[Open-education] Friday Chat: Re: Import Lesson

Mon Jul 7 15:06:52 UTC 2014

> > suit his/her needs. E.g. for a K-8 teacher a WYSIWYG editor is better
> > but for a math high education teacher LaTeX can be preferable and for
> > a engineering high education teacher IPython Notebook. 
> 
> Oh yes the MathML issue -
> Is that addressed by using the Aloha editor? This post seems to indicate
> so.
> 
> http://aloha-editor.org/blog/2012/08/wysiwhat-aloha-editor-selected-as-oerpub-sourcefabric-booktype-editor/

Math on the Web and EPUB has many issues. MathML is W3C recommendation for how
insert math on Web pages and was adopt by EPUB3. The first and big issue is that
only a few browsers and epub readers support it. As fas as I know Firefox is the
web browser with best support to MathML and it didn't support many important
features. From the EPUB side, I know that iBooks support part of MathML
specification but don't know any ereader that do it. Right know, almost all web
pages that need maths is using some polyfill solution, e.g. MathJax, and this
approach has some problems, specially for EPUBs.

Another issue is that type math isn't easy. Some times you request that the user
knows LaTeX or other markup and others time the user need to spend time
selection "anchors" at a WYSIWYG editor.

> > This is another reason that I want avoid that users deals with EPUB or
> > any other zip format. From my personal experience, if you give to
> > "Alice" an EPUB and to "Bob" the content of it as a directory/folder
> > and ask they to re-use one image in another document, "Alice" probably
> > will use a screenshot because the EPUB editor don't allow to export
> > the image (and "Alice" don't know that she can unzip the EPUB and pick
> > the image) and "Bob" probably will browser the directories/folders to
> > see what file he can find.
> 
> Quick question on this.  How would you get the directories and files to
> Bob to browse if it isn't in a zipped format.

When you use git to download one project it create a directory and copy the
files into it without dealing with zip. If we want to avoid git, we can use some
service like ownCloud/Dropbox/Google Driver/... that also avoid the user deal
with zip.

> I think the problem has two parts to it. The first part is to provide
> a tool that is easy to use. The second part is to teach the user more
> about the medium they are using. Without the second part I feel that
> we are just providing tools and not empowering educators.

I agree with you that without teach the user about the medium we aren't
empowering educators.

> The questions for me becomes - in what way do you teach more about the
> medium without distracting from the short term goal of
> creating/remixing some content and without intimidating the user too
> much?

This is the million dollar question.

Cheers,
Raniere

P.S.: I will be at OKFest and love to talk about it.