• The Workshops




    1. Workshop "Tools"

      Mathematical software, tools, standards and cooperation with business partners

      Moderation: Petra Oberhuemer
      Presenter: Mike Pearson
      [workshop paper; html] [short summary:]

      • Basic technical requirements/constraints:
        • Use of MathML
        • Account for accessibility issues
        • Multilingualism
        • Support of Unicode

      • Authoring:
        How can we get teachers to create content (good quality content)? There is a need for a good, easy-to-use editor to provide MathML output.
        Re-using existing material in a reasonable way: how can we get teachers look at existing resources and how can he/she select components of this content?
        How can other teacher discover these resources?: Metadata / development of a classification scheme / Automatic tools to generate metadata.
        Setting up networking to advertise their resources: ? Concept of weblogs?

      • There are several levels of needs:
        1. Editor which allows to build new content
        2. Repository to deposit and manage content
        3. Tool to slice content and add those slices an address (ID-handling)
        4. Tool to annotate the items (=learning objects), to put some "glue" in between
        5. Tools for SCORM export


    2. Workshop "Target Groups"

      Envisaged aims and target groups, e.g. university students, distance learning, colleges, life-long learning. Plus issues of gender and mobility, media competence and multi-lingualism

      Moderation: Bernd Thaller
      [short summary:]

      • Target groups are identified as students, teachers and authors
      • We need to cover the range from preliminary level to university level and eventually vocational training.
      • There must be a bridge between high school and university
      • Sociological studies: female/male, different ethics. How do they accept eLearning?
      • Comprehensive database with RLOs (although term "RLO" is not clearly defined), RLO is less than a course (multidimensional arrangements for RLOs)
        RLOs: can have different languages, levels of abstraction, relationships, keywords
      • Qualilty management for RLOs: might be a Wiki-like system (in a moderated way), Wiki-system for mathematical content.
      • Authors should get technical support that we get high quality products. Example: UCEL at University of Cambridge Provides a good referee system.
      • Need for re-use of existing content: should not just be a link collection
      • Organisation of repositories of RLOs
      • Need some sort of taxonomy (mathematical classification scheme). Need a scheme describing teaching! Classification scheme to sort in our RLOs, should also describe the didactical approach (this might be a research point!)
      • Need to describe existing RLOs (-? Metadata) -? is a librarian's work
      • We should participate in the discussion of metadata standards (Anleihe Baumgartner!)
      • There should be some support for teachers (to overcome the famous 5% barrier)
      • RLOs with taxonomy ("Zentralblatt für didaktische Mathematik), there is need of an international metadata scheme.
      • How to enable users to use an editor
      • Cataloguing of existing material combined with quality assessment
      • Digital repository
      • Do we know why teachers do not use it? We should spend some effort to find out!


    3. Workshop "Didactics"

      Didactics: current standards and desiderata, new conceptual approaches

      Moderation: Hans-Georg Weigand, Franz Embacher
      [workshop paper; ppt] [short summary:]

      • Teachers should be able to easily compose courses + exercises for their students
        • Content-factory: easily create content (also interactive applets)
        • Pedagogical-knowledge-factory
        • Networking Units
      • Objects(units)-oriented
      • Would like to develop courses by means of drag&drop content, need a categorization (sort of ranking) of these objects, produce a basic set of tools to enable networking of basic units.
      • 3-level model:
        • tool to construct units
        • mechanism to network (combine) units
        • pedagogical knowledge level
      • Wiki Idea: users should be able to rewrite content, changes should be reviewed by members.
      • Continuous (not only on demand) teacher development support.

      • Important features:
        • life long learning
        • multilingualism issues
        • collaborative work (for all kind of teachers and teacher-students)
        • enrich learning by eLearning
        • bring learning back into eLearning (by Dave Pratt): no longer e-delivery, need to transform eLearning, we should think of eLearning processes!), teachers are learners.
        • Emphasis on pedagogical content-factory: look closely at how teachers talk about resources, how should resources look like so that teachers use them?