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Putting Maths on the Web

One of the projects I’m about to start is developing some learning resources to help nursing students with their maths. As part of that I’ve been revisiting putting maths on the web. Maths can be incorporated into a web page as MathML or as images, and as usual there isn’t a simple answer but hopefully you’ll find something below to give you a starting point to meet your own particular needs.

Images or MathML?

The downside to using MathML is that Internet Explorer won’t display the equation correctly without a plugin. Firefox at least understands MathML but needs extra fonts installed to display it correctly. Plugins and fonts both live on the client machine, which means we’re relying on the user to have their computer configured correctly in order to see our content. The plus side is accessibility because screenreaders can read the MathML and give meaningful content to visually-impaired users.

Creating the images

The other approach is to use images. Generating the images is fairly straightforward. I’ve used a combination of DragMath and MathTran. DragMath is a Java-based visual tool that generates a snippet of LaTeX code. Once I’ve got my LaTeX code I open a basic html page. Generating the images from the html page needs two things:

  1. A link to the javascript file in the head:
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.mathtran.org/js/mathtran_img.js"></script>
  2. An image tag in the body:
    <img alt="tex: LatexCode" /> with my LaTeX code pasted in to replace where it says LatexCode

The javascript creates a png image from the LaTeXcode and inserts into the web page. Right-click on the equation image, choose ‘Save Image as’ and the image can be reused where ever it’s needed. The advantage is I don’t have to worry about what’s installed on the user’s machine, but the disadvantage is if I want to use the image on a web then accessibility becomes an issue. Another issue is that DragMath is maths-orientated so I would have problems creating a different type of equation. I could write the LaTeXcode myself, but that’s a whole different tool set and learning curve for most people.

Using OpenOffice

Another approach is to use OpenOffice. I can create formulae in OpenOffice by ‘Insert - Object - Equation’ in OpenOffice Writer. Creating the equation is fairly straightforward (there are links to the documentation in further help below) and then I have a choice. I can export directly as MathML by:

  • clicking back in the document (to stop editing the equation),
  • right-clicking on the equation,
  • choosing ‘Save Copy as’
  • When the dialog box appears, dropping down the list of formats (the default is pdf) and choosing ‘MathML 1.01′.

Alternatively, I can export the whole document as LaTeX by:

  • clicking on the ‘File’ menu and choosing ‘Export’.
  • When the dialog box appears, drop down the list of formats and choose ‘LaTeX 2e’.
  • Then open the saved tex file in a plain text editor and find the latex code for the formula. It’ll be between the begin{document} and end{document} lines, and starts with something similar to $\mathit.
  • Copy the latex code into MathTran to generate the image.

Problems and other methods

MathTran uses TeX while the methods outlined above are dealing with LaTeX, and there are some syntax differences. If you have editing access to a wiki using MediaWiki then you can put LaTeX code between <math> and </math> tags and a png image will be generated.

Further help

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2008 10 22 Duncan Development Comments (0) Permalink

Sustaining Online Communities - thoughts from Alt-C

The final day of this year’s Alt-C conference saw an interesting presentation from Helen Whitehead and Liz Cable from ReachFurther with the title If you build it will they come? A model for sustainable online community networks for practitioners. The abstract for the presentation is here, the slides are here, and my version of Helen’s diagram is below:

Sustainable Online Communities

Sustainable Online Communities

I think the key point that Helen and Liz have raised is the idea of sustainability. Too often we do build it and they don’t come, or they come, look around at the virtual tumbleweed blowing through it and leave never to return. Helen’s model showed that for a community to be sustainable there needed to be flows between individuals (the personal environment) and the community - people both contribute to and benefit from membership of the community.

One point I missed at the presentation was that of the expert level. I took that to mean subject experts and misunderstood the dotted line in the diagram. If we consider some of the activities in that level they are commercial (sponsorship, licencing, advertising), so the way that I’m interpreting this is like a water wheel - the community and personal levels flow into each other in a circle within the community, but the expert level feeds in from outside (the water) to maintain the movement of the wheel with either expert knowledge or financially. That’s important because many of the communities Helen talked about were not within the education sector and sustainability also needs to include financial sustainability. That’s also an educational issue - how many excellent projects have we seen where the long term benefits are lost because the project funding ended?

Helen talked about the appropriate choice of technology - some of the communities she has set up and facilitated have used open source platforms and some have used commercial software, but what she did was to match the software she wanted to use to the needs of the community. In other words, one size doesn’t fit all, but again, how many times is the institutional VLE the only option we’re either given or allowed?

Build it and they will come? No, action is required - a viable online community requires active intervention to build a sense of community initially, and then sustain that community. Returning to the wheel analogy, there’s no such thing as perpetual motion - we have to put in the energy to keep the wheel turning.

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2008 09 23 SiteAdmin Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Students create podcasts for formative assessment

Conferences can sometimes be a matter of luck. You go to one session with a great title and learn nothing new, you go to another and it makes attending the whole conference worthwhile. The first session of the blended learning conference fell into the second category.

Two academics from the University of Hertfordshire (Anna Anders and Heather Thornton) gave a presentation that described students creating podcasts. The podcasts recorded a role play on the key skill where they give advice to patients with a particular pathology. Students were divided into four main groups and each group had five sub-groups researching a different pathology. The group research on the pathology was put into a wiki and other students could read it. So a student can learn about their own assigned pathology (and perspectives from the other three main groups) as well as four other pathologies within their own main group. Despite the assessment being formative (and voluntary) all the students except one did the assessment. I’m impressed with the high level of student participation they’ve achieved and the fact that it will fit beautifully with what we do at my own institution.

Attending a session like this where I can learn from the successful practice of others and a project that I can implement into my own institution makes tackling the London underground with two rucksacks and a poster tube worth the hassle.

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2008 06 24 Duncan Assessment
Blended Learning Conference 2008
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Producing the poster - screen and print resolutions, and a useful dia shortcut

This time I had an easier time producing the graphic for the poster. When I did my poster for Alt-C two years ago, the central image was a mindmap produced using Freemind. This time I had basically a site diagram produced in Dia, an open source diagramming package similar to Microsoft’s Visio. Producing a graphic for a poster means that the final print size will be large, and also the resolution is much higher, for example a print image might have 300 pixels per inch compared to 72 or 96 dots per inch for an image on screen. What this means is that the image is going to have lots of pixels. Now when I used Freemind it produced a bitmap and I had real problems trying to get the size (physical and in terms of resolution) that I needed, but with dia it was a breeze.

I stumbled across an option when exporting the image that really fitted the bill for what I needed. What I did was go the the ‘File’ menu and then ‘Export’, and then gave it a filename. Dia will determine the file type automatically, so I had typed ‘image.png’ it would have saved it as a png for me. The trick was to drop down the list of file types and explicitly change it from ‘By Extension’ to ‘Portable Network Graphics (*.png)’:

Dia export screenshot

When I did that and clicked on save I got this:

Options screenshot

Then I could set any dimensions I wanted and get an image of whatever resolution I needed to get a decent print resolution. I love open source software, but one of the things you have to live with with code from a smaller project is that the user interface may not be as polished as you’re used to, or like this, really useful features are obscure.

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2008 06 21 Duncan Blended Learning Conference 2008
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Bridging the chasm - the poster

Here is the final version of the poster, more boring titled ‘Promoting Learner Independence through Pre-Induction. Work is progressing well on the preparation of the materials, although there are a few ‘technical difficulties’ with the video editing that I’ll go into once I’ve resolved them.

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2008 06 16 Duncan Blended Learning Conference 2008
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Bridging the chasm

I’m to present a poster at this year’s blended learning conference at the University of Hertfordshire on a project I’m working on for the School of Health Sciences. We’re creating a set of materials for pre-induction i.e. for the students to use before they actually arrive at university.

The styles of learning and teaching here in the UK are very different to those at university, and the expectations we have of the student are radically different to what they would have been used to before. For example, universities don’t ‘teach to the test’ - the student learns for the test, finding, evaluating and using a range of sources. Another difference in expectations comes with assessment. At school students are used to handing a draft to their tutor for review so that they edit it and gain a better mark in the actual assessment. Workloads and class sizes mean that doesn’t happen at university except in rare cases.

What we’re after (and what they’ll need after graduation) is for them to become independent learners, with help from tutors and lecturers. The whole ethos of the project is to bridge that gap between what we expect of the students and what they expect of us.

The materials will be online within our VLE (WebCT) and consists of web pages, discussions and other activities, and short video clips of existing students describing their experiences. Since we want them to become independent learners (and we’re not trying to replace conventional induction) the the web pages will be fairly short. The main emphasis is on the active elements. The materials are divided into four areas - the university experience (coming to university), the programme experience (studying at university), the placement experience, and a generic tips for students section.

The aim is to ease that transition into university and allow the students to develop some sense of community and belonging before the culture shock of their actual arrival. I’m currently videoing my student volunteers and we go live from the middle of August. I’ve never done any video for online presentation before, so I’m trying a myriad of different file formats, bit rates and codecs to find a workable result. I’ll blog the results of my experimentation later.

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2008 06 03 Duncan Blended Learning Conference 2008
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Pedagogies and economics

This week I’m going to be taking part in an online conference on vles: implementation and pedagogy. Last week was the reading week and this week is the discussion week. One of the presentations is by Ian McPhee at the University of Paisley on evaluating student performance and satisfaction with different delivery methods. What really interested me was the feedback he had from lecturers on workload. The module he describes was delivered face-to-face, online and blended. The lecturers found that in terms of actual contact hours the workload increased in that order - face-to-face, online and blended, but the hours that the university recorded as being done was the opposite - it went down from face-to-face to blended. So from the real workload and the workload recorded by the institution started off being roughly comparable for face-to-face sessions but then diverged quite markedly.

I teach an evening class and for the first time this year I’m using online elements to teach it. Now the way part-time lecturing works at that institution is that we get paid for contact hours and the contract states that the rate includes an element for preparation and other duties. Great, no problem with that, except that I have two contact hours per week (face-to-face) and probably about another two online at various points in the week checking on what the students have done. My preparation is running at two to three hours for each contact hour. So I’m doing two hours face to face, two hours online, and four to six hours per week preparing - a total of eight to ten hours and being paid for two.

If institutions want us to use technology to teach then this issue of economics is an issue they are going to have to deal with. Some of us will use the technology and pedagogy because we love to, but there will be many staff who won’t. Now this is an extreme example because I’m talking about part-time evening teaching, but it’s still valid despite being an extreme. My main employment consists of two part-time posts, so the same issues still apply but not to such a great extent because I’m paid for a fixed number of hours. There will still probably be more work than hours, but not by three to four times as much, and anyway that’s my problem - it becomes an issue of workload management, rather than not being rewarded. And the workload management becomes more of an issue when an institution has a radically different view of someone’s workload than what is actually happening in reality.

This isn’t sour grapes on my part, although it would be nice if it was at least recognised that the contact hours had changed, but it is an issue that isn’t going to go away. For those lecturers who already have more work than week and whose skills with technology may not be the best, it is simply naive to expect them to take a further hit on their time to replicate online what they do offline. If we can get them online then we can show they where the benefits lie but initially all they will probably want to do is get their lecture notes on the vle and they’re not even going to do that if they think this ‘extra’ work isn’t going to be recognised or rewarded.

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2006 10 19 Duncan Institutional Issues
Learning with Technology
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Feel the force Luke …

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the conflict between the needs of the curriculum and the needs of the student. It’s related to what Jay Cross and Stephen Downes calls ‘improv’ - the letting go and seeing where it leads. My own thoughts are that it’s less a need for the control of the interaction but more to do with the product of the interaction. This week I had a class where the students asked questions - nothing wrong with that - but the session was only scheduled to last for an hour and a half and it was getting to the stage where the class was becoming all questions and no course. I was finding myself becoming stressed because it was a staff development session and we needed to cover the content.

Now, did we have a successful session? Well, it all depends on how we measure ’success’ and who’s doing the measuring. Did I have a successful session? Yes, we covered the topics we needed to cover. Did the students have a successful session? Yes, I think they did - they had their questions answered and covered the topics we should have done. But it still leaves me thinking about the conflict because they could have gained a great deal more from their time with me.

I think it’s much less with the need for control than with the product - the need for a reproducible end result, especially when assessment becomes involved, but is that really what learning should be about? Plagiarism raises its ugly head specifically because of the ‘McAssignment’ - the production of something uniform, and if it’s uniform then it can be copied, and if it needs to be copied, then where better than the internet, especially when someone can make money selling the copy? The UK government produced a white paper recently on education. At Alt-C this year, Stephen Heppell searched the PDF of the document and found 144 references to standards but no references to creativity.

Yes, we need standards - I’m a big proponent of web standards for example - but it depends on what we mean by standards. If we mean standard in terms of a minimum acceptable level, then yes I agree. If we mean standards in terms of a uniform end product then no, absolutely not. Learning is an intensely individual undertaking and we can’t make the most of it trying to force everyone to take the same route. We need to make room for creativity, If learning is like running a marathon then the runners (students) need to be free to choose their own route and finishing point but the organisers (institutions) want to know where to place the watering stations and finishing line. There’s the conflict. There’s the dichotomy. And it’s how we manage this dichotomy in the daily twenty-six miles of a classroom that makes the difference, both for us and our students. I would have loved to let those students take their own journey through Moodle, perhaps to spark their enthusiasm more effectively than I could simply teaching, but I had specific goals to reach - they needed to practice specific skills in order for them to use Moodle effectively in their own teaching. I don’t have the answer, I don’t know how to resolve this particular dichotomy, but I’m uneasy with where along the spectrum institutions place their emphasis. What can we do about it as teachers? I don’t know, except look for the creativity within ourselves and look for the places where we can let go, and see where it leads.

2006 10 12 Duncan Assessment
Learning with Technology
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Paint me purple and call me Barney…

I’m due to start teaching a new course tonight - it’s an adult evening class on creating web pages. I know we’ll have about ten students, and their abilities will probably range from those just short of being able to hack into NASA to those who wonder whether all the lights in the building will go out if they press the delete key. And somehow I’ve got to cover that range and give everyone an effective, enjoyable learning experience.

So what has this got to do with purple dinosaurs? Well, because we’re all dinosaurs. I know I can go into that class and teach them well. I know I’m good at what I do - the other places I work we have feedback sheets after every class - so I know I can do a damn good job standing in front of the class and talking them through it, but that makes me a dinosaur because the days of ’sage on the stage’ have gone. The world simply moves on too fast for it to be an effective teaching strategy anymore. The amount of information and the rate that new information accumulates make the role of a teacher as a repository of information redundant. We stick to what we know not because we’re frightened of trying something new (although it certainly can be frightening) but because we know the ‘old ways’ work and work well.

So tonight, the dinosaur is dead, at least in this particular class, and I’ll be teaching this course using Moodle. We’ll be using Moodle as a basic repository for the content material (worksheets, etc) but we’ll also be learning by exchanging and sharing. We’ll develop site plans by blogging and responding to each other’s blogs. We’ll critique websites by finding and posting the url of a good and bad site in a forum message, and then the other students can respond with their comments. How will it go? I don’t know - it involves letting some of the control go and seeing where we end up - but I do know it’s a better alternative than letting the dinosaur live.

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2006 09 25 Duncan Learning with Technology
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Plagiarism - and why a battlefield is not the place to learn how to shoot

Plagiarism is a big issue for most institutions at the moment, and what I’ve seen at different institutions and heard through talking to people is that most of the time, we’re concerned with detection rather than prevention. We have ‘plagiarism detection services’ that we send a sample of our students work to. The detection service compares it to a database and back comes a report. The student might then face a plagiarism panel and have a judgement passed on them and face whatever penalties the institution might impose. There was an article in the Times Higher Ed where some students felt undue pressure not to appeal the decision against them and I feel that goes against natural justice - we should all have the right to challenge judgements about us that we feel are unfair.

But are we approaching this in the right way? Are we teaching students sufficiently well about what plagiarism is and more importantly what it looks and feels like during the process of creating the work to be assessed. We might tell students what plagiarism is, and how to correctly cite a reference, but do we teach them enough about the process? When do we say “You see this bit and that bit you’ve brought together? You’ll need to cite both those”. It’s like teaching a soldier the theory of what a rifle is and how to shoot, but not letting them practice on the rifle range, and then we wonder why they’re getting shot to pieces on the battlefield.

Part of me wonders how much of the current issues around plagiarism are simply a result of our assessment criteria and techniques. How much of this is a result of us asking for facts-based assessments? Is our desire for reproducible results allowing the students to plagiarise? If we assess based on them demonstrating the facts they know then there will always be the pressure (and with the internet the opportunity) to source those facts from elsewhere without actually mentally processing them. If we assessed with unconventional ‘products’, ones that aren’t facts based - for example a reflective learning journal - then there isn’t the body of facts they can go and ‘borrow’. The downside is that assessment could become less objective, but what do we want here? Do we want students that know facts or students who have the skills to find and process new ‘facts’?

2006 09 18 Duncan Assessment
Learning with Technology
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