tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32132428276175215842024-03-13T23:17:22.760-07:00Kathi Fletcher's BlogKathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.comBlogger62125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-79667791766706266182020-02-03T06:00:00.001-08:002020-02-03T06:00:37.436-08:00I have moved.<br />
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I am now blogging at <a href="https://kathifletcher.com/">kathifletcher.com</a> - Come check out my latest posts about all things having to do with delivering helpful technology well. I am talking about managing teams and also about how to incorporate ethical practices into tech, especially in the areas of Fair, Accountable, Transparent use of algorithms.<br />
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<br />Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-35382419728298039282017-03-15T16:01:00.003-07:002017-03-15T16:01:55.983-07:00Accessibility Sprint - Part 3: Giving non-visual feedback for learning from interacting with PhET simulationsThis is the third part of a series of blog posts about a coding
sprint about creating interactive online learning that is usable for
people with disabilities. <br />
<br />
The <a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2017/03/csun-17-coding-sprint-for-people-with.html" target="_blank">first post gives an overview of the coding sprint</a>. Each of these subsequent posts describes the work of one team. <br />
<br />
<h3>
Sims Team Goal</h3>
Make the University of Colorado Boulder's well respected, freely available, <a href="https://phet.colorado.edu/">open-source PhET simulations</a> more accessible for students who cannot see the simulation. By providing just the right amount of aural feedback about what is happening in the simulation after an action taken by a learner, blind and low-vision students could interact with the simulation, hear the results, and try additional actions to understand the underlying physics principles.<br />
<br />
For example, PhET has been working on making their Balloon and Static
electricity simulation accessible by including scene descriptions that
screen readers read aloud in order to orient learners that can't just
look around to see what looks controllable. The controls are all
accessible via keyboard actions. But, when a learner takes an action,
for instance removing a charged wall that is keeping the balloon steady,
the resulting balloon movement must be described. It would overwhelm
the listener if small changes are repetitively described, and it can be
confusing if messages end up being read out of logical order. For
instance, messages about the balloons movement might end up being read
behind a message describing its reaching an object and stopping. <br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Balloon simulation on laptop screen with sweater, balloon, and wall showing. Scene description listed to the right." height="225" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/MBHyb527g5sJ7-4t-xBRqyrYLcJQNrFW5aQ7KTbTre7MBjuMuZNyi4lcRQHL0VwefGK7iz6cXzP9h_N0JT6mLgGwwiRSkb2j80ArBnevEuxKvhle2jLgWV7XRikrgWlE_r8f4tMr" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This image shows a balloon simulation of static electricity moving
between a shirt and balloon. Beside the visual is information encoded in
the DOM that is read when particular actions are taken. This is what
will be read using assistive technology to help operate this sim and
understand the results when actions are taken.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
This group decided to work on extending the messaging being reported by
this balloon sim, in order to better report very dynamic events, such as
moving the balloon, or the balloon moving itself (attracted to sweater)
without overwhelming and overlapping messages. To do this, they
designed an UtteranceQueue, which is a FIFO (first in, first out)
message queue with certain rules: it takes an object that contains an
utterance, an object the utterance is associated with, an expected
utterance time (to delay before the next utterance) and a callback that
returns a boolean, to allow the utterance to be cancelled, rather than
spoken, when it reaches the top of queue. This should allow a simulation
programmer to design the set of messages a particular object should
report. For example the balloon would report being moved, as well as its
state of charge, and whether it is stuck to something. The callback
would allow, for example, the balloon movement messages to cancel
themselves if the balloon is in fact now stuck to the sweater or wall.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Laptop with balloon sim and code inspector" height="223" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/oo-GowdPhdsZZikZo8IKnwB_fSh6Aza-pDJQvEteA5sKEuWZz8IgJhoyHDeY2ty_zV6k8gLuB0esGZUg14UJLTuDWGFj09gXfS1CD9E11OOaTJD2KWgjIHVeFJgzXmzRb8Ys0vZr" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This image is showing the same balloon sim with the browser code view open to see what is controlling the simulation.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>
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<h3>
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<h3>
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<h3>
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<h3>
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<h3>
Testing (of the earlier version)</h3>
While the above development was occurring, on of the team members, Kelly, tested the feedback announcer function in the existing version of the balloon sim (the one before the code sprint) and got some user feedback for the group. The person that she tested with had worked with the sim before, but not with the new scene narration. Her test subject found the narration volubility to be just about right. He did, however, want to <b>have a way to repeat some narration</b>. <br />
<br />
<h3>
Demo</h3>
At the end of the day, this group demonstrated the operation of the new UtteranceQueue when the wall is removed and the balloon starts drifting toward the sweater. The movement was described (and not overly repetitive) and when the balloon got to the sweater that event was narrated. No other messages followed. <br />
<br />
People who worked in this group: Jesse Greenberg, Darron Guinness, Ross Reedstrom, Kelly Lancaster <br />
<br />
<h3>
Code</h3>
<a href="https://github.com/phetsims/balloons-and-static-electricity/tree/ocad-hacks">https://github.com/phetsims/balloons-and-static-electricity/tree/ocad-hacks</a><br />
<br />
<h3>
Links<b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></h3>
<ul>
<ul>
<li><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;">The <a href="http://www.colorado.edu/physics/phet/dev/html/">code for the PhET sims</a></b></li>
<li><b style="font-weight: normal;">PhET sims that have a significant effort around accessibility</b><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;"> </b></li>
<ul>
<li><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;">Balloon Static Electricity sim</b><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;"> </b></li>
<ul>
<li><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://www.colorado.edu/physics/phet/dev/html/balloons-and-static-electricity/">Balloon Static Electricity sim</a></b><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;"> </b></li>
<li><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://www.colorado.edu/physics/phet/dev/html/john-travoltage/1.3.0-dev.10/john-travoltage_en.html">John Travoltage</a></b><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;"> </b><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;"> </b></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<li><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="https://connexions.github.io/simulations">OpenStax HTML5 sims directory</a> </b>OpenStax created HTML5 versions of some of the PhET sims that were needed for a high school physics book</b><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;"> </b></li>
<ul>
<li><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;">and code: <a href="https://github.com/Connexions/simulations">https://github.com/Connexions/simulations</a></b><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;"> </b></li>
</ul>
<li><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;">OpenStax book using many PhET sims </b></li>
<ul>
<li><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="https://cnx.org/contents/zOZP3vRI@5.1:9h7ZYYwq@2/Introduction">https://cnx.org/contents/zOZP3vRI@5.1:9h7ZYYwq@2/Introduction</a></b><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;"> </b></li>
<li><b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-aa47-4dbe-8790-7dba8c8d7e23" style="font-weight: normal;">Balloon Sim <b>u</b>sed here at OpenStax: <a href="https://cnx.org/contents/zOZP3vRI@5.1:kZhR8P2h@2/Electrical-Charges-Conservatio">https://cnx.org/contents/zOZP3vRI@5.1:kZhR8P2h@2/Electrical-Charges-Conservatio</a> (although the sim isn't properly displaying right now) </b></li>
</ul>
</ul>
</ul>
Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-82436923548532950202017-03-09T06:53:00.002-08:002017-03-09T06:53:59.455-08:00Accessibility sprint - part 2: Creating a mobile-friendly and accessible Infobox for mapsThis is the second part of a series of blog posts about a coding sprint that happened the day before CSUN 17. The sprint was about creating interactive online learning that is usable for people with disabilities. This whole software area is called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility" target="_blank"><b>accessibility</b></a>, and known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_design" target="_blank"><b>inclusive design</b></a>.<br />
<br />
The <a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2017/03/csun-17-coding-sprint-for-people-with.html" target="_blank">first post gives an overview of the coding sprint</a>. Each of these subsequent posts describes the work of one team. <br />
<h2>
Creating a mobile-friendly and accessible Infobox for maps</h2>
<h3>
Team Goal</h3>
Create a widget for helping people who are blind or have low vision explore maps that display statistical information (think popular vote winners in the US). This type of map is called a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choropleth_map">choropleth</a>.<br />
<br />
The existing infobox widget takes statistical data in a simple format and works with hot spots on an svg map to bring up an info box as a user mouses over or tabs to different regions on the map. The current version, however, isn't accessible for low vision, doesn't work well with screen readers, and doesn't work on mobile. The team worked on improving these aspects of the widget (which can be reused for any statistical map).<br />
<h2>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-a5ba-712c-9997-415437906ad2" style="font-weight: normal;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Map of the 2016 US presidential election popular vote results by state, with blue, red, pink and light blue colors for each state. An info box is open for New Mexico with the winner and actual vote totals." height="307" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/d30qNVmD4PzGoz9gdIjKKPUw_HoSchz8dRcWzbMUDfcOJkTdHA32MBTUfK1HTKf_ZU7wm1JuCO_J0RWZ4kKEKAw2O8RKq-Q8ngxs-5mNImfQeXLPl-WrNcL49ohdIQriJMPQ4kiK" style="border: medium none; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; transform: rotate(0rad);" title="" width="463" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>United States 2016 presidential race: Popular vote by state. </b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</b></h2>
<h3>
Demo at the end of the day </h3>
Doug Schepers demonstrated the improvements. The demo showed the map tool improved for low vision and screen reader access. For low vision, the state selection outline was thickened, the info box contrast was increased and made resizable, the info box placement was adjusted to make sure the selected state was not covered. The ability to select the next state via tabbing on the states was added. Selection is currently in alphabetical order, and a better system would work on the navigation also. He also demonstrated using a screen reader and being able to select a state and hear it read the info box for each state. It uses <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/ARIA_Live_Regions">ARIA Live Regions</a> to update things. The statistical data is formatted using simple name, value pairs. <br />
<br />
The ultimate goal is to define a simple standard for describing statistical map data and provide an open-source, reusable, accessible widget for interacting with these maps. <br />
<br />
Doug Schepers and Derek Riemer worked together.<br />
<br />
The code is available here: <a href="https://github.com/benetech/Accessible-Interactives-Dev/tree/master/MapInteractives">https://github.com/benetech/Accessible-Interactives-Dev/tree/master/MapInteractives</a><br />
<h2>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-3febcf70-a5ba-712c-9997-415437906ad2" style="font-weight: normal;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
</b></h2>
Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-4601196421825902462017-03-06T14:13:00.000-08:002017-03-06T14:45:07.029-08:00CSUN 17 Acessibility Coding Sprint for People with Disabilities (Making learning accessible) - Part 1Last week, my colleagues at <a href="http://openstax.org/">OpenStax</a>, Phil Schatz, Ross Reedstrom and I attended the 2nd annual pre-CSUN (but third overall) accessibility coding sprint to help make learning materials useable by people with disabilities.<br />
<br />
<h2>
Prior accessibility coding sprints </h2>
The first took place in 2013 and was jointly sponsored by my <a href="https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a> fellowship and <a href="http://www.benetech.org/">Benetech</a> and held at the offices of SRI. You can read more about that one in these earlier posts (<a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/06/born-digital-born-accessible-sprint.html">2013-accessibility-post-1</a>, <a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/06/learning-born-accessible-sprint-design.html">post-2</a>, <a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/06/born-digital-born-accessible-sprint.html">post-3</a>, <a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/06/accessiblity-protototypes-from-sprint.html">post-4</a>, and <a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/07/next-steps-from-accessibility-sprint.html">post-5</a>). The second took place last year before the <a href="http://www.csun.edu/cod/conference/2016/sessions/">CSUN 2016 Accessibility Technology Conference</a> in sunny San Diego and was again sponsored by funds from my Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship and by Benetech. That one focused specifically on tools for creating accessible math. Read more in <a href="http://blog.diagramcenter.org/?p=2258">Benetech's blog post</a> under "Sprinting towards accessible math", <a href="https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2016/04/28/math-accessibility-trees/">Murray Sargent's follow up post on accessible trees</a> and <a href="http://blog.jantrid.net/2016/07/open-source-access-to-math-for-nvda.html">Jamie Teh's post about creating an open-source proof-of-concept extension of math speech rules</a> used by the NVDA browser to make them sound more natural.<br />
<h2>
This year's sprint <br /><b id="docs-internal-guid-05a4eb31-a57f-a0eb-72f5-1eb2cb29f39f" style="font-weight: normal;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz_3mulUP76nV9XxbnQ2wIMDJh3hB-3Jk1Yjti3y-803aUfJ-PEHjs88HnfjQpa8H3YKoROMfUrVNsbdJlOjiJlyqlVBbqgPL9lMa20yzYAISIrKWZRdukyqpU-SGbVkqnIAwgXD4ywyM/s1600/participants-at-work.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Four tables with 10 participants conferring and working at laptops" border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz_3mulUP76nV9XxbnQ2wIMDJh3hB-3Jk1Yjti3y-803aUfJ-PEHjs88HnfjQpa8H3YKoROMfUrVNsbdJlOjiJlyqlVBbqgPL9lMa20yzYAISIrKWZRdukyqpU-SGbVkqnIAwgXD4ywyM/s320/participants-at-work.jpg" title="" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Participants at work</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</b></h2>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-05a4eb31-a57f-a0eb-72f5-1eb2cb29f39f" style="font-weight: normal;">This one again took place in not-quite-as-sunny San Diego (California has been getting lots of rain) before this year's <a href="http://www.csun.edu/cod/conference/2017/sessions/">CSUN-17 conference</a>. The focus was on making interactive learning content accessible. And the very cool thing from my perspective is that my fellowship had nothing to do with the organization of this one. Benetech and <a href="http://www.macmillanlearning.com/catalog">MacMillan Learning</a> sponsored and organized this one. The attendance was the largest ever with 30-ish in person participant and 5 or so attending remotely. We had several developers that both create accessible software and use assistive technology themselves.</b><br />
<br />
Like previous sprints, we spent time initially getting to know each other and brainstorming and then divided into multiple teams ranging from a single person to five people working together to prototype, explore, or make progress on a particular accessibility feature. In upcoming posts, I will highlight each of the team's goals and what they demonstrated at the end of the day.<b id="docs-internal-guid-05a4eb31-a57f-a0eb-72f5-1eb2cb29f39f" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><br />
<br />
<h3>
Upcoming posts (links will be added as subsequent posts appear)</h3>
<ul>
<li>Creating responsive (mobile-friendly) and accessible (screen-reader friendly) Infobox for maps</li>
<li>Giving non-visual feedback for learning from interacting with PhET simulations</li>
<li>Using alternatives to drag and drop for matching, ordering, and categorization tasks</li>
<li>Personalizing website interfaces for better accessibility (both sensory and cognitive)</li>
<li>Standardizing the display of math in publications</li>
<li>A Nemeth and UEB Braille symbols table</li>
<li>Using MathJax to produce Braille output from LaTeX math</li>
</ul>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-05a4eb31-a57f-a0eb-72f5-1eb2cb29f39f" style="font-weight: normal;"></b><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-05a4eb31-a57f-a0eb-72f5-1eb2cb29f39f" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Read more</span></b></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-05a4eb31-a57f-a0eb-72f5-1eb2cb29f39f" style="font-weight: normal;">
<ul style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<a href="https://github.com/benetech/Accessible-Interactives-Dev/wiki/Agenda" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Original agenda</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<a href="https://github.com/benetech/Accessible-Interactives-Dev" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Github repository for artiifacts from the sprint</span></a></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<a href="https://community.macmillan.com/groups/macmillan-news/blog/2017/02/22/macmillan-learning-benetech-launch-2nd-annual-code-sprint-for-people-with-disabilities" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Macmillan Learning press release</span></a></div>
</li>
</ul>
</b>Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-41698147299759484472017-01-28T09:59:00.000-08:002017-01-28T09:59:00.590-08:00Geoffrey Cohen's talk at Rice on Inclusive Teaching<h2>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Inclusive Teaching</span></div>
</b></h2>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"></b><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I went to an "Inclusive Teaching" workshop by Geoffrey Cohen, who works with <a href="https://psychology.stanford.edu/cdweck" target="_blank">Carol Dweck at Stanford</a>. The workshop was sponsored by </span><a href="http://cte.rice.edu/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rice's Center for Teaching Excellence</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and was well attended by Rice faculty and staff. If you don't know Carol Dweck, she pioneered a branch of research on the effects of mindset on performance in a wide variety of settings, concentrating on academic achievement. In this model mindsets fall into two camps. A '<b>fixed mindse</b>t' is a belief that a particular trait, like intelligence for instance, is fixed at birth and basically cannot be changed, versus a '<b>growth mindset</b>' which is a belief that a particular trait is malleable and improves with practice and effort. There are many, many different experiments that show that regardless of initial measured ability, a growth mindset is associated with higher performance academically over time, and this appears to be due to increased tenacity in the face of challenge, because failure is not seen as a measure of ability. Furthermore, particular interventions can shift a person's mindset and shifting that mindset results in increased performance. <b>When these interventions work, the results are significant and can be long lasting, on the order of years</b>. </span></b></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Given the potential, I have been interested in how we might incorporate growth-mindset inducing features into OpenStax products, and whenever someone with good ideas and research is around I try to learn what I can from them. These are my notes from this talk. </span></div>
</b><br />
<h2>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Social belonging / Stereotype threat / White men can't jump</span></div>
</b></h2>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"></b><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The talk concentrated on social belonging. You may have seen some of the research on what is called <b>'stereotype threat</b>'. It seems counterintuitive, but it appears that if you think that people believe your group isn't good at something, and your performance could confirm that negative stereotype, your performance suffers. That is a very causal way of explaining it, and, of course, these are really just correlations, but now I will just tell you some of the weird and wooly experiments that have been done. All of these divide subjects as evenly as possible into two groups, one of which gets the 'treatment' (in this case a negative </span></b><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">treatment)</span></span><b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and the other of which doesn't, and then average scores are compared.</span></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Things that decrease performance: </b></span></b></div>
<ul style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you ask people to <b>list their gender</b> before taking a math test, female scores drop significantly.</span></b></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you ask people to<b> list their race</b> before taking an academic test, black student scores drop significantly. (There is such a thing as 'stereotype lift' also. White scores increase a little if asked to list their race, but the increase is much less than the decrease for groups where a negative stereotype is part of the culture).</span></b></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you <b>tell people a test is a measure of intelligence</b>, certain minorities and females do worse than giving the same test and characterizing it differently (skills …)</span></b></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If a black researcher asks <b>white men to jump as high as they can</b>, they jump less high than if they are asked by a white researcher. </span></b></div>
</li>
</ul>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"></b><br />
<h2>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Digression: Unconscious bias in hiring</span></div>
</b></h2>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cohen went in to a significant digression about experiments that show unconscious bias in hiring. I think this was mainly to give examples of how interventions can fix things that are unconscious and hard to just 'goodwill' away. </span></b></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"></b><br />
<h3>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Research demonstrating bias</span></div>
</b></h3>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"></b><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Specifically, there are a set of experiments that show that when comparing two candidates, people adjust their expectations to favor candidates that fit their stereotypes. For example, when presenting two candidates for a police promotion, one of which is male and one of which is female, and giving these candidates either more 'on-the-job' experience or more 'book-learning' experience, if you first show the candidates and then ask which is more important 'on-the-job' or 'book-learning', the <b>hiring manager picks whichever criteria the male has</b>. </span></b></div>
<br />
<h3>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Techniques that can decrease bias</span></div>
</b></h3>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"></b><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But just like with mindset, there are interventions that can eliminate or improve these biases. </span></b></div>
<ul style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you ask people to <b>come up with the criteria</b> for the best candidate<b> before they see the candidates</b>, they stick with those criteria and, in the case of the police promotion will (on average) pick a female candidate matching the stated criteria, over a male candidate that does not.</span></b></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When people <b>hire a group into a position</b>, for instance hiring three managers at once, or three developers etc. - they are more likely to select a diverse group, than if they hire three people in successive rounds. </span></b></div>
</li>
</ul>
<br />
<h2>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Social Belonging interventions that increase student performance </span></div>
</b></h2>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"></b><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then he came back to listing a set of 'interventions' that have been shown to have positive effects for females in male dominated fields, minorities in white dominated achievement areas, first generations college students, etc. These particular interventions did not show positive or negative effects for other groups, but studies that measure attitudes first do show benefits for all students coming in with particular mindsets and attitudes.</span></b></div>
<ul style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Having students <b>read about 'real' students who felt they were not smart enough</b>, or did not belong, but then found that they did. Or attend a panel of students discussing these feelings, especially if the audience identifies with the students (gender, race, economics, etc). </span></b></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Having students choose three sentences from among a long list that are important to them and then write a paragraph about each. Cohen called this </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">'value affirmation</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">'. The values listed have a wide variety of things, and include non-academic values like 'sense of humor', 'relationship with family' (This intervention reduced F's in a course by 50%, from 20% to 9%).</span></b></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For K-12 students, having a teacher write <b>'I am giving you these comments because I have high standards and I know that you can meet them.'</b> to accompany corrections and comments on an assignment. Teachers pre-wrote these and research assistants attached them to student work. Teachers and researchers were blind to who got these and who didn't. </span></b></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For K-12 students, having a teacher initiate an exercise where students write the end of this sentence <b>'I wish that my teacher knew that …</b>'</span></b></div>
</li>
</ul>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5e9a634d-e634-46ae-f770-ec4ed2967f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This summary from Carol Dweck's website, </span><a href="https://ed.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/manual/dweck-walton-cohen-2014.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Academic Tenacity: Mindsets and Skills that Promote Long-Term Learning</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, has more about a lot of the research that Cohen described.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span></b>Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-54252027202549980532016-12-07T09:30:00.002-08:002016-12-23T09:05:35.217-08:00Edit (Math) or Bust - Sprint Nov. 16 - 19 (Part 1)<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thanks to the <a href="http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/" target="_blank">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>, where I had a <a href="https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/alumni/kathi-fletcher" target="_blank">fellowship from 2011 to 2014</a>, <a href="http://openstax.org/" target="_blank">OpenStax</a> (my current employer), and all of the participants (listed below), I was able to host a sprint at the OpenStax offices Nov. 16th - 19th to investigate easier ways to edit and convert mathematics within open textbooks, as well as to make it easier to adapt and customize OpenStax college textbooks. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTDUcKv44P2cUGUqVVG_-A-eJ2Cpw2jjXzLMkQUE1q9I-Aw9zJ0ZBuvM0KufSboWn8bKcb4enuIeWDifLeoPpoOMuuBBg5gKPwPM2tes5A75vPG7PsCpNhjp8lQrHPobhbiQzxuDeKEZM/s1600/20161116_145223_HDR.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Participants sitting in a u-shape with laptops, and large screen showing demo." border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTDUcKv44P2cUGUqVVG_-A-eJ2Cpw2jjXzLMkQUE1q9I-Aw9zJ0ZBuvM0KufSboWn8bKcb4enuIeWDifLeoPpoOMuuBBg5gKPwPM2tes5A75vPG7PsCpNhjp8lQrHPobhbiQzxuDeKEZM/s320/20161116_145223_HDR.jpg" title="Active group participant shot" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Some of the participants at the sprint during demos.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
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<h2>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Themes</b></span></h2>
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Two themes emerged at the sprint around common pain points. Encouragingly, we (the developers among us) were able to create prototypes that start to address those pain points. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Different math formats result in tedious re-work.</b> First, we realized that a substantial number of education institutions and one major OER partner have been using Pressbooks with the BCcampus textbook extension to adapt the OpenStax textbooks. However, because Pressbooks and OpenStax use different math formats, if the textbooks have mathematics in them, after import, the math has to be hand recreated which is very time consuming. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>We need a simple visual math editor, with a LaTeX-editing fallback for complex cases:</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Secondly, although there are many individual math editing tools, there is not a simple, easy to use math editor (that will also support advanced features) for the web that can be plugged into different tools, and that can produce the right math output for the plugged in environment. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here is what we did during the sprint</span></span></h2>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Because participants had experience with a wide variety of editing tools and math conversion tools, we spent the first part of the sprint demoing a wide variety of tools and processes to create and adapt textbooks that have mathematics within them. </span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then we generated an extensive list of "pain points" within these processes. </span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Next we generated a </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xU5lZMXz6QlBb2_bjVVQ2aAkWsArgmLpXXdH9DSaqSI/edit#" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">set of users stories</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> from the points of view of three different users: faculty adapting and customizing textbooks, students answering homework problems for scientific and mathematical subjects, and professional teams copy editing and maintaining open textbooks.</span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From those we generated an extensive list of ideas of things that we could realistically do together at the sprint and tied those to the user stories they could serve.</span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Two technical themes emerged and the developers divided into </span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: circle; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Team A that would concentrate on getting textbooks from one of three editing environments represented at the sprint (OpenStaxCNX, Pressbooks, Manuscripts), and especially solving the problem of getting OpenStax math format converted to Pressbooks math format. </span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: circle; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Team B worked on an editor widget for writing equations visually or using LaTeX and then getting them back into a document as MathML, LaTeX, or an image. </span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Both teams were composing existing tools, not writing things from scratch, which is one of the fantastic results of opensource software. More details to come.</span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Each day we did demos and retrospectives from the sprint.
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The next blog post will have more information about the prototypes that were created with links to demonstrations and source. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Participants</span></h2>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>OpenStax</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (<a href="http://openstax.org/">openstax.org</a>) - Kathi Fletcher, Phil Schatz (<a href="http://philschatz.com/">philschatz.com</a>), Ross Reedstrom, Dante Soares, Ryan Stickney. The OpenStax team is interested in improving math editing for their internal textbook production and interested in making customization of the textbooks less cumbersome for organizations adapting the textbooks. Two of those organizations are here at the sprint. </span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>OERPUB</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (<a href="http://oerpub.org/">oerpub.org</a>) - Marvin Reimer is an experienced developer who worked with Kathi during her Shuttleworth Foundation (SF) fellowship (shuttleworthfoundation.org) and works with pybossa.com and </span><a href="http://crowdcrafting.org/" style="font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">crowdcrafting.org</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Marvin wrote a google docs, latex, etc converter that also publishes to OpenStaxCNX.</span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Katalyst Education</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (</span><a href="http://katalysteducation.org/" style="font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">katalysteducation.org</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">):</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #006621; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Christopher Sweeney, Tomasz Stach, Wojciech Ludwin, Krzysztof Mędrzycki, Iris Gau, Michael Moran. Katalyst Education has been working with OpenStax on Internationalizing the OpenStax user interface (OpenStaxCNX) and will also be publishing free college textbooks in Polish. They are helping with OpenStax’s efforts to create online versions of the textbooks that have the same numbering and collation as the PDF versions of the books, and they are committed to developing an easy tool for authors and editors who wish to adapt OpenStax textbooks. </span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>BCcampus</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - Lauri Aesoph and Brad Payne (remote). BCcampus has been managing the </span><a href="https://bccampus.ca/open-textbook-project/" style="font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">B.C. Open Textbook Project</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> since this project was announced by British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education in 2012. Brad Payne, Senior Technical Analyst, developed the </span><a href="https://github.com/BCcampus/pressbooks-textbook" style="font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pressbooks Textbook</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> plugin for Pressbooks and provides technical support for and continuing development of this and the B.C. Open Textbook Project. Lauri Aesoph, Manager of Open Education, manages the ongoing effort to import all OpenStax textbooks into Pressbooks to allow easier adaptation of these books by faculty in B.C. and elsewhere. </span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Matias Piipari</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of </span><a href="http://manuscriptsapp.com/" style="font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Manuscriptsapp.com</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - developer of the scholarly authoring tool Manuscripts, which includes MathJax based math rendering, an equation editor, and ability to convert between math formats on importing and exporting documents.</span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<a href="https://github.com/OmarIthawi" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Omar Al-Ithawi</b></span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - Software Engineer at </span><a href="http://www.edraak.org/en/" style="font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Edraak</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, an Arabic MOOC platform based in Jordan. Omar recently released a MathJax extension for </span><a href="https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-third-party-extensions/tree/master/arabic" style="font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Arabic and RTL</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
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Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-38162867081880756992014-02-12T15:32:00.000-08:002014-02-12T15:32:01.569-08:00Linking to Objectives in the OERPUB editor (a prototype between MIT OEIT folks and OERPUB)<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgevfQxpjhHnVUS_oziSnmW3GkkWp8kCDGFyRBGQn54p3uLemvy30K87D-ps6vTOLPf5wn8l_aehK2z23fKvKLgJ6DMkrGYVGt13BerrH_sRYWq04eXKgaiB_Z0GJoNGuXuLoWYfUS40LA/s1600/Studysuccessweb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Decorative, colorful concept map" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgevfQxpjhHnVUS_oziSnmW3GkkWp8kCDGFyRBGQn54p3uLemvy30K87D-ps6vTOLPf5wn8l_aehK2z23fKvKLgJ6DMkrGYVGt13BerrH_sRYWq04eXKgaiB_Z0GJoNGuXuLoWYfUS40LA/s1600/Studysuccessweb.jpg" height="156" title="" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Learning Objectives, Concept Maps<br />Image: By Sborcherding at en.wikibooks <br />[Public domain],<br /> from Wikimedia Commons</td></tr>
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<b>The exploration:</b> When creating textbooks and interactive learning activities, wouldn't it be cool if authors (and eventually others) could easily link material to learning
objectives? This is the second exploration that <a href="http://oerpub.org/" target="_blank">OERPUB</a>, <a href="http://lumenlearning.com/" target="_blank">Lumen Learning</a>, and MIT's Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (<a href="http://oeit.mit.edu/" target="_blank">OEIT</a>) took on together in Salt Lake City. Linking materials (textbook, activities, videos, quizzes) to learning objectives makes them easier to find, and could also allow navigation by objective rather than by a single linear path through the material.<br />
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<b>The Scenario:</b> An author is writing a textbook or course in the OERPUB editor. Perhaps it is a physics course, and the course has a set of objectives that it teaches (or hopes to). The author is writing a section on lattices and the ways that x-rays scatter through crystalline structures. Since the physics department at MIT has defined this as a learning objective, it would be great if the author could easily specify that a reading teaches this objective. <br />
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<b>The Components:</b> MIT's OEIT has a service for storing and looking up learning objectives, called <a href="http://oeit.mit.edu/gallery/projects/core-concept-catalog-mc3" target="_blank">MC3</a>. MC3 has an API for returning learning objectives. Before we got together, Cole Shaw took the OERPUB editor and embedded it in a page that connects with the MC3 server. The screenshots below show his prototype. He added a new "widget" to the editor for adding an activity and wired it up to include an objectives drop down. The choices in the drop down are coming from the MIT's objectives server. He copied an existing widget and modified it. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguyR4bRjmpbT2WTSJDARYdwkDn3kWv6wv2F1oR1N6ed_7nQMt8162_8qwjss0A-YP8kQj4UJExhe6LDdarmkGiSkhCQ-dNzKvu77NWMBAEt0LhNDEK99X1n6jTRJcFjQZhAat9cuSQZic/s1600/mc3-bank-selection.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="shows the editor with a drop down added to choose which server to get objectives from and which set of objectives to use." border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguyR4bRjmpbT2WTSJDARYdwkDn3kWv6wv2F1oR1N6ed_7nQMt8162_8qwjss0A-YP8kQj4UJExhe6LDdarmkGiSkhCQ-dNzKvu77NWMBAEt0LhNDEK99X1n6jTRJcFjQZhAat9cuSQZic/s1600/mc3-bank-selection.png" height="113" title="Editor embedded to find objectives" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cole added a top toolbar for choosing where objectives<br />should be looked up. </td></tr>
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<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHoRgMbIwsqZ66yvNzBHfBrblNeRWfd9w5F_Ih0eR3caHek1W1Vx39hz4gwFjXmmENXc6fDxZSjQyg0al__4XxuocrQCR_U_808-i-qgZ6Bkc1cuhrQCg2eDX5-rjy6ctabcKES-93HTQ/s1600/selecting-objective.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Shows a drop down "Bragg's Law Outcom 3B1" is chosen from amoung a set of options." border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHoRgMbIwsqZ66yvNzBHfBrblNeRWfd9w5F_Ih0eR3caHek1W1Vx39hz4gwFjXmmENXc6fDxZSjQyg0al__4XxuocrQCR_U_808-i-qgZ6Bkc1cuhrQCg2eDX5-rjy6ctabcKES-93HTQ/s1600/selecting-objective.png" height="305" title="" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Here is the drop down in an activity added to the document. The choices <br />are looked up live. Once one is chosen, it is added to the activity.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
And then when we all got together, Cole and Tom Wooward worked together to take Cole's work and make it a widget that works in the github-bookeditor. That is shown below. Tom also showed Cole some of the ways to configure educational widgets within the editor. (That also tells us where we need to improve documentation for developers.)<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Shows a "Read"ing activity, with "Bragg's Law" chosen as the objective" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk_qAt474tqyWFlQmdua2qBsXtqiHc3gO2pyMzxlMo0GgC3wF-Oe_EJG3bKV0FNcCaNSOsV890LVOpBTRDnmFF0_mjoKji47DHjtgrVEm3Yrdz0G1n7FgvgWl62Iai93mu_OcEAOt7ixk/s1600/mit-mc3-outcomes-in-ghb.png" height="266" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is the same widget, but in the github-bookeditor. The <br />server to query is hard-coded. This will live on a branch<br />to show how such a thing can be done.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Really making this kind of thing widely useful for general users of the editor, requires more thought, time, and effort. MIT is hosting their own course objectives, and their software provides the store and lookup service. But these aren't general purpose. The user interface would need to provide ways of configuring which objectives are relevant, etc.<br />
<br />
If we did come up with a way to do something like this, I would love to see a way to make choosing an objective a standard option on all content sections and educational widgets. In other words, an author could attach an objective to essentially anything within the HTML and the editor would provide an easy UI for doing that and a simple encoding as metadata to store in the document. I think that would probably be Schema.org's <a href="http://schema.org/educationalAlignment" target="_blank">educationalAlignment</a>. <br />
<br />
<b>Technical notes and links:</b><br />
<ul>
<li>The code is on the <a href="https://github.com/oerpub/Aloha-Editor/tree/mc3-activity" target="_blank">mc3-activity branch</a> of the <a href="https://github.com/oerpub/Aloha-Editor" target="_blank">oerpub editor,</a> and the <a href="https://github.com/oerpub/bookish/tree/mc3-activity" target="_blank">mc3-activity branch</a> of bookish.</li>
</ul>
Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-51337704393619236032014-02-11T16:43:00.001-08:002014-02-12T15:33:39.671-08:00Sprinting to embed assessments and learning objectives with MIT, Lumen Learning, and OpenAssessment <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9qSNCTeYancCTEWPF2Wz7NvwtonyxOTYwpwZdKbVq1DGxkBH6MsXhfCC8nsGElK7j7NSwJabkOUeSucxMrQfPakJzQJ10w4RbFC-jFtVaMOJQCeP7E408a9KG_SJXccCNhyphenhyphenfp8f29ldY/s1600/embedded.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Shows a quiz in a textbook page too small to see" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9qSNCTeYancCTEWPF2Wz7NvwtonyxOTYwpwZdKbVq1DGxkBH6MsXhfCC8nsGElK7j7NSwJabkOUeSucxMrQfPakJzQJ10w4RbFC-jFtVaMOJQCeP7E408a9KG_SJXccCNhyphenhyphenfp8f29ldY/s1600/embedded.png" height="135" title="An embedded assessment in the editor" width="200" /></a></div>
<b>Idea:</b> Wouldn't it be cool to have a really easy way to embed interactive assessments in textbooks, epubs, and courses? <br />
<br />
<b>People:</b> The folks I have just been meeting with thought so and we got together to explore a few prototypes. I have been in Salt Lake City working in the <a href="http://www.lib.utah.edu/" target="_blank">Marriott Library at University of Utah</a>, hosted by David Wiley of <a href="http://www.lumenlearning.com/" target="_blank">Lumen Learning</a>, and joined by Brandon Muramatsu and Cole Shaw of <a href="http://oeit.mit.edu/" target="_blank">MIT's Office of Education Innovation and Technology</a> (OEIT), Justin Ball and colleague James from Atomic Jolt consulting, and Tom Woodward of <a href="http://oerpub.org/" target="_blank">OERPUB</a> via Daft Labs.<br />
<br />
<b>Scenario: </b>The following scenario sets up our first exploration. Lumen Learning is adapting a biology textbook from <a href="http://openstaxcollege.org/" target="_blank">Open Stax College</a>. They are creating courseware for college faculty that takes each section and adds interactive, formative assessments, and discussions and analytics and other cool stuff. They are creating completely open banks of questions to go along with the books and these will live at <a href="http://openassessments.org/">openassessments.org</a>. Open Assessments is building a quiz player that works like a youtube video player. You find a quiz you like and use a simple embed code to include that anywhere you want.<br />
<br />
<b>Exploration:</b> So what we wanted to explore was including the ability to find and add a quiz from Open Assessments in the <a href="http://github.com/oerpub/Aloha-Editor" target="_blank">OERPUB editor</a>. So, imagine you are creating a textbook section, or a learning activity for college biology and you have just written the section on parts of the cell, and you want to help students retain what they have learned. So you click on the 'quiz' button in the editor, and search for quizzes about cells, preview the quiz, and pop it in. This is what we put together yesterday. Keep in mind this is code written quickly to see how to do this kind of thing while we had all the experts together. It isn't polished and beautiful. But the impressive thing is that we got this done in a couple of hours. The following screen shots show what we did.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjim9qU3qAd125exxaqZASKeOoBqnNKvZANG3ZGx166qEYwBjyhlmqD-AbRr_NtOHpTN0FCml-QZcYWyM9-hO_dHvW9010Gv4sxStItlGKn_6RszGZa89IgCVMSJsP6kIMw6bpGKa54JuE/s1600/search-cells.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt=""Insert an Assessment", with two fields, "Assessment url", or "Search" " border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjim9qU3qAd125exxaqZASKeOoBqnNKvZANG3ZGx166qEYwBjyhlmqD-AbRr_NtOHpTN0FCml-QZcYWyM9-hO_dHvW9010Gv4sxStItlGKn_6RszGZa89IgCVMSJsP6kIMw6bpGKa54JuE/s1600/search-cells.png" height="155" title="" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">After clicking on the quiz widget in the editor, search <br />
for "cells".</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6FCHDUSgk1Hi3OPeEUi3yX-L5RhXfxsnzEiT5SPW-_tAxeRzFLrHKLRZ6l-1YzeVMdg_LxTpvUXPVtI4_nXtqfDDdYUivaWXBjbfapzGvcrc5zYk8HX_JjsNtaHKFTpqkUWPSSPSEyGI/s1600/cell-search-results.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt=""Insert an Assessment", with "Search" field filled in with "cells" " border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6FCHDUSgk1Hi3OPeEUi3yX-L5RhXfxsnzEiT5SPW-_tAxeRzFLrHKLRZ6l-1YzeVMdg_LxTpvUXPVtI4_nXtqfDDdYUivaWXBjbfapzGvcrc5zYk8HX_JjsNtaHKFTpqkUWPSSPSEyGI/s1600/cell-search-results.png" height="188" title="" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The search uses openassessments.org's API, <br />
and returns one result. Click on "select" to preview it.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidhqAOl7APa8LFes-asXAYaoP9BiwpWrnZXPKUVhzJom8azU3v6ADqwn0gorCsyM3YcVip8HLOdrLmy1i8-B9nukdlEiFlcMjCaNT_lPCU0e9GmgEd820_fEoPMXobyheLl-ym3-HIGaM/s1600/preview.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Shows "Question 2 of 3" about parts of a cell, with "golgi body" selected as the answer." border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidhqAOl7APa8LFes-asXAYaoP9BiwpWrnZXPKUVhzJom8azU3v6ADqwn0gorCsyM3YcVip8HLOdrLmy1i8-B9nukdlEiFlcMjCaNT_lPCU0e9GmgEd820_fEoPMXobyheLl-ym3-HIGaM/s1600/preview.png" height="323" title="" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Preview the assessment to make sure it is what you want. The<br />
preview is live, so you can check the answers and all the<br />
questions in the quiz.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo3rETy5pCSiXUadZzUxJz5bSwvj0XjPMz-KKuxbajWkIvegKbt1c_L8A9q9xXmuZlfTcH-MbzeUOHOD_jR51uDmXJXym6TAEoqaYaqiIo3Ps5uqJ9ST7e6uj7CGa5-tpwTBtfCcXPXGY/s1600/embedded.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo3rETy5pCSiXUadZzUxJz5bSwvj0XjPMz-KKuxbajWkIvegKbt1c_L8A9q9xXmuZlfTcH-MbzeUOHOD_jR51uDmXJXym6TAEoqaYaqiIo3Ps5uqJ9ST7e6uj7CGa5-tpwTBtfCcXPXGY/s1600/embedded.png" height="271" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The quiz is embedded in the content and will play in the editor<br />
and also in the textbook as long as there is an internet<br />
connection. The quiz is being played by openassessments.org.<br />
The actual quiz is stored as a qti file at openassessments.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b>Technical notes and links:</b><br />
<ul>
<li>The code is on the <a href="https://github.com/oerpub/Aloha-Editor/tree/embed-quiz" target="_blank">embed-quiz branch</a> of the <a href="https://github.com/oerpub/Aloha-Editor" target="_blank">oerpub editor</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.openassessments.org/" target="_blank">Open Assessments is here</a> and their <a href="https://github.com/tatemae/oea/wiki/API-Documentation" target="_blank">API is documented here</a>. Some of it
changed just yesterday to make searching work and to implement <a href="http://oembed.com/" target="_blank">oEmbed</a>. Read more about that on
<a href="http://www.justinball.com/2014/02/10/open-assessments-code-spring-with-oerpub%2C-mit-and-lumen/" target="_blank">Justin's blog about it</a>.</li>
</ul>
<b>Upcoming posts</b><br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2014/02/linking-to-objectives-in-oerpub-editor.html" target="_blank">Linking to learning objectives using OEIT's MC3 service </a></li>
<li>Embedding the editor in Wordpress so the math and assessments and other cool features could be used in Wordpress or Pressbooks. </li>
</ul>
Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-57436877322650842422014-01-23T12:36:00.000-08:002014-01-23T12:36:06.548-08:00Once upon a time textbooks were hard to create ...My <a href="http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/" target="_blank">Shuttleworth Foundation</a> Fellow colleague, <a href="http://www.paperight.com/" target="_blank">Arthur Atwell</a>, sent an intriguing challenge out to our gang of fellows. The challenge was to come up with a pitch for our projects that follows the Pixar style of pitch, as described in Daniel Pink's book, <i>To Sell is Human </i>(see full reference at the bottom of the blog entry). The beauty of the style is that it really emphasizes story, which of course is at the heart of movies, and really is at the heart of all human endeavor. But it isn't always easy to articulate the importance and vision of a technical software project. At least not for those of us who regularly geek out and focus deeply on technical things. <br />
<br />
The pixar style has the following components:<br />
<br />
<div>
Once upon a time, ...</div>
<div>
Every day, ...</div>
<div>
One day ...</div>
<div>
Because of that, ...</div>
<div>
Because of that, ...</div>
Until finally...<br />
<br />
So here goes. Here is my story of the vision behind the work I have done as a Shuttleworth Fellow. <br />
<br />
<b>OERPUB Movie-Pitch </b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Once upon a time, textbooks were hard to create, expensive to buy, and out of date within a short time.<br /><br />Every day, college students paid $150 for an algebra book containing information that is hundreds of years old. High school students learned from ten year old Biology textbooks, authors struggled to make everything look good and cursed while they tried to edit math. Nobody could use the content in the textbooks to create interactive flashcards or quizzes.<br /><br />One day we created a textbook editor that is easy to use and saves books to github (a place for freely storing books and software). We made sure the hard stuff, like editing mathematics, formatting the books, and delivering them to students was actually easy. And we made sure that things like definitions and homework problems were easy to reuse. <br /><br />Because of that, authors can collaborate to build textbooks, deliver them to students online, on mobile devices or in print. They can make updates immediately, and share textbooks with others for translation and adaptation. Software developers can create interactive flashcards and study tools that use the content from the textbooks.<br /><br />Because of that, textbooks are a pleasure to create, cheap or free to buy, always up to date, and part of a much more interactive and engaging experience.<br /><br />Until finally we've transformed textbooks into true engines of learning.</blockquote>
<b>Reference:</b> Pink, Daniel H (2013-02-07). To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth
About Persuading, Convincing, and Influencing Others (pp. 172-173).
Canongate Books Ltd. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/To-Sell-Is-Human-Surprising-ebook/dp/B0087GJ8KM" target="_blank">Kindle Edition</a>. Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-67486792766565483032014-01-10T09:13:00.000-08:002014-01-10T09:13:43.854-08:00Recent talks about creating, editing, and remixing textbooks with the OERPUB editorNormally I would create a post after each talk, but I got behind so I am going to link in my talks from "The New Publishing" W3C workshop, Books in Browsers, and Open Ed, all in fall/winter 2013.<b> </b><br />
<br />
First up in September was the W3C Workshop<b>, </b><a href="http://www.w3.org/2012/12/global-publisher/" target="_blank">The New Publishing and the Open Web Platform</a>. The title for my paper is practically its own abstract, "<a href="http://www.w3.org/2012/12/global-publisher/statements-of-interest/29-oerpub.html" target="_blank">Semantic HTML5 is the Future of Textbook Publishing and Non-technical Authors Can Participate using Customized Web Editors that Support Accessible Authoring</a>". In the paper, I argue that we should be writing textbooks in HTML5 using a clean, open, and semantic format, so that books can be read online, on the web, and in print, and more importantly are easy to keep up to date, combine, translate, and make accessible to learners with disabilities.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://bit.ly/fletcher-bib13" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8jchP6g-qO1ZzbEbW6kvI9CCQBbk_QE0S3J36NlIsb0ra1Tcqnsbu61Tzb6h48YK60Zbmktz_vHmL0WgHChyphenhyphenGadtsbzPcfNOUH2VlInUp-2OS_kxsa93sZCaQKjfA5kmVhHtDuEtjrG0/s1600/textbooks-in-browsers.png" height="270" width="320" /></a></div>
Next up in October was <a href="http://bib.archive.org/" target="_blank">Books in Browsers,</a><br />
My talk, "<a href="http://bit.ly/fletcher-bib13" target="_blank">Textbooks in Browsers: An Editor for Creating, Adapting, and Sharing</a>", covered our open-source editor for textbook authoring that
lets authors create, adapt, and remix textbooks that display well in the
browser, on mobile devices, and in print. Since the editor itself runs in a browser, and the book can be read on your browser, it was a perfect fit for the conference. The slides (linked above) show how the editor supports
mathematics, accessible images and tables, and structured features like
definitions and exercises, using a constrained subset of HTML5. At the end, the slides give links to use the editor and for developers to get involved. You can <a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhuFVlhLf9BlgJJ2Smx2p2sIdqWwDbEls" target="_blank">see me giving the talk, here (minute 8:40 to 28:17</a>). My favorite tweet during the talk: "Github-Bookeditor!? Yes, it's a thing. A very awesome idea brought to life by @oerpub #bib13 oerpub.org/tools/"<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://bit.ly/fletcher-opened13" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh48ZqIzjlzros5M9CC123b-PcWw3L-hijdqgKNVIWYUc1SCZVnfnzbfw0jcJkuhBFNC9RtuAq0FQwaMZ70OaBW4UYYYDQSyAcnMCOmhTs6kCSglp0mssxuEpwNcv_riWjjrWv61bs8OPQ/s1600/opened13.png" height="273" width="320" /></a></div>
In November, I spoke at <a href="http://openedconference.org/2013/" target="_blank">Open Ed 13</a>, on "<a href="http://bit.ly/fletcher-opened13" target="_blank">Write to share; Real remix realized"</a>. Remix is the gold-standard of OER effectiveness, but technical barriers
have made it hard to do, even when author-educators want to share their
content and reuse and adapt high quality open resources. OERPUB's open-source editor solves this problem by making it easy for authors to create rich open
textbooks that can be remixed and shared. The editor supports editing
mathematics, embedding multimedia (coming soon), and is supportive of creating content
that is accessible to learners with special needs. I reported on Adrian Garcia's research on best practices for motivating author-educators to
create semantically rich OER that is easy to share and remix.
He found that K-12 teachers were especially interested in content that will work for learners wtih disabilities. I also reported on our <a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/09/textbook-writing-sprint-with-k12.html" target="_blank">textbook creation sprint in South African with St. John's College teachers (see more in this blog entry)</a>. We got great feedback from the teacher, enthusiastic support for the collaboration and drag and drop features, and plans for custom Physics and Chemistry textbooks for 11th and 12th grades coming out over the next year. They are using <a href="http://siyavula.com/" target="_blank">Siyavula</a> textbooks, <a href="http://openstaxcollege.org/" target="_blank">Open Stax College</a> textbooks, and their own materials. ( You can see <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L43HjIzQzoE" target="_blank">the video of me giving the Open Ed talk here</a>). Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-7407287030701106022014-01-07T14:18:00.003-08:002014-01-09T12:27:17.614-08:00Video plugin prototype (from last year) and upcoming implementation plansApparently, I never blogged about the prototype video plugin that two OERPUB interns created for the Aloha-Editor last year. We are getting ready to add multimedia capability to the <a href="http://oerpub.github.io/github-bookeditor">github-bookeditor</a> and so I was looking for that blog entry without success. So better late than never, here is a link to see how the prototype worked.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://screencast.com/t/HyfCvSP41" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="the editor with the video chooser dialog open" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuj7o08fN4e8oXPFRUbwtizfcucRxGRmi6CcSdnBtPSrdeT9NK_fQbyDIfV5l3-ZULHTK4m22ZQ-0PipcBiy4lppvZKz1yVPdaR8zHBksTuwDYioz4TnpgaUQYOwXeJRdvSVsnWNXU5gc/s1600/adding-videos.png" height="226" title="" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Screen capture from a screencast of the video plugin in action.<br />
Click on the image to run a video of the process, or <a href="http://screencast.com/t/HyfCvSP41" title="Screencast video of searching and selecting videos">click here</a>. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I like how the prototype lets authors search for videos and pick them
from a list that includes a thumbnail and description. There is always a URL backup, but the search means that authors don't have to leave and find the video and cut and paste in a link.<br />
<br />
The student developer interns, <a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2012/04/really-productive-student-developer.html">Max Grossman</a>, and <a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2012/05/another-really-productive-student.html">Gbenga Badipe</a>, worked together to create this prototype and explored the possibilities using the Youtube, Vimeo, and Slideshare APIs. They have long since graduated and started computer science careers, but their work lives on.<br />
<br />
We are planning to add a plugin soon to the editor so that authors can include video and slides. We will be working with our friends in the accessibility community to make sure that we make it easy for authors to include information about audio and transcripts so learners find content appropriate to their needs. More coming on this topic. <br />
<br />
<br />Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-87251304063035382802013-09-24T11:44:00.003-07:002013-09-24T11:44:54.539-07:00More about the Textbook EditorIn <a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/09/textbook-writing-sprint-with-k12.html" target="_blank">my last post I talked about a textbook sprint with teachers</a> in South Africa, remixing their own content with Siyavula and Connexions textbooks. The teachers worked with our textbook editor that automatically creates EPUBs (for mobile viewing), saves textbooks to github for sharing and repurposing, and supports mathematics and textbook features like notes, examples, equations, and homework problems.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7RktAGTUEDUjc6_ydMw9-6EKrYjqTX73CXEY-j4F4nRPidGeGuZvp2ja3thT69i2u6qx9_5oeoPN9XqrJLBGmoA_6CTIkIP9zvCRfWtbsfZMwx8kAG7C4U8QhFxsFrm9ymAKBubWJQCs/s1600/whole-book-design.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="287" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7RktAGTUEDUjc6_ydMw9-6EKrYjqTX73CXEY-j4F4nRPidGeGuZvp2ja3thT69i2u6qx9_5oeoPN9XqrJLBGmoA_6CTIkIP9zvCRfWtbsfZMwx8kAG7C4U8QhFxsFrm9ymAKBubWJQCs/s400/whole-book-design.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Now I am including some links in case you would like to play with the editor, work with the source code, and see the user interface designs we are working toward.<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editor.oerpub.org/" target="_blank">Textbook Editor Demo (Chrome only)</a>: Brand new! Pre-Alpha! Some nifty features are hard to find, but we have UI designs to fix that coming up. You must have a github account and log in with your credentials. They get saved in a cookie locally in your browser and passed to Github. OAuth is also supported, and should work in a couple days. You won't be able to save your edits on the demo book since you don't have permissions. Use the chrome browser for now until we get bugs worked out for other modern browsers.</li>
<li><a href="http://github.com/oerpub/github-book" target="_blank">Code for the editor on github</a>. Feel free to fork the code and start developing. We even have a bunch of bugs you could work on. : - )</li>
<li>Latest designs we are working toward<b><br /></b></li>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://mountainbunker.org/~maxwell/oerpub/editor-ideas/w-editor-23.html" target="_blank">Whole book</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://mountainbunker.org/~maxwell/oerpub/editor-ideas/editor-57.html" target="_blank">Just the HTML5 content editor</a> </li>
</ul>
</ul>
Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-77248245041968890372013-09-17T07:33:00.002-07:002013-09-17T07:33:13.263-07:00Textbook writing sprint with K12 teachers in South AfricaAlthough I have much more to share about this sprint and what we learned, I wanted to let people know about an exciting first outing of OERPUB's textbook editor.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjnsIBJQMWHjD9OLOnbHqLBVISrWrEuoSjHvYMccS6kxzdnzFkGqKPJuEV9fGhXZWPJPkonO3_tKlh7P-SqCH_mjo6i9BvtiILMiX-7avFOmOqHqYGBYmBgTjwZhKQ1_IETc90L8OLPJE/s1600/editor-screenshot.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Table of contents, and book section from the sprint" border="0" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjnsIBJQMWHjD9OLOnbHqLBVISrWrEuoSjHvYMccS6kxzdnzFkGqKPJuEV9fGhXZWPJPkonO3_tKlh7P-SqCH_mjo6i9BvtiILMiX-7avFOmOqHqYGBYmBgTjwZhKQ1_IETc90L8OLPJE/s400/editor-screenshot.png" title="" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Screenshot of the editor (books stored in github)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In August, Siyavula, OERPUB, and St. Johns College K-12 college preparatory school
collaborated on a textbook sprint to develop custom textbooks for
Physics and Chemistry to serve in 11th and 12th grades. Six teachers,
three in physics and three in chemistry, participated. We started with
source books from Siyavula and OpenStaxCollege. The teachers also
brought their own source materials. We use the brand new (pre-alpha) version of the textbook editor, based on the github-book editor started by Phil Schatz of Connexions. We started with
all the source books preloaded, and with a skeleton book loaded with curriculum guidelines.<br />
<br />
Teachers used the
editor to edit from scratch and to copy modules (chapters and sections)
from the source books, and to copy smaller parts like images or worked
examples from the source books. We had the developer team present to fix
bugs as they were encountered and to design features as needs arose. A
fair number of issues were found (low load times and problems with collaborative editing
of the table of contents), which we are addressing now. Despite
that, the group made significant progress on chapters in the books and
more importantly were convinced that we have finally hit upon the right
solution for authoring and remixing textbooks. The team is now putting
better bug fixes in place and the authors will return to work on the
books soon. They plan to use the Physics textbook in January. Siyavula
will create PDF's for the books using a variation on their standard PDF
generation.<br />
<ul>
<li> <a class="external text" href="http://www.markhorner.net/2013/08/21/community-driven-ieb-physics-and-chemistry-books/" rel="nofollow">Mark Horner's post about the workshop</a>
</li>
<li> <a class="external text" href="http://chenningblog.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/realizing-a-dream/" rel="nofollow">Colleen Henning: Realizing a Dream</a></li>
</ul>
Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-17553408063951949092013-07-01T16:11:00.002-07:002013-07-11T11:55:46.511-07:00Next Steps from the Accessibility SprintA lot of why we got folks together for a sprint on accessibility when creating and using web-based scholarly and educational materials was to make sure that the different participants got to know each other, had a good feel for the kinds of expertise and tools that each organization (<a href="http:///#participants">see list below</a>) specializes in, and could put faces to names. I think we accomplished those goals, and we also made some concrete plans for next steps. We spent the third half-day of the sprint looking at next steps for some realizable opportunities arising from the sprint although <a href="http:///#aside-sprint-length">some teams kept coding (see note below)</a>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">In case you missed my earlier posts on this sprint, here are some quick links to those and links to other posts about the sprint. one from Adrian Garcia, UI intern with OERPUB):</span><br />
<ul><span style="font-size: x-small;">
</span>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/05/born-digital-born-accessible-learning.html" target="_blank">Day 1: What is in the toolbox already: Demos</a> </span></li>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">
</span>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/06/learning-born-accessible-sprint-design.html" target="_blank">Day 1: Creating the sprint design challenges</a> </span></li>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">
</span>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/06/born-digital-born-accessible-sprint.html" target="_blank">Day 1: Brainstorming solutions</a></span></li>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">
</span>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/06/accessiblity-protototypes-from-sprint.html">Day 2: Building prototypes</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://blog.diagramcenter.org/?p=1045" target="_blank">DIAGRAM Center's notes on the sprint </a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://oerpub.org/blog/2013/06/07/authoring-accessible-links/" target="_blank">Adrian Garcia's notes on authoring accessible links </a></span></li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<h4>
A Service Using MathJax and ChromeVox to generate MathML, SVG, and text-descriptions of math.</h4>
Benetech is eager to move forward with support for more accessible mathematics in a tangible way, because this fits into an existing project. So a group of us spent the last morning of the sprint determining which of our ideas and prototypes around accessible mathematics could be implemented relatively quickly and efficiently. The group working on <a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/06/accessiblity-protototypes-from-sprint.html#server-side-math">server-side mathjax for taking MathML and producing images and descriptive text for voicing math</a>, had created a prototype quickly. Making it really work could be done fairly straight-forwardly, by building on the work of people at the sprint. It would need the following:<br />
<ul>
<li>The prototype server-side code that builds on Phil Schatz' code.</li>
<li>MathJax running server-side via PhantomJS.</li>
<li>ChromeVox's mathematics description generation made into a separate service called by the code and running via PhantomJS. </li>
</ul>
<h4>
Why building this server-side tool would be immediately useful</h4>
<ul>
<li>It could <b>make EPUB books with mathematics accessible</b> for learners using screen readers. EPUB3 calls for supporting MathML directly, but support for that is not available in most readers. Currently, publishers must produce images instead, which aren't helpful for visually-impaired scholars and learners. With this server-side component, publishers can use MathML as the source, and deliver images with descriptions for reading the math aloud.</li>
<li>Pre-converting mathematics <b>allows publishers more control</b> over the generated mathematics and could make the reading experience faster for learners. Connexions, for instance, would like to ensure that their EPUBs and PDFs have mathematics that looks the same across devices. They would like to be able to generate both using MathJax.</li>
</ul>
Benetech, MathJax, and ChromeVox are working together to move this project forward. If you would like to help or keep up with the progess, please email Anh Bui, <span class="gI">anhb at benetech.org</span>, to be added to the mailing list.<br />
<h4 id="aside-sprint-length">
Aside about sprint lengths </h4>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">A few of the teams building prototypes really
wanted to continue their work and kept coding. I am sure they would have
used at least a full day more coding. My friend Adam Hyde always
recommends a week-long sprint. He organizes book sprints where a group
writes a book in a week. Last summer, my team participated in a coding
sprint with Adam's Booktype project and about five other organizations.
That sprint lasted a week. It was fabulous. We picked the editor that we
based ours on, determined what approach we would take for mathematics
editing, and explored options for real-time collaboration. You can read
about it in <a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/search?q=berlin">earlier blog posts on that sprint</a>.) </span></blockquote>
<h4 id="participants">
Participating organizations at the accessibility sprint </h4>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://bookshare.org/">Benetech/Bookshare</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.calstate.edu/accessibility/">California State University Accessibility </a></li>
<li><a href="http://cnx.org/">Connexions</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.diagramcenter.org/">Diagram Center</a></li>
<li><a href="http://futurepress.org/">Future Press </a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.chromevox.com/" target="_blank">Google (ChromeVox)</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://goorulearning.org/">Gooru </a></li>
<li><a href="http://hypothes.is/">Hypothes.is </a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.htctu.net/">High Tech Center Training Unit</a> of the California Community Colleges </li>
<li><a href="http://idrc.ocad.ca/">Inclusive Design Research Centre</a></li>
<li><a href="http://kindlinglabs.com/">Kindling Labs, LLC</a></li>
<li><a href="http://mathjax.org/">MathJax</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://nook.com/">Nook LLC</a></li>
<li><a href="http://oerpub.org/">OERPUB</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://phet.colorado.edu/">PhET</a></li>
<li><a href="http://plos.org/">Public Library of Science (PLOS)</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://sri.com/"> </a><a href="http://www.vdrdc.org/">Smith-Kettlewell RERC & VDRDC</a></li>
<li><a href="http://sri.com/">SRI International (our hosts)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~vxs">University of Birmingham</a> </li>
</ul>
<h4>
This sprint was supported by generous funding and in-kind support from</h4>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://benetech.org/" target="_blank">Benetech</a></li>
<li><a href="http://gatesfoundation.org/" target="_blank">The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation</a></li>
<li><a href="http://shuttleworthfoundation.org/" target="_blank">The Shuttleworth Foundation</a> (via OERPUB)</li>
<li><a href="http://sri.org/" target="_blank">SRI International</a></li>
</ul>
Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-71195045858474339532013-06-29T15:14:00.001-07:002013-06-29T15:14:36.243-07:00Notes from the Aloha Barcamp<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6jSU9pEV7XB9pVnEkB1mb-M0gpqfjIFnJEu0FXwxFIuYxCvIalbyDTvYPmE6EVgxuN5foxD1NxpD2KuEzG_VNiFv5aFT2vlrZgXMDNxpEi38bJS2s4IJEES7k3yUwdnuVtaVQRUBI2gA/s1600/aloha-doll.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Aloha offices, poster and life-size doll-man wearing Aloha shirt" border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6jSU9pEV7XB9pVnEkB1mb-M0gpqfjIFnJEu0FXwxFIuYxCvIalbyDTvYPmE6EVgxuN5foxD1NxpD2KuEzG_VNiFv5aFT2vlrZgXMDNxpEi38bJS2s4IJEES7k3yUwdnuVtaVQRUBI2gA/s200/aloha-doll.jpg" title="" width="118" /></a><br />
A few weeks ago, I attended an Aloha editor barcamp in Vienna, Austria. I know you are feeling sorry for me, right now. It was actually during the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/german-floods-elbe-river-breaches-levee-more-towns-evacuated_n_3414578.html">recent floods in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Germany</a>, but due to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Danube_regulation">extensive flood control and regulation of the Danube</a>, Vienna was completely spared and the weather was gorgeous for us. <br />
<br />
I posted <a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/06/on-my-way-to-aloha-barcamp-june-67-in.html">what I was planning to show</a> earlier, and that is basically what transpired. I demonstrated the OERPUB editor built on Aloha. I demonstrated the new mathematics editing, as well as adaptations to the image, table, and link plugins. I also showed transformation tools that bring content from web pages, office documents, Google Docs etc, into the editor. Marvin Reimer and Tom Woodward showed more detail focusing on the way the original Aloha editor code was adapted. <br />
<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/embed?id=1ssivd4xpeO4UMyFPcGj340O3kVSCSy_b5fEiritWTwo">
</iframe>
(or <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ssivd4xpeO4UMyFPcGj340O3kVSCSy_b5fEiritWTwo/edit?usp=sharing"> see presentation in Google Drive</a>)<br />
<br />
I had never been to a barcamp, so I had no idea what to expect. I still don't know if this one was typical or atypical. There were about 30 participants, most from the Vienna area. Sourcefabric, Connexions, and OERPUB traveled to the event. Petro, of Aloha, was our MC of sorts and had everyone introduce themselves and pick something to present on. Phil Schatz of Connexions presented on github-book, which we will be using in South Africa later this summer. It uses github to store books written with the Aloha editor. <a href="http://aloha-editor.org/blog/2013/06/browser-based-epub3-ebook-editor-powered-by-github-aloha-editor/" target="_blank">Gentic's (Aloha's sponsor company) blog features it</a>.<br />
<br />
Only a few of the presentations were directly related to Aloha, because about half the participants were not yet using Aloha, but rather were evaluating and learning. I was the only person with a presentation in hand, but then again, almost everyone was a developer. Actually, I was expecting more coding and less presenting. There were presentations on general purpose technologies like like AngularJS, Marionnette.js, d3.js and CSS3. Aloha presented about real-time collaboration for Aloha, developed by a partner company. Aloha also had hands-on workshops on creating an Aloha plugin and adding youtube videos using content change handlers that notice youtube links inserted into text.<br />
<br />
My team and Connexions spent an extra day working with the Aloha team on 'undo' and handling 'cut-and-paste' of structured elements. Those are both really critical in a document editor. We needed some relatively simple ways to improve those so that textbook sprints will be successful. More on what we decided in another post.Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-29830275744001870482013-06-25T09:59:00.000-07:002013-06-29T09:28:49.230-07:00Accessiblity Protototypes from the Sprint<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTs6tyo1_BIUGUAdJOPPRpqSzE-pSlGsaenIWW3AvKg5trjKnXOuY015Twx0ymJNbqXqqjSpkYSjskXlrZ9JNdjJN3tprJ8Z0G9Aaia6S5ExYFJ6dDEJ3oE3Zv9DM00BiZyHh7B0uN-cI/s1600/IMAG0722.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTs6tyo1_BIUGUAdJOPPRpqSzE-pSlGsaenIWW3AvKg5trjKnXOuY015Twx0ymJNbqXqqjSpkYSjskXlrZ9JNdjJN3tprJ8Z0G9Aaia6S5ExYFJ6dDEJ3oE3Zv9DM00BiZyHh7B0uN-cI/s200/IMAG0722.jpg" width="200" /></a>This post points to the results of prototypes built at a sprint with educators, technologists, and accessibility specialists. Earlier posts describe the process we went through before working on prototypes.<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/05/born-digital-born-accessible-learning.html" target="_blank">What is in the toolbox already: Demos</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/06/learning-born-accessible-sprint-design.html" target="_blank">Sprint design challenges</a> </li>
<li>Adrian Garcia's thoughts on <a href="http://oerpub.org/blog/2013/06/07/authoring-accessible-links/" target="_blank">Authoring accessible links</a></li>
<li><a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/06/born-digital-born-accessible-sprint.html" target="_blank">Brainstorming solutions</a></li>
</ul>
After getting to know the tools we started with, describing problems that authors, readers, and learners face, and brainstorming solutions, we spent the next day organizing into small groups that would design interfaces and code prototypes to address these problems. We had people sign up in groups to work on prototypes (paper, code) that built on the brainstorming from day one. Additionally, we had lots of math and metadata experts and so groups formed to address mathematics authoring and accessibility and discovery of accessible content.<br />
<br />
Below are links and brief descriptions of the artifacts that resulted from the prototyping:<i><b> </b></i><br />
<h3>
Idiot proofing the authoring process for accessibility</h3>
<ul>
<li><i><b>Auto-creating a Table of Contents</b></i>: (<a href="https://github.com/oerpub/Aloha-Editor/tree/accessability-sprint" target="_blank">oerpub's github accessibilty-sprint branch</a>) In addition to providing good navigation for screen readers, the live TOC shows the structure of the document as it is being created, encouraging authors to see their work structurally, and hopefully improve the structure. OERPUB and FLUID worked together to get a live demo working in the oerpub editor.</li>
<li><i><b>Learner controls</b></i>: (<a href="https://github.com/oerpub/Aloha-Editor/tree/accessability-sprint" target="_blank">oerpub's github accessibilty-sprint branch</a>) Well structured web content can easily be controlled by learners on the fly to adjust text, color, speech options, button readability, etc. OERPUB and FLUID worked together to incorporate the FLUID Learner Options' into the OERPUB editor so that authors can see how their content looks when learners adjust those controls. </li>
<li><i><b>Authoring good image descriptions</b></i> (<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tyc07lvPg1JIeUWe5nuTnC-bqGQiwZKW8xCvigGWWL4/edit" target="_blank">link to design and paper prototype</a>). This team of of two started with assumptions, created user stories, built a flow chart and then made detailed UI designs for a set of wizard-like steps that help authors create good image descriptions.</li>
</ul>
<h3>
Making annotation accessible</h3>
<ul>
<li><i><b>Crowd sourcing speech for math using annotations</b></i> (<a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fdl.dropboxusercontent.com%2Fu%2F4999562%2Fbenetech%2520oer%2520sprint%25202013%2F2013-05-21-math-annotation-crowd-sourcing-interface.pdf&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNFsV3wRPxiwa1I5SvBX3E_8E6B6Bg" target="_blank">link to paper prototype pdf download from dropbox</a>). The idea is to extend Hypothes.is for crowd sourcing math accessibility. It would provide a combo box with four choices - provide alternative, report issue, fix issue, or comment. Readers would rank alternatives by popularity, preference (visual, aural, braille, etc) and subject area. When reporting an issue, readers could select one of 'does not render', 'incorrect', 'confusing', or 'wrong context'. The team would like these to become github bugs using 'bugalizer' (which I think has to be created also.) To fix an issue, someone could 'choose a label', 'create an aural alternative', 'edit an aural alternative', or 'edit the equation' itself (for example, so that invisible operators could be voiced). </li>
<li><i><b>Creating annotations accessibly</b></i> (<a href="https://github.com/martinq/h" target="_blank">link to github code</a>). Making annotations accessible will benefit readers and learnes that use voice activation, keyboard only, and switch devices. At the demo, opening the annotation side bar with keyboard shortcuts was shown, as well as getting the annotations read aloud through shortcuts. It was the first start to making annotations accessible, by using ARIA annotations and keyboard event handlers to enable opening and navigating the annotation drawer. </li>
</ul>
<h3 id="server-side-math">
Better support for mathematics</h3>
<ul>
<li><i><b>Server side mathematics rendering</b></i> (<a href="https://github.com/philschatz/oer.exports" target="_blank">link to github code</a>, branch 'sprint'). MathJax renders mathematics in browsers on each reader's computer. However, it would be nice to have a server-side version of that also, so that content is pre-converted with the original mathematics, an svg for print and epub, and an aural representation for screen readers. They demo'd grabbing the math elements from HTML documents and handing each one to MathJax for converting to SVG and also handing to ChromeVox for generating a speech rendering. </li>
</ul>
<h3>
Making accessible content discoverable </h3>
Representatives from OERPUB, Bookshare, and Learning Registry worked together to figure out ways to make accessible content easier to find. OERPUB analyzed where metadata could be automatically generated while authoring. Bookshare is including similar fields in their description and the Learning Registry was augmented so that needs and preferences could be set before searching and then results that met or nearly met those needs could be returned.<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/Accessibility" target="_blank">A11YMetadata proposal to Schema.org</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwiki.fluidproject.org%2Fdisplay%2Ffluid%2F%2528Floe%2529%2BOER%2BCommons%2Bauthoring%2Btool%2Bhigh%2Bfidelity%2Bmockups%2B%2528February%2529&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNH4Reyw5W7SIpqWjbPmezoxDizfDw" target="_blank">Icons for accessible content provided by the FLUID project</a></li>
<li>Filtering the learning registry by A11YMetadata (<a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1AFFRIOx_2Bek9BeU1qc1d4U1k/edit" target="_blank">paper plan</a>)</li>
</ul>
<h3>
</h3>
Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-37203427984413256902013-06-24T03:23:00.001-07:002013-06-24T03:57:37.543-07:00Born Digital, Born Accessible Sprint - Brainstorming Solutions<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsII5-2ZMfy29JVTAXoh49ewnBKADHIlaToQJHnXfXSCIIhAbsqtGZq1w9P19toGv1dhOyKIL534jsj5hTtDgdPrOK3_4YgIqvfHXOv8XlBJQMbZP4KCjUzkhgznTtoLurWiHzvZoATY4/s1600/IMAG0713.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Group voting wtih sticky notes" border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsII5-2ZMfy29JVTAXoh49ewnBKADHIlaToQJHnXfXSCIIhAbsqtGZq1w9P19toGv1dhOyKIL534jsj5hTtDgdPrOK3_4YgIqvfHXOv8XlBJQMbZP4KCjUzkhgznTtoLurWiHzvZoATY4/s200/IMAG0713.jpg" title="" width="200" /></a>If you missed the earlier posts on the accessibility sprint that we had in Menlo Park in May, here they are:<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/05/born-digital-born-accessible-learning.html" target="_blank">What is in the toolbox already: Demos</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/06/learning-born-accessible-sprint-design.htmlhttp://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/06/learning-born-accessible-sprint-design.html" target="_blank">Sprint design challenges</a> </li>
<li>Adrian Garcia's thoughts on <a href="http://oerpub.org/blog/2013/06/07/authoring-accessible-links/" target="_blank">Authoring accessible links </a></li>
</ul>
Believe it or not, we are still on Day 1!<br />
<h3>
Choosing Challenges to Work On </h3>
After coming up with design challenges, we voted on the ones we would start to work on. We discussed voting criteria including the importance of the problem and the tractability of prototyping a solution in a short time. We voted with colored sticky notes and I tallied the top three vote getters. We chose three so that we could have two design teams for each problem and compare the results. The top three vote getters were ...<br />
<ol>
<li><i><b>Idiot proofing the authoring process for accessibility</b></i></li>
<i><b>
</b></i>
<li><i><b>Making annotation accessible</b></i></li>
<i><b>
</b></i>
<li><i><b>Supporting a STEM scholar that wants to submit articles that are also accessible. </b></i></li>
</ol>
We had five design teams total with two on the first two problems and one on the third challenge. The teams brainstormed and came up with quick sketches and then presented their findings at the end of the day. Here are my notes from those sessions.<br />
<h4>
Idiot proofing the authoring process for accessibility </h4>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBXlYIIhr2dzbfNJW_uWhV-1roltFfULIUzY3zbTYu3hEWhTYcSz8-iVlbK-Gx4Rh1VJBO9ZiVQT3Z1_1VCDt5P-rxWm9MRJW8HN64fT-ncG8NcFq9wf1iqMH6EYTQanZawps8i5aL3QY/s1600/IMAG0718.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Poster of groups findings summarized in text" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBXlYIIhr2dzbfNJW_uWhV-1roltFfULIUzY3zbTYu3hEWhTYcSz8-iVlbK-Gx4Rh1VJBO9ZiVQT3Z1_1VCDt5P-rxWm9MRJW8HN64fT-ncG8NcFq9wf1iqMH6EYTQanZawps8i5aL3QY/s320/IMAG0718.jpg" title="" width="284" /></a></div>
For simplicity, I am combining ideas from both teams.<br />
<ul>
<li>Have a description bank for images.</li>
<li>Create table of contents automatically so screen readers have good navigation and so that authors see a representation of the structure of their content which might encourage better structure.</li>
<li>Make footnotes smart and easy to create. (I didn't fully catch this one, but I think the suggestion is to make footnotes easily to create in ways that link them to the content they are footnoting so that screen readers can find them in context).</li>
<li>Have smart defaults. Include header rows by default in tables and suggest authors use headings. </li>
<li>Mimic Wordpress' image insertion which shows you caption, alt text, and description in a side panel. These create good habits and expectations in authors.</li>
<li>Have a preview mode that reads your content back to you so you can experience what someone listening to it experiences.</li>
<li>Have an "accessibility check" mode like spellchecking. </li>
<li>If images are described, make sure to add that to the metadata for discoverability of the resource.</li>
</ul>
<h4>
Making annotation accessible</h4>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0v9gzMUtFwV1_8xOJKGLeN_-zSSjDTR48thiu3GvgH6uvDlP4mWKSsjdWZx38bia19AiFIZ7gF8yBlnffavvi9p7woE7eG_CpE3dBXLc7UcGbceV7j4qFaySt1U7mmEpsrda5aTCAG9I/s1600/IMAG0719.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="An image being captioned through an annotation and using a template" border="0" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0v9gzMUtFwV1_8xOJKGLeN_-zSSjDTR48thiu3GvgH6uvDlP4mWKSsjdWZx38bia19AiFIZ7gF8yBlnffavvi9p7woE7eG_CpE3dBXLc7UcGbceV7j4qFaySt1U7mmEpsrda5aTCAG9I/s320/IMAG0719.jpg" title="" width="320" /></a>The two design teams took two very different angles at this problem. One team brainstormed ways to use annotations as a new way to crowd source descriptions of images and alternatives for inaccessible content. The other looked specifically at <a href="http://hypothes.is/">Hypothes.is</a>' interface, to figure out how to make reading annotations and creating annotations accessible. In order to crowd source annotations, that team envisioned a specific annotation layer for accessibility, with a user interface (UI) <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-YOVQFq5mBbpUbPNyjU2AaQVgRSdqjdfr6zIgbz9lhz-2ZCm9d1EfR3-jZl5XzmUYyAlPmT2srpR92u0xEftxYgm-haOjj267GCNrKLuskp_hGUGCW7aSmbvzwG-cFGqenlPb-ZotoH8/s1600/IMAG0720.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Notes on adding annotations and hearing the annotations" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-YOVQFq5mBbpUbPNyjU2AaQVgRSdqjdfr6zIgbz9lhz-2ZCm9d1EfR3-jZl5XzmUYyAlPmT2srpR92u0xEftxYgm-haOjj267GCNrKLuskp_hGUGCW7aSmbvzwG-cFGqenlPb-ZotoH8/s320/IMAG0720.jpg" title="" width="251" /></a>specialized for adding accessibility information. The UI would have drop downs for images, graphs, math, etc. Readers would flag resources as inaccessible and request descriptions or alternatives. <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-YOVQFq5mBbpUbPNyjU2AaQVgRSdqjdfr6zIgbz9lhz-2ZCm9d1EfR3-jZl5XzmUYyAlPmT2srpR92u0xEftxYgm-haOjj267GCNrKLuskp_hGUGCW7aSmbvzwG-cFGqenlPb-ZotoH8/s1600/IMAG0720.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a>Responders would have templates for the accessibility information requested. Finally, there would be a way to vote on the best descriptions and/or alternatives. The team looking at making Hypothes.is accessible for authors found that it needed a keyboard shortcut for adding annotations. Additionally, so that readers know when an annotation is present, the team envisioned a configurable tone that would indicated the presence of annotations.<br />
<h4>
Accessible Scholarly Authoring</h4>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh99X_y-IzBDJ_SSkI9GjItzfTELBLLjiilZh28Q1Wbibbtrb2f6UZhIR6FSgsCt4A27aNgI9zA0EVF6Wzr1OwDST4-G3N7e1dBGausqC1qcfzOSPi4NdZrbhXl5Sr4exMeFyPoLno4fdQ/s1600/IMAG0721.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Flow chart for authoring math" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh99X_y-IzBDJ_SSkI9GjItzfTELBLLjiilZh28Q1Wbibbtrb2f6UZhIR6FSgsCt4A27aNgI9zA0EVF6Wzr1OwDST4-G3N7e1dBGausqC1qcfzOSPi4NdZrbhXl5Sr4exMeFyPoLno4fdQ/s320/IMAG0721.jpg" title="" width="247" /></a></div>
The team started by discussing the most likely pathways for creating scholarly content in the first place, using Word with MathType for math, or using LaTeX. Both have some benefits for accessible authoring and can produce mathematics in MathML. Any work that authors do to make content accessible should be reusable and should fit within the normal flow writing an article. A library of common descriptions for particular common graphs and statistics would be useful. One option for math would be having authors actually voice the math and include an audio annotation, but human produced audio can't be explored the way that machine generated audio could. For instance, a reader cannot ask to hear just the first term in an equation. So the team wasn't sure whether that option should be produced.<br />
<br />
The next post will include the results of prototypes created the next day.<br />
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<br />Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-79190328882926373262013-06-04T12:24:00.003-07:002013-06-04T12:24:56.482-07:00On my way to the Aloha Barcamp, June 6,7 in Vienna<b id="docs-internal-guid-1b1cb506-109a-43fe-8414-5bea464547cb" style="font-weight: normal;"></b><br />
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-1b1cb506-109a-43fe-8414-5bea464547cb" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here is what I am proposing to talk about at <a href="http://aloha-editor.org/blog/2013/04/aloha-editor-barcamp-june-2013-state-of-the-art-html5-editing/" target="_blank">the Aloha state of the art HTML5 editing barcamp</a>.</span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The OERPUB editor: Aloha for Authoring Textbooks!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-1b1cb506-109a-43fe-8414-5bea464547cb" style="font-weight: normal;"></b></span></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-1b1cb506-109a-43fe-8414-5bea464547cb" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We<b> </b>are using a<b> </b>customized version of<b> </b>Aloha to create open textbooks and remix and share them. Several different organizations will use Aloha for authoring books and textbooks. It is being embedded at Connexions (</span><a href="http://cnx.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">cnx.org</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">), the oerpub suite of tools (</span><a href="http://oerpub.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">oerpub.org</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">), Siyavula (</span><a href="http://siyavula.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">siyavula.com</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">), and in a lightweight ebook<b> </b>editor that uses github to store all versions (</span><a href="https://github.com/philschatz/github-book" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">github-book)</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and more. We are customizing Aloha<b> </b>(</span><a href="https://github.com/oerpub/Aloha-Editor" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">forked here</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) to be really easy for textbook authors and educators to use. We are also making sure that it is easy to create accessible content, so we have customized image, table, and math plugins. In addition, we have special draggable semantic elements for common things in textbooks like exercises, examples, and notes. I will be demoing these customizations.</span></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh65sAXqqG1Pp8PDKjp2aAo8y0aNg1Wg791KyyOKryiXlFQ9o678feq8p7T45Opcfw5Xe_DBJ0PQhnn0q81DjGEWX64Qugxk0kzcJ0iXaK9UCsbRhtmMRuKkFRVqYn1G0AsYkIrlKrsSpo/s1600/aloha-for-textbooks.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="screen shot of the editor with sidebar toolbox, document page, and toolbar" border="0" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh65sAXqqG1Pp8PDKjp2aAo8y0aNg1Wg791KyyOKryiXlFQ9o678feq8p7T45Opcfw5Xe_DBJ0PQhnn0q81DjGEWX64Qugxk0kzcJ0iXaK9UCsbRhtmMRuKkFRVqYn1G0AsYkIrlKrsSpo/s400/aloha-for-textbooks.png" title="" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-5cd2ef10-109f-cb9c-519a-f65b33f26abd" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Find out more</span></b></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5cd2ef10-109f-cb9c-519a-f65b33f26abd" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Find out more at </span><a href="http://oerpub.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">oerpub.org</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-5cd2ef10-109f-cb9c-519a-f65b33f26abd" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Play with a demo at </span><a href="http://editor.oerpub.org/oerpub" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">editor.oerpub.org/oerpub</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-5cd2ef10-109f-cb9c-519a-f65b33f26abd" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Play with our full suite of tools for remixing at </span><a href="http://remix.oerpub.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">remix.oerpub.org</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-5cd2ef10-109f-cb9c-519a-f65b33f26abd" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">See our mockups with features that haven't all yet been implemented, </span><a href="http://bit.ly/editor-55" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">bit.ly/editor-55</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5cd2ef10-109f-cb9c-519a-f65b33f26abd" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Take a </span><a href="http://content.screencast.com/users/maxstarkenburg/folders/Default/media/930d49d0-432a-4dc3-a77c-8c5289f5ee33/OERPUB_%20Introduction%20to%20the%20Editor.swf&blurover=false" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">video tour of the designs</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></div>
</li>
</ul>
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</b><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-88301335733268008772013-06-03T12:43:00.001-07:002013-06-03T12:43:36.969-07:00Learning Born Accessible - Sprint Design ChallengesWith a bit of delay, I am back to documenting the "Born Digital, Born Accessible Learning Sprint". The first thing we did was show off tools and software that the groups brought to the sprint. See <a href="http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2013/05/born-digital-born-accessible-learning.html" target="_blank">my previous blog post for the goals and tools we brought</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE_jrMjYn8kWEdxS55hyphenhyphenePVSnyjcS81UCZIOtJPvZz6TNn0tkeKLrT-Re2mJEIPqWpDnc7t0OHG1lQU-fIRMD_oiWEyof98Qgf4SaE1fnEZUOWoHBz6mCZTq2Gmo3MSMHQFEkhlcMpnE8/s1600/IMAG0716.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="subgroup of sprint participants around a round table" border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE_jrMjYn8kWEdxS55hyphenhyphenePVSnyjcS81UCZIOtJPvZz6TNn0tkeKLrT-Re2mJEIPqWpDnc7t0OHG1lQU-fIRMD_oiWEyof98Qgf4SaE1fnEZUOWoHBz6mCZTq2Gmo3MSMHQFEkhlcMpnE8/s200/IMAG0716.jpg" title="" width="200" /></a>Next, we broke into groups of 5 or 6 to discuss the biggest challenges that teachers and learners face with respect to accessible learning. In subsequent posts, I will show the brainstorming results and the prototypes that resulted.<br />
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<h3>
Design Challenges</h3>
<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-4929ee4d-0b49-efba-ca5e-f4051e1b588c" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b>Customize a lesson for a class with several students using assistive technology or learning supports:</b> This scenario is based on an actual class. A fourth grade, US geography teacher, following the common core, is preparing a lesson. In this class, one student is blind and uses a braille keyboard, one has a physical challenge and can only use a single motion to communicate and uses a switch controlled keyboard. Several have dyslexia and/or speak english as a second language. The class has a student aide who is assigned to the child who uses the switch device, but the aide helps other children as well by necessity. The classroom teacher gets regular classroom material and must figure out how to make it work for everyone. The teacher wants to </div>
<ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Customize a lesson and </li>
<li>Use a PHET simulation </li>
</ul>
<b>Teaching long division to visually impaired students:</b> Long division usually can't be read by screen readers because it is just an image. A teacher wants to create good text that describes the process in the image and then share that with other teachers.<br />
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<b>Using annotations accessibly (taking notes, participating in discussions, providing help for others).</b> A blind learner would like to annotate text, math, and images in an educational resource and wants to be able to accessibly navigate annotations and filter them by who created them and whether the learner favorited them.<br />
Use cases for annotation: </div>
<ul>
<li>Letting people know that this image needs a description.</li>
<li>Providing a description or better description for an image or math. </li>
<li>Participating in a discussion with peers about the text</li>
<li>Taking notes for studying </li>
<li>Parents sharing the audio descriptions they create for their own children</li>
</ul>
<b>Making accessible authoring "idiot-proof"</b>. An author wants to create and share learning materials accessibly, but it is hard to know how to do a good job and what tools to use.<br />
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<b>Submit research accessibly: </b>Margaret is a STEM professor and she has a younger brother that is visually impaired. She wants her next publication to be accessible, but her time is limited. She wants good authoring tools and ways to keep track of her materials. She wants to reuse things that she has already made accessible like figures and equations in subsequent publications.<br />
She wants to make her colleagues more aware and encourage them to do the same. Her time is limited -- if she can get others to help she would really like this. Who might benefit? Publishers and libraries (material is more searchable), researchers and students with print disabilities.<br />
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<b>Accessible Chemistry: </b>ChemML is a representation for chemistry that can be explored and read, but you need authoring tools that can let you produce it. Two potential users: I am a publisher and I am in charge of scientific journals and want to support ChemML. I am a student in post-secondary school and I can't draw the chemistry equations and I need authoring tools for doing my work.</div>
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<b>Finding my own resources quickly and sharing them with others that need them:</b> Jose is in 6th grade and has a print disability. His parents don't speak English and don't have free time. He wants to find resources to help on his homework. He wants to be able to control the process -- not wait for someone to read to him. Immediacy is important -- taking a test can't wait, doing a group project in class can't wait. Schools will benefit from any solutions that can be shared and discovered -- lowers costs.</div>
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<b>Lack of Unicode support makes material inaccessible: </b>Screen readers say "unidentified symbol", graduate papers often have them, close captioned television uses unicode for music symbols. The use of these symbols are context-dependent and lists of them are incomplete.</div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span> </div>
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<b>Making accessibility high priority:</b> I am a product manager and want to include accessible authoring. How do I communicate to higher ups that you need to add accessiblity? What are the business use cases? Where are simple guidelines? As a content provider I want to retrofit existing content with A11y Metadata, but need help convincing others. </div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span>Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-24838680827013581172013-05-23T20:33:00.003-07:002013-05-25T08:49:06.657-07:00Born Digital, Born Accessible Learning Sprint - Day 1 (Toolbox)This week a diverse group of educators, technologists, and accessibility specialists (30 of us!) gathered to envision and prototype end-to-end solutions for born
accessible eBooks; from creating, to discovering, to learning from
accessible, rich, <i>interactive</i> eBooks. We were there to learn from each other and sprint together to build prototypes while strengthening the collaborative possibilities between the groups.<br />
<br />
For any readers unfamiliar with the term 'accessible', it means making the material usable by as many people as possible, especially including people with disabilities or special needs (See also <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility" target="_blank">the wikipedia article on accessibility</a>). Not only is accessibility critical in education to give every learner the ability to reach their potential, but often the benefits of accessible content extend to all learners in the same way that curb cuts have made roller bags possible. Here are some examples.<br />
<ul>
<li>If someone is blind or low vision, they are likely to use a screen reader. It is important that all controls are accessible via the keyboard, and that the structure of a document is easy to navigate. Videos important for learning need an audio description to replace important information from the visual field (which is different from captioning). Images need descriptions if they are important to the learning. All of this extra information benefits all learners because it makes resources easier to find because the text descriptions are searchable. </li>
<li>If someone has a very limited range of motion, then controls must be usable via a switch interface or voice commands. All learners benefit because the same hooks can be used as shortcuts and automations.</li>
<li>If someone is deaf or hearing impaired, audio content needs transcripts and videos need captions. Simulations need to make sure that information conveyed through sound is available in another way. In addition to added searchability, anyone in a noisy environment will benefit from these features. </li>
<li>If someone has a reading or learning disability, assistive technologies can read aloud and highlight text as it is read, but not if text is embedded in images. That might seem rare, but mathematics is often presented as an image only. Although still in research, mathematics that is text (rather than image) will also be explorable one day. Each part or term can be queried, annotated, and manipulated, benefiting all learners.</li>
</ul>
<a href="http://oerpub.org/" target="_blank">OERPUB</a> (my <a href="http://shuttleworthfoundation.org/" target="_blank">Shuttleworth Foundation</a> funded organization), <a href="http://benetech.org/" target="_blank">Benetech</a>, and <a href="http://gatesfoundation.org/" target="_blank">the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation</a> each helped to bring the sprint to fruition.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirsKhM67SRSaF09j3DbaoKDHUXEpbuyKOcmCNrzUQNiZsbHKLkHY4WjJIkbEpYlN5UX1arBCHhD7MHj3yVz3Tl4VSNdW32ajPNW7xHHkgkvm7Eufd5xx0h4lNWaacEQrFAOU8AH4sWhN0/s1600/IMAG0715.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="participants watching demos" border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirsKhM67SRSaF09j3DbaoKDHUXEpbuyKOcmCNrzUQNiZsbHKLkHY4WjJIkbEpYlN5UX1arBCHhD7MHj3yVz3Tl4VSNdW32ajPNW7xHHkgkvm7Eufd5xx0h4lNWaacEQrFAOU8AH4sWhN0/s320/IMAG0715.jpg" title="" width="320" /></a>The sprint was two and half days long and it is going to take a few posts for me to get all the information out about the sprint, but I definitely want to share all of it, because the sprint was incredibly informative and productive. The first morning, each of the groups showed off relevant tools, technologies, and processes. We wanted to know who was looking for help making their sites and teaching resources accessible, and who was bringing tools to make content more accessible. In a sense, this part of the meeting was about showing what we already have in the toolbox for accessibility.<br />
<br />
Demos:<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://mountainbunker.org/~maxwell/oerpub/editor-ideas/editor-54.html" target="_blank"><b>Accessible Authoring: </b>OERPUB editor design</a>: To break the ice, I showed features of the oerpub editor designed to help authors create accessible content. We mark images that need descriptions and say 'thanks' when they are added. We create tables with a header row by default, and math is written in a format (MathML) so that screen readers can read it. I asked for help doing even more, especially for training authors while they are creating and for finding and including accessible movies and sims. You can see what we have released so far at <a href="http://remix.oerpub.org/">remix.oerpub.org</a>, which also includes importers for Word, OpenOffice, LaTeX, Google Docs, and web pages.</li>
<li><a href="http://youdescribe.ski.org/" target="_blank"><b>Accessible Videos:</b> YouDescribe</a> Owen Edwards from Smith Kettlewell showed YouDescribe, an experimental platform for crowdsourcing extended video descriptions. It is analogous to the <a href="http://www.amara.org/" target="_blank">Amara platform</a> for crowdsourcing closed-captions. Viewers pause videos and then record a narration of what they are seeing. Often parents and relatives do this already if someone in their family needs this. They are describing exactly what they know their relative needs to hear about the video. This would be a way to make that work benefit many more people.</li>
<li><b>Accessible Simulations:</b> Ariel Paul of <a href="http://phet.colorado.edu/" target="_blank">PHET</a> (simulations for math, chemistry, and physics that make the invisible (like electrons) visible) is creating HTML5 versions of their simulations and taking the opportunity to make them accessible to more learners. Ariel demo'd an alpha version of an HTML5 tug-of-war simulation to show basics of forces and motion. The new simulation could be operated via keyboard, switch devices, or voice activation. They are taking this rewrite to HTML5 as an opportunity to really think through accessibility. He was here to learn as much as possible from all the accessibility experts here. </li>
<li><b>Learner Controls and Accessible Video:</b> Yura Zenevich and Joanna Vass of the <a href="http://idrc.ocad.ca/" target="_blank">Inclusive Design Research Center</a> demonstrated Learner Options (<a href="http://demo.floeproject.org/integration-demos/uiOptions/ClimateChange.html" target="_blank">example</a> - show display preferences), <a href="https://github.com/mattytemple/speak-js">Speak.js</a>, and <a href="http://build.fluidproject.org/videodemo/videoPlayer/demos/Mammals.html">an accessible video player</a>. Learner Options is a javascript library that gives learners a set of controls to adjust text size, button and link size, spacing, font, contrast, text-to-speech, navigation and layout. The video player has controls that are all keyboard operable, and it pulls in any corresponding captions it finds from amara (caption crowd sourcing). </li>
<li><b id="docs-internal-guid-46325c14-d43f-f814-8bfb-a44f71b4741f" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><b>Accessible Annotations:</b> Jake Hartnell demonstrated <a href="http://hypothes.is/alpha" target="_blank">Hypothes.is</a>, a distributed, open-source platform for annotating the web. He asked for help in making annotations accessible -- both the discovery of annotations and the creation of them. In addition to seeking to make annotations more accessible, annotations are also a potentially powerful tool for accessible learning. <a href="https://www.bookshare.org/" target="_blank">Bookshare</a> (an accessible online library) regularly receives requests for some way to take notes within books. Learners using accessible books need accessible ways to track their learning. Additionally, annotations might provide a way to request and receive help making resources useful to more learners. For instance an annotation on an image with no description could provide a description.</li>
<li><b>EBook Authoring</b>: Phil Schatz of Connexions demonstrated <a href="http://philschatz.github.io/github-book/" target="_blank">github-book</a> (<a href="https://github.com/philschatz/github-book" target="_blank">code</a>): an authoring system for books that uses the OERPUB editor for each chapter and automatically creates an EPUB ebook as a result. Versions of the book are all stored in github and people can easily make their own copy of a book and adapt it. </li>
<li><b>Accessible Math and Chemistry:</b> Volker Sorge of University of Birmingham and Google demonstrated <a href="http://www.chromevox.com/" target="_blank">ChromeVox</a> which can read mathematics on the web, demonstrated a system that can analyze an image of a molecule and outputs three structured text format alternates for the molecule, and finally demonstrated <a href="http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/groupings/reasoning/sdag/maxtract.php" target="_blank">Maxtract</a> which converts PDFs created using OCR (optical character recognition) to LaTeX or HTML. </li>
<li><b>Accessible EBOOK Reading, Image Captioning, and Text-to-speech with highlighting:</b> Gerardo Capiel from Benetech demonstrated an <a href="http://github.com/benetech/readium" target="_blank">accessible version of the Readium</a> EPUB3 reader, <a href="http://diagramcenter.org/development/poet.html" target="_blank">POET</a> (an image description tool), <a href="http://github.com/benetech/BeneSpeaK" target="_blank">BeneSpeak</a> and <a href="http://a11ymetadata.org/" target="_blank">Accessibility Metadata (a11ymetadata)</a> for <a href="http://schema.org/">Schema.org</a>. The readium version uses special tags so you can navigate using Safari, IE 9 and 10, Firefox, and Chrome. With POET, an entire book in DAISY format is uploaded and then all of the images can be described or marked as decorative. Soon POET will support books in EPUB3 format. BeneSpeak does word-level highlighting in conjunction with the <a href="http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/tts.html">Chrome specific TTS APIs</a> speech engine. The highlighting helps readers with learning disabilities like dyslexia or who are learning a second language follow and comprehend. The accessibility metadata Capiel showed has been proposed to Schema.org, based on the a11ymetadata project. It will make it easier to find accessible education resources. Examples -- you can indicate that a resource can be used via keyboard only, or via mouse only. You can indicate that a resource has described images, transcripts for video, etc.</li>
</ul>
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<br />Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-52455849237860215972013-05-16T14:22:00.001-07:002013-07-03T08:49:03.859-07:00Testing of the editor designs at the Connexions ConferenceThe OERPUB UI team, Adrian Garcia and Max Starkenburg, were hard at work during the sprints after the Connexions Conference testing the usability of new features that have been designed for the editor. The testing, as usual, was highly informative.<br />
<br />
They were testing <a href="http://tinyurl.com/oerpubmockup" target="_blank">this mockup</a>:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBzfBdm9wIR9nieo5ESMLQAaMHJEjK1KLpx9wBcWQraglQvvUMcuJ5dL8UD3AQVSSv6rNKxsTVS4rZkEkveQPbI7CCuZTICnTilF-0Reo5RNPjRHi6BNXVcKqsj8If4l4I9zHmX3x7OKs/s1600/mockup.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="mockup shows a left toolbox of pedagogy templates, a fairly standard editing toolbar, and a learning document on properties of exponents." border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBzfBdm9wIR9nieo5ESMLQAaMHJEjK1KLpx9wBcWQraglQvvUMcuJ5dL8UD3AQVSSv6rNKxsTVS4rZkEkveQPbI7CCuZTICnTilF-0Reo5RNPjRHi6BNXVcKqsj8If4l4I9zHmX3x7OKs/s400/mockup.png" title="" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<h3>
New Features</h3>
It has several new features or combinations of features since the last set of testing:<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKL8HSSmfVx11qmjswKqtrgBqLPYu0HlzAzn_x27Cwpqm1xkM2jvi9hAa7d3oOLT3zHv5dDRlobmr-OepgX_z4CHT0YXsEJXU9xRRQ08nnshmlXHATECslQHxGFtWChCS45JjXzfCTpFg/s1600/pedagogy-forms.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKL8HSSmfVx11qmjswKqtrgBqLPYu0HlzAzn_x27Cwpqm1xkM2jvi9hAa7d3oOLT3zHv5dDRlobmr-OepgX_z4CHT0YXsEJXU9xRRQ08nnshmlXHATECslQHxGFtWChCS45JjXzfCTpFg/s1600/pedagogy-forms.png" /></a><b>Pedagogy templates in the toolbar.</b> This was implemented for instances in which an organization embeds the editor but doesn't have screen real estate for the toolbox. Some organizations may even want both.</li>
<li><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTCxjfPG2ovh5AYoz0Cw_gpFonJ_Fj8om-iUPJnSvAJ_WthrVCk-xOUSUs8levrgEPIkwDT8k7AdgTUEHgXhbfWXzzGfxHL9fJc8h9srmLZMsj-ZGZfAJ73koHrDdjH_boSa0cBisp2x8/s1600/inline-menu.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTCxjfPG2ovh5AYoz0Cw_gpFonJ_Fj8om-iUPJnSvAJ_WthrVCk-xOUSUs8levrgEPIkwDT8k7AdgTUEHgXhbfWXzzGfxHL9fJc8h9srmLZMsj-ZGZfAJ73koHrDdjH_boSa0cBisp2x8/s1600/inline-menu.png" /></a><b>An inline menu</b>. This will enable users to make key terms, code font, or foreign text, and to remove formatting. This inline menu appears when authors hover over highlighted text, over styled text (which they could convert to a more semantically rich choice), or over key terms, etc. </li>
<li><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLu23wrgvDnflCUOwlNOvNX-s5ITYq9BFPrJ-9h2HaYsmJpzigTdv6aD4B5sBNm8v0E_BY5iWi8DxbnDxyTQZ_BEEgDTkc3qLsp9-U9SXXI4NTfdT8TlBzaOBXgNEOXtiI4TiDG-ewoUk/s1600/options.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="131" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLu23wrgvDnflCUOwlNOvNX-s5ITYq9BFPrJ-9h2HaYsmJpzigTdv6aD4B5sBNm8v0E_BY5iWi8DxbnDxyTQZ_BEEgDTkc3qLsp9-U9SXXI4NTfdT8TlBzaOBXgNEOXtiI4TiDG-ewoUk/s320/options.png" width="320" /></a><b>Pedagogy options menu.</b> This menu provides a list of all possible pedagogy templates and allows users to select which ones are visible. </li>
<li><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY1hNa4YvX3M_GmZ0Zlbj4FCcRdJ3sjcO0JdnR9seBZc0As3Ya7h0B4E2wGko5czKcZTzoRbnqhWsG_6fhIBnKZ6MRLZPjnp2JiwV1xERkOotxEgFCKaUtGzlGhMPfhHhs0XYtEo_ZDR0/s1600/video.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY1hNa4YvX3M_GmZ0Zlbj4FCcRdJ3sjcO0JdnR9seBZc0As3Ya7h0B4E2wGko5czKcZTzoRbnqhWsG_6fhIBnKZ6MRLZPjnp2JiwV1xERkOotxEgFCKaUtGzlGhMPfhHhs0XYtEo_ZDR0/s320/video.png" width="320" /></a>
<b>An icon for inserting videos into documents.</b> This will enable users to search for videos hosted on various sites and embed them in their document. </li>
<li>
<b>Quotation template.</b> These enable authors to create quotations. </li>
</ul>
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<ul>
</ul>
<h3>
Questions and Answers </h3>
<ol>
<li><i><b>Can users discover important features of the editor on their own?</b></i> The pedagogy toolbox is much more discoverable than the pedagogy menu. In the menu, "Add a new" sounded like a toolbar configuration rather than something to include in the author's content. We were trying to avoid "insert" which other research has shown to be confusing to authors, but we will need to work on the wording of this menu and make it more inviting to try.</li>
<li><i><b>How discoverable is the inline context menu?</b></i> The inline context menu was the least discoverable of the features. Perhaps changing the color of the menu's icon so that is is brighter will increase discoverability. It may also help if it appears more quickly. <a href="http://mountainbunker.org/~maxwell/oerpub/editor-ideas/editor-54.html" target="_blank">This mockup</a> shows a possible fix.</li>
<li><i><b>Will it be a surprise to users that the inline menu does not provide any styling options? Might the inline menu distract from styling?</b></i> This doesn't appear to be a problem for authors. They seemed fine accessing styling exclusively from the top toolbar. Keyboard shortcuts for bold and italics should be supported (and they are in the implemented editor!)</li>
<li><i><b>Are participants able to use and understand the pedagogy? Can they successfully customize it?</b></i> No change from prior tests. Authors are able to use the tools easily. Sometimes they bypass the templates and just type things in. In this test, authors struggled with the widget for altering the labels (exercise->question for instance). </li>
<li><i><b>Is it confusing to have two pedagogy menus in the editor? </b></i>Basically, yes. The confusion abates after experimenting with both. Most authors concluded they were the same, but we don't know how high their confidence was. We aren't sure whether we will try to fix this problem.</li>
<li><i><b>Are participants able to properly insert videos?</b></i> Yes, the workflow worked well. The icon was hard for authors to find, but they did find it. It would be good to create a better icon, but we can probably live with this one for a while.</li>
<li><i><b>Are participants able to properly insert quotations? Will they have issues with their appearance? </b></i>The workflow was fine. Participants wanted them to be styled differently. They will be more likely to use the semantic template if it is visually pleasing. This is an easy fix, but will only affect the content in the editor and when saved from the editor. Repos may style quotes differently.</li>
</ol>
<h3>
The Full Report</h3>
You can <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_gneGsL-CA5M2szUkE5amJKbEE/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">download the full report in PDF format</a>. We are working on a more remixable format for the report.<br />
<br />Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-882505592673820302013-04-26T09:02:00.001-07:002013-04-26T09:02:18.966-07:00Day 2 -- Sprinting continues<h3>
The Saga Continues</h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2ey59g-kBsnqKxp8YOlu0-sBOBsAU8mowwlcbWS-l_xvwibF06ok3NUQfkReeq0THKzkvY9dFQ8wC5XREKxZip7-C5nLAoP8LIsO6duRMaghNhLPX-91J_jcwPZrkNoUyLwws657SzZc/s1600/day2-xformapi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="white board photo of api for services for transforming documents. Details not critical." border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2ey59g-kBsnqKxp8YOlu0-sBOBsAU8mowwlcbWS-l_xvwibF06ok3NUQfkReeq0THKzkvY9dFQ8wC5XREKxZip7-C5nLAoP8LIsO6duRMaghNhLPX-91J_jcwPZrkNoUyLwws657SzZc/s320/day2-xformapi.jpg" title="" width="240" /></a></div>
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A few people headed home after day 1, but we still had over 20 people sprinting on day 2. On Day 2, we continued to code and also had several design discussions on technology and APIs. </div>
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<b>Transform Services:</b> One of those discussion was between Connexions, Vietnam OER, and OERPUB (my Shuttleworth funded team) about a common API for transforming documents from one type to another (Word to HTML to EPUB to PDF, etc). Although it sounds really esoteric, it turns out that this is an area that is ripe for collaboration and sharing code, not only among these teams, but also for anyone producing digital and print books like Booktype, Pressbooks, and even OReilly. The photo to the left shows a quick sketch of common ground and <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RgY3xvusB8vHtP9RVz5KQ6aeWbZdH_QImccMUnPLWoY/edit#" target="_blank">this doc has a further writeup</a> on the ideas shared. After the discussion the VOER team headed home, and one of the Connexions developers started refactoring current code to match the new shared vision.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje3tk3wKCgcFVMYXabHqABRuXEFCYw1GNAoZF3n8etLtjhn456Bu4GUTTtwi7-kVjH5I7c6Z5XOBP-Z29VMAzFHpg9gdmxLfYk5G_V9ZGy4vUK8pJz6h5PTwl6FUWhadm3Y63ob3MG2AU/s1600/screen5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje3tk3wKCgcFVMYXabHqABRuXEFCYw1GNAoZF3n8etLtjhn456Bu4GUTTtwi7-kVjH5I7c6Z5XOBP-Z29VMAzFHpg9gdmxLfYk5G_V9ZGy4vUK8pJz6h5PTwl6FUWhadm3Y63ob3MG2AU/s400/screen5.jpg" width="400" /></a><b>Wordpress editor embed:</b> And the photo to the right shows the progress on getting the OER editor embedded in Wordpress. It builds on an existing Wordpress plugin for Aloha (the base HTML5 editor of the OER editor.) The existing plugin needed to be updated to make everything work (as all code does periodically) and that has been submitted back to the original developer. We also added in the new semantic elements drop down (not shown) and are updating to the latest Aloha to correct for a bug that Clemens recognized in the behavior. </div>
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<b>Internationalization:</b> Clemens Prerovsky from Aloha showed a group of us how Aloha internationalization is done. Basically they use "keys" in the code and then each plugin has a set of language specific files with key-string pairs. Translators edit those directly right now. Although not super streamlined if you have lots of new translations to do, it is simple and straightforward. We also need translations for auto-generated text that is a part of the content being created, and we discussed the added complexities that entails.</div>
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<b>Abandoning Content-Editable:</b> Since we had an Aloha founder in the room, Phil of CNX and Clemens of Aloha discussed the problems with trying to use content-editable in the editor. Browsers handle events in the content-editable region differently which means that the Aloha base functions have a lot of code to correct for that. It may be saner to essentially implement cursor and event handling from scratch and not use content-editable. Clemens will take that idea back to the Aloha team and perhaps we will work on it during the <a href="http://aloha-editor.org/blog/2013/04/aloha-editor-barcamp-june-2013-state-of-the-art-html5-editing/" target="_blank">Aloha barcamp, June 6,7 in Vienna</a>.</div>
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<b>Wikipedia Therapy: </b>The folks working on wikipedia entries got to experience editing over time (see the<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStax_College" target="_blank"> OpenStax College entry</a>), which doesn't happen in a 2 hour workshop. The wiki folks also provided feedback on how to navigate the wiki world and respond to reverts and slightly heated discussions. They worked on cross-wikipedia licensing issues, for instance when a resource from Brazil is reused in English wikipedia and the license is in Portugese. </div>
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<b>Logging and Analytics:</b> Connexions did more work on logging. Ed, normally consumed by planning and management enjoyed being able to develop for a couple of days. Ross investigated pwik -- an opensource analytics and log analysis framework. He created a million line log file to do some load testing and initial results indicated that performance may be a limiting factor. </div>
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I hope this gives a flavor for the cross-pollination that happens at sprints; conventions agreed upon, ideas germinated, bugs identified by experts across the room, nagging questions answered, opportunities to branch out, or branch back and brush up skills and rejuvenate.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje3tk3wKCgcFVMYXabHqABRuXEFCYw1GNAoZF3n8etLtjhn456Bu4GUTTtwi7-kVjH5I7c6Z5XOBP-Z29VMAzFHpg9gdmxLfYk5G_V9ZGy4vUK8pJz6h5PTwl6FUWhadm3Y63ob3MG2AU/s1600/screen5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;">, </a></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje3tk3wKCgcFVMYXabHqABRuXEFCYw1GNAoZF3n8etLtjhn456Bu4GUTTtwi7-kVjH5I7c6Z5XOBP-Z29VMAzFHpg9gdmxLfYk5G_V9ZGy4vUK8pJz6h5PTwl6FUWhadm3Y63ob3MG2AU/s1600/screen5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></a>Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-14688121143131630042013-04-25T09:13:00.001-07:002013-04-25T09:13:04.036-07:00Sprints at Connexions - Day 1<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmYHOo_lE1rCtuqzqPyj3V-HrAyQMxkSjQf1dr2xvfTxZOrAbOUDJNcXY14HFlEwASkyvPzP25T45GVHvIspl0Jx2N62NU5YVlDboXwwB07Y5xKhZF4362nNccC2jr1joNUhWvACgKOL0/s1600/IMAG0588.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmYHOo_lE1rCtuqzqPyj3V-HrAyQMxkSjQf1dr2xvfTxZOrAbOUDJNcXY14HFlEwASkyvPzP25T45GVHvIspl0Jx2N62NU5YVlDboXwwB07Y5xKhZF4362nNccC2jr1joNUhWvACgKOL0/s320/IMAG0588.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
We had an excellent first day of sprinting after the Connexions conference. Today's report includes pictures of people working together, but tomorrow we will include more links and screenshots, hopefully. About 30 people total participated on the following projects:<br />
<ul>
<li>Clemens from Aloha gave a mini lesson on the Aloha editor and then VOER and BCCampus built Hello-world plugins. Marvin from OERPUB wrote documentation about how to create new plugins!</li>
<li>BC Campus, Aloha, and OERPUB worked on a Wordpress plugin for the OERPUB editor. We have embeds of the editor in the</li>
</ul>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlVGk0uVdAOXW5RS-lzLsqZj4opubTUcOVeqml3AbEITsS_7zHUBErkKGM0AexmuZrPHC00ISqv5FOpLPYiFiJyjQjCLZ0-Ciji70mskO3xjGYsbOh71bxgd8EM4k57yzKX_w_79qQBTU/s1600/IMAG0589.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlVGk0uVdAOXW5RS-lzLsqZj4opubTUcOVeqml3AbEITsS_7zHUBErkKGM0AexmuZrPHC00ISqv5FOpLPYiFiJyjQjCLZ0-Ciji70mskO3xjGYsbOh71bxgd8EM4k57yzKX_w_79qQBTU/s320/IMAG0589.jpg" width="320" /></a>Oerpub Remix tools and in the Connexions Authoring Tools Client. But this is the first embed in a completely independent framework.<br />
<ul>
<li>Marvin cleaned up the media plugin prototype.</li>
<li>Huy from VOER worked on creating links between different sections of a textbook, including search and integration with the editor.</li>
</ul>
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<ul>
<li>OERPUB's UI team brainstormed about integrating an author's workspace, organizing textbook content, and the editor and its semantic toolbox. They also did user interface testing with sprint participants around a few last details of the editor design.</li>
<li>Ha from VOER got install instructions written for Fedora for the Authors Tools Client. </li>
<li>Other topics, less editor related - a group worked on Wikipedia pages for OpenStax College and learned about making good reference materials that Wikipedia articles can point to (with good dates and author info). CNX worked on better logging, a catalog for OpenStax textbooks, VOER did Elastic Search research and porting old simple author accounts to OpenID. </li>
</ul>
Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-52952931116825516002013-04-16T13:17:00.001-07:002013-04-16T13:17:59.008-07:00Notes from the Saylor Digital Education Conference April 2013<h3>
It's the money, stupid.</h3>
At the Saylor Digital Education Conference, this past week (April 2013), Michael Saylor talked at length about his own educational journey. He came out of MIT with no debt and was able to start a company. A student coming out of college today with over $100,000 in debt or a medical school with $400,000 of debt cannot innovate or take a risk. He stressed that the goal of the Saylor Foundation is free education for everyone. And finally, I understood that he actually meant what he said. He doesn't mean he will put free content on a website and super-focused students can go through it all themselves. He means a high quality, guided college education for FREE. How that will happen isn't clear, nor is how that will be sustainable, but that is what many at the conference are figuring out through trial and error yielding the next set of ideas. The argument for free is pretty clear. Right now, a 4 year college degree costs $200,000 or more. A colleague mentioned that colleges themselves claim the true cost is nearer to $280,000. That is just not ever going to scale to universal education, and it truly is limiting the future of even our brightest and most fortunate students.<br />
<h3>
How about free?</h3>
Saylor thinks that universal, free education will happen online, interactively, and will be personalized using software that people at the conference (and others) are developing. It might be paid for through advertising, or through recruitment fees, or through business models as yet unheard of.<br />
<br />
I am also convinced that we can learn a lot more with a little help from our digital friends. We will have the ability to interact with digital models, to interleave practice with memory refreshers, to create online portfolios of our vision. We can have all our past knowledge and entire degrees worth of new knowledge at our fingertips.<br />
<h3>
But don't spend it all on technology.</h3>
I do have worries about all this focus on digital everything transforming education. So far, most of the really dramatic results in education that I know of come from giving smart teachers the ability to interact directly with learners. Technology has never matched the dramatic gains that smart teachers make. More on that in the next post.<br />
<h3>
OER from the learner's perspective.</h3>
My talk at the conference was chiefly about the power of semantic document formats, open-source content transformation tools, and well thought out user interfaces for authors. But, I also made an attempt to show the vision from the perspective of a learner, benefiting from the sorts of learning that is possible once their textbooks and courses are available in interoperable formats.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="356" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" mozallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/18648428" style="border-width: 1px 1px 0; border: 1px solid #CCC; margin-bottom: 5px;" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="427"> </iframe> <br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 5px;">
<strong> <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/kathi-fletcher/fletcher-saylor-digital-education-conference-2013" target="_blank" title="Fletcher saylor digital education conference 2013">Fletcher saylor digital education conference 2013</a> </strong> from <strong><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/kathi-fletcher" target="_blank">kathi-fletcher</a></strong> </div>
Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3213242827617521584.post-23012503354767773302013-01-30T12:33:00.001-08:002013-07-03T08:46:36.999-07:00Usabilty team blog postsThe usability team that has been designing and testing the OER editor interactions will be blogging regularly to share everything about our design and testing process. Their <a href="http://oerpub.org/introducing-oerpubs-usability-and-user-interface-blog/" target="_blank">first introduction post</a> is up on the oerpub.org site.<br />
<br />
Since we are an open source and open content project, the designs and processes are all open also. Not only do we hope to create an incredibly easy to use editor without sacrificing power and utility, but would be thrilled if the best of our ideas are copied and used elsewhere also.<br />
<br />
And we hope that open source development teams around the world can learn from our successes and failures with making useful software.<br />
<br />
We have a back log, so expect a quick series of blog entries as we get caught up sharing initial designs and tests from Open Ed, and then our redesigns and test cycles from December and January.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://oerpub.org/introducing-oerpubs-usability-and-user-interface-blog/" target="_blank">Happy reading (the intro blog post)</a>Kathi Fletcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03495040783600739973noreply@blogger.com0