Teaching, Training, and Advising for the Harvard Mathematics Department. Oh, and some computer stuff.
I have left Harvard as of July 1, 2008 to take a position at
NYU.
This website has been cached and left static. Feel free to browse
my new website,
aka "What the heck is a Clinical Associate Professor?"
The TeX Users Group will be participating as a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code program, and my project of a Dublin Core metadata interface was accepted. I’m hoping some enterprising youth with lots of experience in programming TeX will be interested in the project.
Here is an overview of the project: Dublin Core is a scheme for expressing metadata (data about data) in a reliable, machine-readable way. It can be expressed in various languages, including RDF, which can itself be serialized in XML. Adobe’s eXtensible Metadata Platform allows RDF+XML statements to be embedded into PDF files. This metadata can then be read by search engines in order to give context to the document besides its simple contents.
TeX and LaTeX can be used to produce PDF documents, and have rich macro-programming environments. One goal of the project is to add simple commands which can write the complex metadata statements into the PDF without the user needing to know anything about RDF, XML, or Dublin Core itself. Another goal would be for more advanced users to augment this interface with new Dublin Core element sets and vocabularies.
I’ve always taken an interest in the semantic web, and apparently there aren’t too many people in this group also interested in TeX. So if the project flies I think it could be very useful.
My old colleague and friend Derek is planning a workshop session on Facebook for graduate student teachers. He may admit that I told him to get on the Facebook bandwagon. It turned out he asked for my thoughts at the very moment I was planning to write this post.
Facebook is the social networking application for people currently now in college, recent graduates of college, college-bound high school students, and those who work in a higher ed environment. It’s also extremely popular in Canada: 10% of Canadians have a Facebook page! I think that having a Facebook page is an important part of being findable and accessible online, much like having an e-mail address used to be 15 years ago and having a personal website 10 years ago. Still, there are issues and mores about expected barriers that need to be respected.
People of different generations use Facebook in different ways. Those who were in college or close to it at the time Facebook was born use it to communicate with each other, upload and share photos, and express themselves in the young and exuberant manner they’re accustomed to. Professionals often use their facebook pages to promote their work selves, either subtly or overtly. Academics are caught somewhere in between, having Facebook contacts (or “friends”) in both arenas.
One popular feature of a person’s Facebook profile is the “Wall,” an area on which a user’s Facebook friends can write whatever they want. It reminds me of the message board I attached to my dorm room door when I was in college. Fellow students who dropped by and didn’t find me could leave a note, or say something interesting, or say something stupid…you probably have similar memories.
The Wall scares me now. I don’t want anyone to write anything they want on my page. That’s my page and I want control over it. Luckily, those who use my wall are either my student friends, who are respectful out the fact that they usually want something from me , and my in-real-life friends who are obeying the golden rule.
The message board analogy extends to the entire Facebook experience. Students treat their Facebook pages as their online dorm rooms. They feel free to let down their hair, join groups for various serious and silly causes, post wide-eyed party pictures of each other with oh-so-convenient camera phones, and essentially bring their entire student life online.
I feel more like my Facebook profile is my online office. I only put up stuff that I would be comfortable with all my Facebook friends seeing, and that includes my students (I might as well include my Mom in that group, except we’re not Facebook friends. We are LinkedIn contacts, strangely enough). This means I don’t get an online dorm room, but I’m of a generation that doesn’t feel the need for that.
Derek pointed out a nice extension of the analogy. I encourage my students to drop by my office. But students probably wouldn’t want me dropping by their dorm rooms. The difference in social protocol is inherent and can’t be leveled by a website.
I respect that difference. I’ll accept friend requests from all students, but I don’t friend my students. I put my work on my Facebook page but only secondarily to the official course websites; I don’t force students to use Facebook to find it.
Facebook seems to be very hip to the needs of students and tries to provide one-stop shopping. They didn’t invent photo sharing, but they adopted it and now host more photos than Flickr. They added marketplaces to co-opt student use of craigslist. They opened up their application programming interface so that anyone can create an application as part of Facebook. So I see the day when university websites–including course sites–will be totally integrated in Facebook. But then again, that might make Facebook suddenly unhip and students will run to the next thing. Until then, I’ll be in my (online) office; drop on by.
I installed the LatexRender plugin to my WordPress blog to express myself in mathematical notation that HTML alone can’t handle. It runs latex on the server side and serves up an image embedded in the text.
For mathematical bloggers who don’t have access to their webservers (or choose not to get their hands dirty with server-side code), there’s Texify, a nice web service that lets you input LaTeX and get a permalink to a graphic that you can include in your web pages. For instance, I copied-and-pasted some code from a slideshow I’m working on and got this:
I’m impressed that they seem to have enabled the amsmath packages in their backend, so some of the more sophisticated mathematical constructs can be used (I’m using an align* environment and the \\text command up there).
The site also provides code to copy-and-paste into BBCode posts such as you’d find on forums, and even Google Docs!
I was at the monthly web pegagogies free lunch sponsored by the Bok Center today and we talked a little about using social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us to collect bookmarks as a group. (There was also a nice demonstration of Facebook by two students, but I’ve already blogged about a similar presentation they made last Spring). I like the idea, but I’m wondering about the methodology.
In the examples of this that I’ve seen, a delicious account is created and the password is given to all the students in the group. The account is given a course-specific username like “history1667″ Then students use that account to save tagged bookmarks relevant to the course. Then to view all the bookmarks tagged by the group you go to the group’s user page.
I think this unnecessarily confuses the distinction between a user and a tag. It seems to me that people in the group should use their own delicious accounts to add a “history1667″ tag to their bookmarks. Then you can view the collection of pages tagged for the course by looking at that tag’s page.
That would certainly result in more links as students who already use delicious regularly wouldn’t have to log out/log in to do their research (delicious integrates well with browsers and can be hard to extricate). And it means that people could add links to that collection even after they left the course, and new students would have at their fingertips all the old links, without having to worry about passwords. And the entity “History 1667″ seems more to me like an attribute of the link than an agent in and of itself.
I’ve started doing this for my courses. If I’m looking at a page that might be useful for my Math 20 or Math 21b course, I can just tag it. I don’t have to re-login. I can tag the same page for as many of my courses as I want. And if my students want to do the same, the bank becomes richer.
There are, I suppose, reasons for having a controlled account. There might be another course numbered History 1667 at another university. Well, make the tag less common (I almost said “more unique” there) by calling it “HUHist1667″ or “HUHist1667Fall2007″ (then, if you want a fresh batch every semester you just change the tag). Most delicious interfaces feature tag-completion so you don’t even have to worry about it being easy to remember. Or, you can just apply the philsophy of folksonomy: don’t worry about it. Tag clouds make sure that the most important (as defined by user activity) links bubble up. It’s only going to become a problem if the tag is used by two groups equally frequently, which is unlikely and can by choice of tag name be made even less likely.
Another worry might be that outsiders might start using the tag to randomly bookmark irrelevant things like, as someone suggested, a picture of a cat. Again, I think the response is don’t worry about it. A basic tenet of semantic web philosophy is that anybody should be able to declare anything about anything, and it’s up to another layer to endow the trust. In this case, the user him/herself is the trust layer by visually weeding out the irrelevant links, and the tag cloud by making pages more users have marked with the same tag more connected to that tag.
A third objection might be that we don’t want to force students to create accounts on third-party services if they don’t want to, or to open up their use of a third-party service to a class. I can kind of see that, although delicious is for sharing bookmarks, so if you don’t want to share them with the world, why are you using it? But I can see wanting to share different things with different groups (and under different identities). So then maybe you have a group account for those who don’t want one, or encourage users have don’t want to use their “private” delicious accounts to create another one specifically for coursework.
So there’s a tradeoff between openness and quality, but I say, the more the merrier.
A while back I wrote that numb3rs is one of the most legitimate pop-culture portrayals of a mathematician. I’ve stopped watching the show, but some mathematicians still do, and Mark Bridger at Northeastern even blogs about it. So you can break down the math in each episode.
I just started looking at Slideshare, a flickr/photobucket-style sharing application for presentations. You upload your presentations (looks like you can use PowerPoint, OpenOffice, or a PDF) and you get a little flash app to embed on your blog as well as hosting of the presentation and all its slides.
Here’s an example, using the talk I gave at UC Irvine last month:
I have disk space available to upload my own stuff here at work, but the flash interface is pretty cool.
I just found PhpMathPublisher on the web and it looks kind of interesting. The name pretty much describes it: a PHP package that parses a kind of math input and produces image-based output.
Most packages (such as LaTeXRender) along these lines serve as a front end to TeX or LaTeX, then serve up a generated image file. There are some drawbacks to this:
TeX and LaTeX are complicated programs with huge distributions, and may not be available to all web programmers
because these programs can include files, there’s a potential security leak in allowing all web users to effectively execute TeX code on the server.
PhpMathPublisher has a tex-like syntax but seems to parse the input on its own and use GD to assemble a formula. Here’s the markup:
Anne Davis at Georgia State University has a nice little post about the Rationale for educational blogging. What I get out of it is that blogging allows writing skills to be coached and practiced in a web environment, which is what they will be writing in eventually anyway. I would love to teach those same skills in mathematics classes.
This semester I started a blog for each of my courses and recommitted myself to blogging on my home page about more general topics. I put in an item every day summarizing the class, and I thought I could use the comments for answering questions. But I got very few comments and no questions so far.
I think that’s something that can be addressed at the beginning of the course. If a tone can be set that this blog is there for the class to use, then maybe more can be gotten out of it.
But still, I like the practice and will continue it. Maybe there’s no “cool” factor left in blogging, but I do enjoy demonstrating that I exist outside of class. And it’s fun to put up non-course, but math-related stuff that they might find interesting, or at least notice that I find interesting.
At the last web pedagogies lunch Michael Hemment told us about Edtags, a social-bookmarking service for educational resources. He’s also blogged about it here. it seems like a fun tool, and I think like to play with it, but I’m wondering if they’d be upset by the intrusion of an undergraduate educator.
But my main question is this: Why use this instead of del.icio.us? To me it seems like creating a search engine that focuses on pages about fishing. You can just add “fishing” to your search query in a real engine like Google and probably get better results. So why not use the same tags on del.icio.us and benefit from the larger community?
Update: Apparently TeachingHacks recommends just that.
I’m so glad that TeX4ht exists. It’s a suite of programs that convert TeX or LaTeX to one of many hypertext variants. You can generate HTML or XHTML, XML files readable by OpenOffice, JavaHelp, and others.
The mathematics in your document can be handled in various ways, too: the “normal” way of producing images for complicated formulas and inlining them to the document, or the “right” way of embedding MathML into the XML file. Unfortunately, the “right” way is not very well supported–not too many browsers read MathML yet. But it’s nice that tex4ht allows me to get by with this yucky kludge until it happens (if ever!)
A long time ago there was LaTeX2HTML for this purpose, and man, did I hate it. It was an impressive project, and sometimes I got it to work. However, I disagreed with the whole ethos of it. LaTeX2HTML uses perl to parse TeX files and generates an HTML file. Why do it this way? TeX already parses files and produces output in the form of a DVI file. What tex4ht does is attaches onto TeX’s parser and operates on the DVI file to make the conversion.
And then there’s the fact that tex4ht has so many options and is configurable. I’d like to learn more about configuring it well, but in a short time I was able to do one thing I wanted–link to the PDF in the HTML version.
, and my in-real-life friends who are obeying the golden rule.
