This is a suggestion for a Bachelor Thesis. Since I have been investigating syndication techniques, recently, I got thrilled by that
idea. In this bachelor thesis suggestion, I’d like to pick up Carsten’s idea of “Lifestream for Learning”.

Motivation: These days social platforms become incredibly popular. Not only, that they connect you with your friends, they also offer you loads of information about your friends’ interests. Users love to share their life and they also love to follow their fellow students’ activities.
Facebook is the most popular international social platform in this area. Business people and researchers have discovered Facebook for their professional life. By connecting Facebook with blogs, joining professional groups, adding (dozens!) applications that are connected to professional life, users are enabled to express their professional identity. Any action is published in a life stream and friends will be notified about these action. This feature potentially offers a high benefit. Hence, let’s use a Lifestream for Learning in ActiveMath.

See also article on Spiegel-Online: What users want.

Solution/Task: Agree on a set of actions that should go into a life stream. Examples:

• “Anton created a new discovery book on ‘the average slope’.”
• “Anton successfully completed his book on ‘the average slope’”.
• “Eva’s competencies increased!”
• “Bert successfully solved a difficult exercise on ‘binomials’. Want to try it, too? Go here.”
• Anton added a public note titled “This definition of the average slope is wrong’. Do you want to discuss it?
• Teacher “Edgar Kessler” has uploaded a new book “

Maybe , also some auto-generated news:

• “10 students tried this exercise on ’slopes’ but none succeeded yet. Do you want to give it a shot?”

To create a life stream, the following components are necessary:

• create a life stream newsfeed (Atom/RSS2.0) from the history/database and store it in a file. Tools will be provided. Add proxy chaches, server-side caches, and compression to reduce computer, network, and bandwidth usage.
• read in life stream newsfeed from file and display in a DIV on the main entry page.
• provide a RSS button to sign up for a newsfeed

Follow Up/Alternative: Devise a flexible architecture which allows to define/seperate life stream newsfeeds relative to user and to aggregate single newsfeeds to groupfeeds where groups can by defined by class, discipline, theory, competency, … etc. Means/Tools for aggregation such as “Planet Tool” will be provided.

Follow Up: Write a Facebook application that pulls the feed and displays the actions appropriately (to be discussed). One goal is, to ADVERTIZE ActiveMath by using large platforms as drivers. Better words for “driver” in German: Trittbrett, Zugpferd …

Here is an abstract from Carsten’s mail:

“My 2 cents for Web 2.0: One important principle of W2 is “open data”. Twitter for instance get most of its traffic via API, not via the Web interface. How can we make ActiveMath more open? RSS Syndication is an important step, and in addition to feeds for content changes/additions, I would include RSS feeds with search terms. In flickr, for instance, you can subscribe to RSS feeds for search terms and you get the latest n-results in a feed. This can then be used for mash-ups.

[...]

Also definitely worth investigation is live streaming. Every Facebook user knows this feature: what did your friends do, read, install, etc. In Facebook, this information is shown in your start page. Some argue that this user centered view on the Web is an example of a more general trend in the Web. By this as it may, imagine an ActiveMath start page that shows the achievements of your classmates. “Anton successfully completed his book on ‘the average slope’”. “Eva’s compentecies increased!” “Bert created a book on ‘functions’. Take a look at it.”. By communicating specific features, we could make them more popular and more well known.

Here is a suggestion for a Bachelor Thesis.

Motivation: In state of the art community products and social platforms, mood messages are a must! Examples are: Skype and ICQ as messengers. Facebook, Twitter, StudiVZ as social platforms. Mood messages are one of the most favorite functions and drivers on these platforms. Users like to share their mood messages. Hence, let’s use mood messages for learning!

So far, capturing moods in ActiveMath can be only done like this:

• get mood information from notes. But: there are no implicit instructions to write about a mood state in notes. Moreover, notes are visibly only, when you select the appropriate menu item.

• make assumptions based on performance. But: assumption may be wrong. How can you be sure that a student feels anger instead of disappointment when his performance is bad.

Solution/Task: Implement an AJAX GUI Interface that offers students to express their mood message by text and/or by a smiley. A smiley is a short-cut for “I am happy/disappointed/frustrated/angry/stumped …”. This information should be stored in the database (-> and history) and can contribute to the student model. Additionaly, implement an atom feed such that this information

• can be forwarded to other platforms the students use or
• can be processed in some other way.

Additional benefit: this feature can be re-used for e-portfolio platforms as well.

A week ago I entered a Gravis Store for the very first time and tested an iPod touch. One of the outstanding features is its display and navigation by using a finger. Also, it provides a WLAN unit, so I typed in the browser URl of a quite challenging site: demo.activemath.org. It’s amazing, I never expected a good output. CSS is no problem and most formulae were rendered correctly. Except for the limit symbol/function. But this is an old well-known problem for which we have no fix yet. However, the display quality is great. And here we go. Click on the images to open large pictures.

Unfortunately, I could not run a full test. That is, I did not login and I did not test any exercise. But at least, we expect that the input editor won’t work because it is embedded in a Java applet. Also, Java Script does not work properly as formula highlighting did not work. After a while, I must have done something wrong, because I could not follow any link on any page. Seems like the iPod touch crashed.

A nice way to embed ActiveMath items, for instance in a blog, is to use ClipMarks. Get an account and install the Firefox/IE plugin. Then go to any web site, press the ClipMarks button, and select any span or div item on the web site. A tiny menu on the top will be presented from which you can select an action. Choose “Blog” and a popup windows opens asking you for some information. I send my clipmarks to my WordPress based blogs. Unfortunately, WordPress has the feature to push any entry through a set of filters which cause an autoinsertion of paragraph and linebreak tags. So, to get the content right, you have to:

• Install the WP Unformatted plugin
• Add ActiveMath specific css definitions

See how great this is!

clipped from devdemo.activemath.org Definition of the average slope between two points In order to determine the average slope of a curve between two points P=( xP,yP) and Q=( xQ,yQ), one replaces the curve by the straight line through P and Q (i.e. by the secant through P and Q). The average slope of the curve between P and Q is then defined to be the slope of this straight line PQ: mPQ= yQ-yP xQ- xP .

This is just a short sketch. The idea is like follows: A student is working within a learning environment such as ActiveMath. Beside an opened book/course the student has also activated the learning diary which is displayed somehow. While the student is writing an entry in his diary, the diary itself asks ActiveMath in the background for the current context. The context information comprises the book’s id and all items of the current page. One could simply assume that while the student is writing the entry he is reflecting on the learning items of the current page.