Task 12 -- Sharing

In the summer, when teachers are scattered and pursuing their own interests, it can be a bit tricky to get a group together in person, so I decided to do some electronic sharing. There are enough department members who are regularly checking their school email this summer that I figured I'd get decent feedback from at least 2-3 people.

What I wanted to do was give people a sample of the sort of thing I hoped to do with a classroom Wiki. I figured an email describing the idea abstractly would tend to sound like a lot of buzzword-laden hot air (which is what 95% of teacher training is anyway, but I like to think this course is part of that other 5%). "I've been learning to leverage new technology paradigms by crowd-sourcing the learning process through web2.0 media!" Anyway, I also figured making a demonstration page would help me figure out technical hurdles and test the technology anyway.

My basic goals were to

• Create a sample Wiki page
• Implement MathML equations on it using AsciiMathML
• Embed at least one interactive Java Sketchpad widget
• Send the link and an explanatory email to my department
• Respond to feedback
• Think about implications for the project -- do there need to be changes?

The sample page I created is here: Math Wiki Demo .

There were quite a few technical hurdles to even creating the page. I'm going to detail those in a separate post. I figure there might be other people looking for similar technology solutions who would appreciate a little technical advice. I will definitely say that if I weren't an old-school computer geek I would have probably been so frustrated with embedding Java Sketchpad that I would have just given up. It's great software, but the GSP folks are doing a surprisingly mediocre job of making the implementation easy, especially since their market should really be the average geometry teacher.

Having sent the link around, I didn't get as much feedback as I would have liked. I'll actually get more feedback and discussion from the department as time goes on, but having given it a week or so, I figure it is time to write things up and move on. There were a couple of teachers who had interesting things to say, and a few more who at least looked at the link, which is a start.

I think the most important thing I learned from a technical point of view is that I've had to face up to the technical limitations of MathML itself. As a tool, it does exactly what I need: display math equations embedded within the text of an HTML document, with formatting and so forth handled seamlessly behind the scenes. As a tool for actual use in the real world, it has a key limitation: browser compatibility issues. Firefox and Opera have both been designed to use MathML from the beginning. Running Firefox or Opera on a modern Windows PC gives you pretty much automatic MathML as far as we need in the class. Using certain sorts of more esoteric math symbols does require installing a font package, but I don't know that that poses an issue for what I need. Running Firefox on a Mac works, but the browser will nag you if you don't have the special fonts (even if it displays OK without), and there are discussions on the web that suggest that it may continue to nag you even after you install the fonts. This last point is something I need to investigate -- it could be a deal-breaker. It's possible that has been fixed in more recent releases of Mac Firefox, but I don't know. If not, users may need to fool around with some fiddly preference settings to avoid the nagging, which would really stink. Running IE only gives you MathML if you install a plug-in (DisplayMath or some such), and then works fine. Running Safari or Chrome, you are screwed. MathML has been on Apple's "real soon now" list for Safari for years and years, and at this point presumably won't happen.

Anyway, I don't necessarily have a problem with "Use Firefox", since its free and available for Mac, PC, and Linux. And I always encourage students not to use IE anyway. The Safari and Chrome thing nags at me a bit, since it also suggests that there won't be any portable internet devices (iPads, iPhones, Droid-based devices...) that can properly view MathML. That feels like putting an expiration date on any webpage that uses MathML to me. Still, I think the main thing I need to check out is the font issue -- how difficult is it to install the fonts, how annoying is the nag message if you don't, and does the nag message go away without fiddly user intervention.

The Java Sketchpad doesn't really seem to have big browser compatibility issues, though obviously you need a decently up-to-date version of Java installed and active on your computer. There are memory/load-time issues with loading up a page with java widgets, so I would tend to think that limiting a page to 1-2 at most is going to be necessary.

As far as curriculum and so on, the feedback has been positive but wary. People tend to think that it might be neat, and that the Wiki itself would be a good resource to have. But they also are paranoid about how hard it will be to produce, whether the students will want to do it, and so on. From my point of view, I figure there's no harm in trying, as long as I don't lose perspective on the thing. If the kids really hate it, I won't push the issue so hard it makes everybody miserable. If enough of them think it's fun that we produce much of anything, then it doesn't matter if we leave the job partially done -- it can be an ongoing project, and it's supposed to evolve over time anyway. And even if all we end up with is an online syllabus/outline and some review on a handful of key concepts, that's still better than nothing.