proposal for this book on or before *** March 15th, 2010***.

You will find more information about this CFC at:
http://dpcs.uoc.edu/emath

Best regards,
Angel A. Juan, M. Antonia Huertas, Sven Trenholm and Cristina Steegmann
Editors

The JEM Network was active for three years: from August 2006 to August 2009. The Network organized 19 workshops, seminars and schools during three years: about one event every two months. The purpose of the network was to advance the use of information technology in education with a special focus in mathematics. These meetings have certainly contributed to that goal.

We have just launched a moodle site to test WIRIS math tools for Moodle.

Pay special attention to WIRIS Quizzes, the improvement to Moodle standard quizz system that allows you to easily add random variables to a question or automatically evaluate them.

www.wiris.com/demo-moodle/
user: teacher or student
password: wiris

This is a demo site, every night the content is cleaned. Don't worry to make a mess.

The first few talks, that I have attended today at the International Conference on Web-based learning 2009, have been about metadata. Erik Duval gave first a powerful keynote talk, and several session speakers have continued on that. We need perhaps some sort of metadata of metadata etc. We already have repositories of repositories, which Duval is promoting.

The University of Oldenburg has been working on OAI harvesting support for repositories. The harvester can be currently seen at http://www.physik-multimedial.de/OAI_SP/trunk/msearch.php. It currently supports both standard and advanced search.

The harvester still has some bugs which will be fixed in the meantime, the above is a preview of what is coming up.

I had an interview on the 3rd of July with William Moen who along with his research assistants is doing a research over different Open Source (OS) platforms and their usage for Learning Repository purposes. The intention of the interview was to get our aspect (mine in primary) on using Drupal as a system and as a platform Learning Repository as we on JEM have done this.

Topics covered in the interview were:

• General aspects on using Open Source as a platform
• Suitability of Drupal as a Learning Repository platform
• Suggestions for people that wish to use Drupal as a platform

I had an interview on the 3rd of July with William Moen who along with his research assistants is doing a research over different Open Source (OS) platforms and their usage for Learning Repository purposes. The intention of the interview was to get our aspect (mine in primary) on using Drupal as a system and as a platform Learning Repository as we on JEM have done this.

Topics covered in the interview were:

• General aspects on using Open Source as a platform
• Suitability of Drupal as a Learning Repository platform

This semester I have been using the Interwrite Personal Response System (see http://www.interwritelearning.com/products/prs/radio/detail.html) in the classroom. Instructor using this system prepares questions that will be shown to the students on a video projector screen in the classroom. The questions are multiple choice, and students answer by clickers.

Zoom H2 microphone

I have been in the business of producing calculus podcasts for a while. Now we experimented reproducing a mathematical talk as a podcast. Together with Emil Volcheck and Tony Shaska I organized a special session at the Joint Meeting of the AMS and MAA that took place in Washington, DC this January. Emil had a Zoom H2 portable audiorecorder that we used to record Peter Buser’s talk. Together with Buser we then recreated the slideshow, and matched that with the recorded audio. The result is available at http://gallery.me.com/mika.seppala#100437.

We have now taken some small measures to improve the navigation on the website. this was done by adding breadcrumbs for individual nodes on the site, eg. the dissemination items, deliverables and some others.

You can now use the breadcrumbs to navigate directly back to the pages where the dissemination items etc are listed instead of having to go through the menu, for example: