Introduction
This project will produce a digital library of high-quality interactive
World Wide Web-based mathematics instructional material for the
undergraduate mathematics curriculum. Three steps are involved:
- a) we will search out, classify, test, and evaluate the many existing
applets and other small electronic teaching tools, both alone and embedded
in useful pedagogical text;
- b) we will address mathematical, software, and pedagogical standards for
applets and related material, and focus development on curricular gaps;
- c) we will attack remaining pockets of the curriculum that are not well
covered.
Many faculty have used computer algebra systems and other technology to
craft insightful mathematical examples for use in and out of class. Teachers
usually work alone on these activities, resulting in gross duplication of
efforts (thousands of secant lines becoming tangent lines), but little
improvement in the quality of their endeavors. A digital library can make
such teaching materials broadly available for students and other faculty,
and its construction can also be used to encourage sharing and
community-building. We propose to construct such a library in order to
disseminate good teaching materials, improve the general quality of the
software, and form a set of shared resources for faculty, focused on
facilitating their use of technology in the undergraduate mathematics
curriculum.
Collaborating Groups
The digital library will be housed in a new electronic journal, the Journal
of Online Mathematics and its Applications (JOMA); the library and journal
will strengthen each other. The Math Forum will be publishing the new
journal and will provide the technical Web expertise for the project. The
project will be undertaken in conjunction with:
ESCOT: Educational Software Components of Tomorrow [1], a project
investigating how software innovations can accumulate, integrate, and scale
up to meet the needs of mathematics and science education. We are proposing
a subcontract with ESCOT. They will help us achieve greater interoperability
and reusability of our software collection by such means as writing a
regular JOMA column on that topic, with recommendations for developers, and
which investigates various strategies for open source software. ESCOT will
also provide an annual "State of Reuse and Interoperability" report. They
will work with faculty who wish to make pedagogical contributions, helping
them to achieve their goals through reuse and interoperability of the
software. ESCOT will evaluate the overall effectiveness of our efforts to
increase reuse and interoperability within the scope of this Digital Library
effort, and develop recommendations as to how the community could achieve
constant incremental improvements in a sustainable way. (See their attached
statement of work in Section I.)
EOE: Educational Object Economy [2] is a global community for Web-based
learning tools in Java. EOE has the largest Web repository for applets of
all sorts. They have offered to make available information and advisement in
areas that include intellectual property, metadata, and development models,
as well as technical advice. They are currently expanding their exploration
of Open Source Development issues, both in terms of the database tools
provide and in terms of the creation and sharing of software components,
which could be valuable for us. We plan to build on EOE's classification
and to set up our first-phase search so that we add to their catalog all
relevant applets not in their database. (See the letter of commitment from
Edmond Gaible in Section I.)
NEEDS: National Engineering Education Delivery System is a digital library
for the engineering education community. They are also submitting a proposal
to the Digital Library II Initiative. Together we will work toward
developing a federated search, the possibility of searching either site from
the other site's search engine. We will also talk with them as we develop
review criteria; they have a thoughtful set in place, but in a somewhat
different direction. In order to better integrate our work, we will host a
workshop to be attended by NEEDS personnel and persons from related digital
library projects (or project possibilities) in other science, mathematics,
engineering and technology education (SMETE) areas, such as BioQuest and the
Physics Info Mall. An important subject for joint work will be understanding
user needs across disciplines.
The NEEDS collaboration will help us to explore the possible development of
an on-line SMETE journal. Also, using NEED's experiences with their
Premier Award we will evaluate the prospects for expanding the Premier Award
in Engineering to include an applet-based category and evaluate the
development of jointly sponsoring a Premier Award in Mathematics.
St. Olaf Applet Testing Center: A group of faculty and students will subject
reviewed applets to a test suite. They have faculty and students interested
in integrating applets into the curriculum. (See the letter of commitment
from Matthew Richey in Section I.)
The Math Forum is a research and educational enterprise of the Drexel University School of Education.