NSF education grant proposal

[Rob Beezer]

A small group has been working on an education-related grant proposal to the US
National Science Foundation to support work making it easier to use Sage in
undergraduate courses. The description of the CCLI Type 2 program is at:

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2009/nsf09529/nsf09529.html

A draft copy of our proposal is attached. High-level or strategic feedback
would be most welcome. We need to finish this up around January 8, so we'll
post a final draft later for anybody willing to help proofread, but right now
you can ignore minor screwups. It would be especially helpful now to see if
everything makes sense and flows properly on a first reading, since we've all
spent too much time staring at it already. ;-)

Thanks in advance.

Rob (for UTMOST)

[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

Hi Rob,

Rob Beezer escribi�:

Is really nice to see more and more efforts on making Sage more suited
to mathematical educative contexts. Ted Kosan, from MathRider, and I,
have been discussing about our experience using Sage with that priority
in mind. May be some of the reflexions could be useful for your
proposal. You can follow the thread here:

http://groups.google.com/group/mathrider-user/browse_thread/thread/600cb5defe336add

There are some pragmatical consequences of the discussion as using ReST
as the storage format for documents. Being your proposal strongly
focused on interactive Sage powered documents for education, Do you
think is feasible to implement that feature also? I see a lot of
potential on having an easy to read/write format for that documents, so
you can teach it easily, you can use it on smaller/simpler
infrastructures like Sage Small (SPD), stand alone, non web interfaces
like MathRider, Lurch or even without any CAS at all, like in text
emails. There are more reasons in the thread.

Cheers and keep the good work.

Offray

PS: I really would like to participate in some Sage Education Days. Lets
hope to see the calls and if there is any grant ;-)
PS2: In your paper you talk about integration of the interactive docs
with LMS like moodle. I have trying an alternative approach making
"integration" with Knowledge Management Systemas like the
Python/Zope/Plone powered Cyn.in (integration means publication, tagging
and comments on that platform of the TeXmacs + Sage or LyX + Sagenb.org
documents) and it has worked a lot better that the "noisy collaborative"
web interface of Sage. You could mention that integrations with KMS like
cyn.in could be used also (preliminary field test in educational
environments has shown a positive impact on classroom practices)

[Rob Beezer]

A final draft of this proposal is available at:

http://buzzard.ups.edu/private/nsf-ccli-summary.pdf
http://buzzard.ups.edu/private/nsf-ccli-proposal.pdf

Comments, corrections, typos, nits would all be welcome. You can post
them here, or send them to Rob Beezer <bee...@ups.edu> through Friday
evening, and after that to Jason Grout <jason...@drake.edu> up
until Monday evening and then its too late. ;-)

Or if you are just curious, have a look - the summary is just a single
page.

Thanks in advance,
Rob