Best theory is often the result of best practices and best practices always leads to the best theory – Donald Knuth
Ananda co wrote the interactive book - Interactive Linear Algebra with MAPLE V. This was one of the first interactive and adaptive books on the market, focusing on mathematics – he wrote this in 1998. This book might of interest to the Mathematics department – Chris Blood and Scott Grice could geek out with it I am sure!
The adaptive book is now sold on Kindle. For those who don’t know, Kindle is the electronic book reader that is sold by Amazon in the US – this is mobile enabled and books are sold just like on iTunes for music, and just come to the reader. The Kindle is a special technology that is easy on the eyes. I’d love to play with one, but you can’t get them in Australia :(
Back to the adaptive book…. he is very proud of the idea, but thinks it is too complicated. His aim is now to create simple and easy to use technology that is easy for the end user. This was really brought on by the pen technology and Tablet PC’s. He really feels that it has changed and focused his life.
He runs a Pen computing application group on facebook….
The transition from powerpoint to pen powerpoint was described – this is basically using powerpoint as per normal, with one exception – in the design phase, space is left in the presentation for the pen annotations, workings etc etc. Then what happens is the powerpoint is used, and the pen is used to annotate and write over the top of the slide. This gives the benefits of both the pen and the powerpoint.
This is a great step, and one that I personally used. It also made my move to DyKnow very easy, as the powerpoints are just opened in Dyknow, and then the annotations are made in DyKnow. Once students have Tablets, this means they get this real time, and all the monitoring, replay, polling features can be used as well.
He mention an application – Physics Illustrator – I need to find out about this! It looks and sounds cool – maybe the Physics guys could get excited by this? http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=56347faf-a639-4f3b-9b87-1487fd4b5a53&displaylang=en
The use of CMU Flash Cards was again mentioned – I wrote about this yesterday – cool stuff!
Another application - Doodle Movie Annotator – allows you to draw over the top of any video! so cool! I am sure many teachers will be able to utilise this! Quote about it “Doodle uses windows Media video (WMV) files. Doodle is intended as a classroom tool where teachers can annotate a video while it is playing or when it is in pause mode. All annotations can be saved, shared and played back later.”
Tablet Math Whiz is another application developed at CMU for practicing maths – aimed at junior school. It grades the problems and gives teachers feedback - It is a free download…. info is here http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/TRETC07/
Making the case for pen computing
- Collaboration
- Keyboard interface is not good for maths
- The cognitive load is extraneous rather than germane
- Recent studies have show that QWERTY keyboards are hard to use for student
- The use of Pen computing is back transferable to paper – keyboard computing is not
Ph.D. thesis to look up – The use of handwriting interfaces in intelligent mathematics tutoring software can yield higher learning gains in students through lower cognitive load than the use of standard typing.
On the horizon – Microsoft courier – a two page “book” tablet PC – looks super super cool!
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2009/09/courier-first-details-of-microsofts-secret-tablet/
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