“KWARC was!”

I started reading “Gödel, Escher, Bach” and I came across an use case for change management. The author introduces an example on page x. He then starts a new section and discusses a new thought. One the next page (x+1) he refers back to the example (on page x) with the lines “as shown above”. I found that distracting, since the example was on the previous page and I had to interrupt my reading to make sense of this line.

I am guessing, the author had a different format when writing the book. There, the example most likely was on the right page and his reference made absolute sense. But depending on the format we choose for printing/ displaying a document, references need to be adapted. In consequence, change management is also useful for automatically updating references inside of documents. Although, I guess, these do not need to be propagated and, therefore, are not that exiting :0)

By the way, I would really like that feature when writing papers: I often leave out the caption of figures to save room. Hence I must use references such as “to the left” and need to update these references whenever I rearrange a picture.

Description in the CAPS 2008 call: “Proactive systems need to be able to understand the different contexts that apply in and for any given user/communication situation. Such context awareness is based on inference of sensor data to achieve knowledge on a users’ state, emotions, activities, goals, etc. and to proactively adjust the systems behavior. Deploying proactive systems in the increasingly embedded and ubiquitous environments further raises the need to make them context-aware.”

While browsing Julika Mimke’s webpage, I also read about the “ENGINe” project and I remembered that Isabell Schaffer, who also attended the SCOOP workshop in August, had already told me about that project and I wanted to get back with her about it.

According to Isabell Schaffer, ENGINe aims at developing a tool, which supports the communication and collaborations of creators of eLearning content. The project is an extension of the “Physik multimedial” (pmm) project, which created a learning platform for physics.

pmm provides a course and assignment management system, a media base, the “Linklistendatenbank (LiLi)”, self-learning units and information on didactics in physics. The system is used by university as well as highschool students and teachers. The Institute for Science Networking Oldenburg (ISN) provided the server, developed LiLi and the self-learning units. The ENGINe project addresses the support, maintenance, and extension of pmm, which has already been used by the University of Oldenburg, Bremen, Düsseldorf, Rostock, Greifswald, and the FHOOW Emden as well as some highschools.

While browsing the JEM network, I found an announcement of the JEM Seminar “Community Interaction and Gain using mathematical eLearning material”. The workshop aims at gathering developers throughout JEM to guide through Web2.0 tools and services, which support the interaction between students, eLearning tool creators, as well as teaching staff.

panta rhei facilitates the collaboration and interaction between professor, TAs, and students; while at the same time presenting semantically enriched content and supporting annotation as well as rating of content. In consequence, this workshop will be a great opportunity to gain an overview on other implementation as well as feedback on the system.

I went to the organizer’s web page (Julika Mimkes), who is the project manager of the Institute for Science Networking Oldenburg GmbH . In particular, her work in the project “physik multimedia” has raised my interest, since it addresses the teaching of physics to biologist and therefore overlaps with my personal research goal:

I am analyzing mathematical practice. In particular, I am interested in how different research areas do and use mathematics. Based on that, I am hoping to develop a method (and improve my system) in order to allow new students (with different background, from different countries) to adopt to the math in a specific lecture. I am therefore extremely keen on learning more about the results of the “physics multimedia” project and will try to get in contact with Julika Mimkes, if possible, inviting her to one of our KWARC meetings.

mmlkit is a Java-based toolkit for building presentation engines for content markup formats for mathematics.

The next generation of content markup formats for mathematics come with a flexible mechanism for defining mathematical notations (see e.g. the MathML3 Working Draft. mmlkit facilitates building presentation engines that use such notation definitions as a parameter.

The mmlkit toolkit currently has three components:

• mmlproc - A library for transforming Content MathML/ OpenMath into Presentation MathML.
• collector - A library for collecting notation definition from a document collection.
• rndgrab - A library for selecting appropriate renderings for a content math object while considering the context and variant attributes of the rendering element
• general - A library for the error handling and utility classes

The initial framework of the toolkit (in particular the mmlproc library) have been developed by Normen Müller and is currently maintained and extended by Christine Müller.

For more information please refer to the project webpage.

We have implemented the collaborative and interactive reader panta rhei, which displays semantically enriched XHTML material generated from the OMDoc source. The system offers service such as the rating and annotation of the course content to allow student to contextualize learning objects. The first case study was based on the General Computer Science lecture (GenCS) at the Jacobs University Bremen and was funded by the JEM network (JEM case study).

Panta rhei offers students an additional opportunity to discuss their assignments and exams next to the face-2-face lecture and the tutorials. Instead of setting up an ordinary forum, panta rhei facilitates the annotation of course content. Annotations are stored in a forum-like structure, allowing students to reply and link between postings. Moreover, the system integrates a rating option, allowing students to indicate which lecture material they found to hard and/ or where they would like to receive additional examples and exercises.

By November 10th 2007, 70 students have been registered for the GenCS course: 68 students have signed up for the system, from which 27 posted in the forum. From 297 overall-postings, 136 have been created by the students and 158 by the 7 teaching assistants and the professor. Moreover, 30 postings were referencing slides and assignments, i.e. they have been created using panta rhei’s annotation feature. 46 postings were initialized in the panta rhei forum. 221 postings were replies. Students were also typing their postings with the available types: 13 advices, 51 answers, 14 changes, 34 comments, 1 example, 29 explanations, and 114 questions were posted. 5 threads were posted in the scope “slides”, 45 threads in the scope “assignment” and 47 in the scope “news”, where as the latter also subsumes postings from “slides” and “assignments” with the type: “news”.

By December 3rd 2007, 70 students have been registered for the GenCS course: 69 students have signed up for the system, from which 34 posted in the forum. From 446 overall-postings, 226 have been created by the students and 208 by the 7 teaching assistants and the professor. Moreover, 63 postings were referencing slides and assignments, i.e. they have been created using panta rhei’s annotation feature. 44 postings were initialized in the panta rhei forum. 339 postings were replies. Students were also typing their postings with the available types: 20 advices, 89 answers, 14 changes, 51 comments, 1 example, 32 explanations, and 189 questions were posted. 5 threads were posted in the scope “slides”, 72 threads in the scope “assignment” and 56 in the scope “news”, where as the latter also subsumes postings from “slides” and “assignments” with the type: “news”.

The increase of postings from 297 to 446 at the end of the semester can be explained with the increasing difficulty of assignment as well as questions concerning the midterm and final exam. Moreover, the integration of the HTML editor TinyMCE as well as the eMail notification feature, tremendously increase the usability and acceptance of the system by our students. Looking at the statistics, students first primarily used the forum, but lately also made us of the annotation feature. The rating feature of the slides was not used at all. Moreover, students mainly posted questions and answers, but also commented on the lecture material. Examples were not posted. The superior number of question is most likely a consequence of making “question” the default type. In particular, students were interested in discussing the assignments, only 5 forum threads were referencing the lecture notes. This can be explained by the rather poor quality of the automatically generated slides, which still needs to be improved. In consequence, although students prefer the online material, they are still referring to the PDFs to prepare for the exams.

In the next semester, panta rhei will be extended with a sophisticated math editor, which allows students to enter math in a LATEX like syntax. In addition, we are currently preparing the course material to be used in the mmlkit conversion. This will allow us to publish much more readable and consistent slides next semester and hopefully increase the student’s interaction with the online material. The latter will also be promoted by our work on an improved annotation and rating paradigm.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Alen Stojanov for his efforts in improving the panta rhei implementation. Moreover, I want to thank all GenCS1 students for their patience and feedback on the system. I also like to thank the GenCS TAs, especially Ankur Modi and Christoph Lange, for their numerous postings that made the system more attractive. Last but not least, I would like to thank Prof. Michael Kohlhase for providing the semantically enriched GenCS content as well as for his support during the development and deployment of the system.

I am looking forward to improving panta rhei for the next case study, which will be launched in February 2008. I am especially happy that Alen Stojanov and I will be supported by Jakob Uecker, who recently joint the development team!!!