A TiddlyWiki Math(s) TextBook

[Richard Smith]

Hello All,

I have just finished a first draft conversion of a Calculus Textbook to TW5. I thought you might like to take a look at it and I would welcome any feedback/input/help/suggestions you may have.

The book is an excellent text called Active Calculus, written by Professor Matt Boelkins of Grand Valley State University in Michigan, which is endorsed by the American Institute of Mathematics (http://aimath.org/textbooks/approved-textbooks/)

The original can be downloaded from Prof. Boelkins pages here: http://faculty.gvsu.edu/boelkinm/Home/Open_Calculus.html

The TW5 version is (hopefully) available from my dropbox: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83055414/Active_Calculus_v0.1.html

The file is quite big, containing over 9,000 tiddlers including embedded svg figures which are rendered into textbook chapters using macros. There is much that is very crude about this first version and I already have an idea of some things that need to be improved.

I'd love to know what you think and I'd especially welcome any help or suggestions that the Twizards might have about how to improve layout etc.

I have some specific questions about things that I couldn't get to work quite the way I wanted to, which I'll ask later and I'm also happy to explain how I made it if anybody's interested (you'll see the editing controls and built in editor in the sidebar)

Regards,

Richard

[Mat]

W
...O
......W
......... !

I've only taken a quick glance - but what a job you've done!!! Will look closer later!

...again.... WOW!


One side-question that pops up (literally) is the automatic opening of a parallel tab in my browser after a while, showing spam. Could this somehow be from your wiki or dropbox??? Needless to say I don't want that, but I'm really curious how it is achieved. Anyone else getting this? I think it took a minute or so before it showed up. I have my browser tabs in a tree structure and the TW Math book was the only thing on this level where the popup came up. The step above it is only this thread where it likely not came from. Sorry for bringing up this and I hope the fault is on my side somehow.

<:-)

[Richard Smith]

Hi Mat,

 

One side-question that pops up (literally) is the automatic opening of a parallel tab in my browser after a while, showing spam. Could this somehow be from your wiki or dropbox??? 

 I have no idea, I'm afraid. I don't seem to be able to replicate it. Is it dropbox-related spam? I obviously don't want it to do that to other people, so thanks for letting me know. Could you give an indication of the content (screenshot or view source perhaps?). 

And thanks for your kind words.

Regards,

Richard

[Birthe C]

Hi Richard and Mat,

I also har a look on your book, and I had no spam showing experience.

I am amazed that your texbook is running so fast, with all that content. Your work is an example to follow. I will for sure look even more, when I get better time.


Birthe

[Peter Miller]

Agree with Birthe. Downloaded like a rocket and runs beautifully. No spam popup/tab issues.

[Mat]

Hi again,

Yeah, such a sucky thing to bring up. I have kept the tab to take a closer look. It's from "https: // www . igame . com / [etc]". The "etc" shows it's language specified. But my guess is it's part of some affiliate network as usual. What is weird is that I had not recently opened any other site or tab at that time and, as mentioned, it appeared just parallel in the tab tree structure.

But, more importantly, opening your TW agian I don't get the popup. And, since nobody else seems to get anything I'll assume it was something else triggering it.

Anyway, what an ambitious project. How long did it take you to finish it? And what are your plans for it - how come you made it in the first place?

Thanks ang, again, wonderful job!

<:-)

[PMario]

Looks nice.
I just have one question. Why did you split the content up into 10'000 tiddlers? It's almost every line is a tiddler.
Is there a reason? IMO it just makes the experience / UI slow.
-m

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi Mat,

My big idea is to use TW as a platform for remixing the content. There's lots of great stuff already out there - basically the whole of high school maths is available for free - but schools need something that matches their specified curriculum exactly. 

I want to create an ecosystem of content that people can use to construct unique editions of textbooks and to which everyone can contribute.

I figured a good way to start would be to show that I could build a full, useful book in TW. I chose Active Calculus because it is a clever, modern book and because I like Prof. Boelkin's comments in the introduction as to his reasons for writing it. 

All I've done at the moment is pull it apart and rather crudely stuff it back together. My next goal is to optimise the experience of using the book on a tablet and then adding some web-goodies. Then I suppose it could be packaged as an app, which would be pretty neat in itself.

Ripping the book apart was fairly quick but with lots of trial and error in writing scripts to break the original latex files up into tiddlers. Stuffing it back together in the right order was also fairly quick with some kludging. Polishing it up so that everything rendered neatly and adding tags etc. took a long time and was pretty tedious. I suspect that someone cleverer than me might be able to do a better job of the former and save time on the latter.

Thanks for looking at it, I really appreciate it.

Regards,

Richard

[Jed Carty]

This looks awesome. I think that using pop-ups so that when you click on a term it displays the definition would improve the usability as a learning tool. Something like this http://inmysocks.tiddlyspot.com/#Make%20one%20tiddler%20popup%20when%20you%20hover%20over%20a%20link%20to%20another%20tiddler would be nice.

I have been hoping to find a good d3.js based library that could be used to add interactive plotting to tiddlywiki, and I am working on a very basic math that plug-in that will hopefully use math.js to allow simple interactive math examples. Unfortunately I don't know if there anything that would support even basic calculus.

I was hoping to use the ideas presented here http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/ to make a textbook for an introduction to engineering math class I was teaching.

Since using tiddlywiki for text books is something I would like to do I would be more than happy to help use some more advanced features of tiddlywiki to make it truly interactive textbook with examples, the first thing that comes to mind is setting up the preview activity 8.1 so that the reader can type in their answer and be told if they are correct or not, or let them change the values used in the example.

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi @PMario

Because I'm not right in the head ;)

I decided to make the experiment of each piece  being the "smallest meaningful" unit. In practice the 10,000 are the individual paragraphs, figures and equations of the original manuscript (so really you see it was Professor Boelkins who split the content up into 10,000 tiddlers!). If it is a little slow, I am still happy that I can now interact with the text at this level of granularity. 

One thing I imagine being able to do, for example, is for a student to be able to click to say "this is the paragraph/equation" I don't understand and having that information beamed to the teacher.

I understand it seems extreme :)

Regards,

Richard

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi Jed,

That would be amazing. 

Any help/contributions at all would be gladly appreciated. My intention, naturally, is for the work to remain free of 'copyright' and other such Victoriana.

Regards,

Richard

[PMario]

On Monday, January 19, 2015 at 12:13:38 PM UTC+1, Jed Carty wrote:

This looks awesome. I think that using pop-ups so that when you click on a term it displays the definition would improve the usability as a learning tool. Something like this http://inmysocks.tiddlyspot.com/#Make%20one%20tiddler%20popup%20when%20you%20hover%20over%20a%20link%20to%20another%20tiddler would be nice.

popups imo are a no go for phones and tablets.

[PMario]

On Monday, January 19, 2015 at 12:13:38 PM UTC+1, Jed Carty wrote:

I have been hoping to find a good d3.js based library that could be used to add interactive plotting to tiddlywiki, and I am working on a very basic math that plug-in that will hopefully use math.js to allow simple interactive math examples. Unfortunately I don't know if there anything that would support even basic calculus.

I think jsxgraph would be a nice fit for interactive math. http://jsxgraph.uni-bayreuth.de/wp/
The library is not too big, doesn't have dependencies and imo is designed for that purpose.

-m

[PMario]

On Monday, January 19, 2015 at 12:20:40 PM UTC+1, RichardWilliamSmith wrote:

I decided to make the experiment of each piece  being the "smallest meaningful" unit.

OK. I see. ... but imo I've seen some tiddlers, that only contained half a sentence or a headline. ... So imo half a sentence without context looses its meaning. ... So may be in the second step .. some "mergers" would be helpful. .. but that's just my opinion.
 

In practice the 10,000 are the individual paragraphs, figures and equations of the original manuscript (so really you see it was Professor Boelkins who split the content up into 10,000 tiddlers!). If it is a little slow, I am still happy that I can now interact with the text at this level of granularity. 

ok
 

One thing I imagine being able to do, for example, is for a student to be able to click to say "this is the paragraph/equation" I don't understand and having that information beamed to the teacher.

That makes perfect sense.  .... But how do you manage to provide the context for the teacher? Because imo s/he needs the "surrounding" text to get the context or even the "big picture", for the explanation. ....


But anyway ... it's a very nice TW, with a lot of potential. .. I could even think of much more tags to connect similar areas of knowledge. ... But I didn't dig deep enough for this :)

have fun!
mario

[Jed Carty]

Richard,

I agree about copyright, especially when it comes to things like this.

PMario,

I hadn't considered tablets and phones, a solution that works on desktops and mobile devices is probably important. And JSXGraph is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to find. Thanks!

[Richard Smith]

Hi @PMario

OK. I see. ... but imo I've seen some tiddlers, that only contained half a sentence or a headline. ... So imo half a sentence without context looses its meaning. ... So may be in the second step .. some "mergers" would be helpful. .. but that's just my opinion.
 

At the moment it's kludged together chapter by chapter but headings got their own tiddlers because I figure it should really be organised into sections that way and I eventually want to be able to re-name and/or tag the tiddlers appropriately.

There are some little sentences that join equations - things like "such that" or "it follows that". I could have bound these fragments to the equations they precede but I wanted each equation to stand alone. There are also a few fragments that aren't currently rendered at all - for example their will eventually be model solutions to many of the exercises.

 

One thing I imagine being able to do, for example, is for a student to be able to click to say "this is the paragraph/equation" I don't understand and having that information beamed to the teacher.

That makes perfect sense.  .... But how do you manage to provide the context for the teacher? Because imo s/he needs the "surrounding" text to get the context or even the "big picture", for the explanation. ....

In that case I imagine the teacher will have her own 'master copy' of the same book which will show her where all of the students are having problems. 

But anyway ... it's a very nice TW, with a lot of potential. .. I could even think of much more tags to connect similar areas of knowledge. ... But I didn't dig deep enough for this :)

Thankyou :) I agree that it should be possible to add much more semantically-meaningful tagging etc. As I said, this version is basically a nasty kludge to make something that looks about right.

 

Thanks for suggesting jsxgraph too, I'll take a look at it. I'd also like to figure out if it will be possible to embed Mathematica CDF's (http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/faq/embedding.html) - there is some code that needs to be gotten into the <head> of the document I believe. Any ideas?

Regards,

Richard

[RichShumaker]

Awesome stuff.

Rich Shumaker

[ram...@gmail.com]

This is AMAZING!!!

You have gone to a lot of work and thank you for all that, I've been thinking of using tiddlywiki for open source books (little known works of art in my native language) and this gives me ideas and makes it easier!

[Jon]

Hi Richard,

Is your maths text still available? The above link isn't working.

Regards
Jon

[Richard Smith]

Hi Jon,

Sorry. I moved it into a sub-directory along with some others, the direct link is now https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83055414/Books/Active_Calculus_v0.1.html.

Regards,

Richard

[Jon]

Thanks, Richard.

Regards
Jon

[iain]

I would be really interested in finding out a bit more about how you set up your TW and formatted your tiddlers - I have a few books of my own to consider.

Iain

[Douglas Counts]

Hi Richard,

That newer link doesn't appear to be active now either. Too bad, I would love to take a look at your work.

-Doug

[Daniel Cunningham]

Hi Richard,

The moved dropbox link does not seem to be working.  Can you re-post?

[Ste Wilson]

I'm assuming it also used to be here activecalculus.didaxy.net but that seems to be gone too. I always meant to download a copy...

[Mark S.]

Using google, I could find one site where someone had tucked away a copy.

Good luck,
Mark

[blackHole]

Both these links
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83055414/Active_Calculus_v0.1.html

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83055414/Books/Active_Calculus_v0.1.html.
at present moment, return a 404 error.
Please can you provide an updated one ?
Many thanks !!

[Ste Wilson]

and the link to its hiding place is...?

[DavidRowe Wtl]

Is this what you are after?  

http://mozilla-support.vtek.com/Active_Calculus_v0.1.html

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Well, that was unexpected. I was going to dig out a copy but now I don't have to :)

If you have any questions about it, I'd be happy to answer them if I can. 

I'm still interested in this as an idea. It was always supposed to be a proof of concept, showing that a full book would work in TW. 

What I'm really interested in is collaborative authoring of textbooks.

Regards,

Richard

[BJ]

the links not working for me.....

[Daniel Cunningham]

I echo BJ's finding that the link is not working for me either.  :-(

I'm genuinely interested, but I think the frustration of several cycles of "thar she blows!" followed by "myuh, myuh, myuh..."  is wearing thin.
 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/tiddlywiki/ZwPkUCfDzqI/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to tiddlywiki+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to tiddl...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/df9d93bd-5c77-48f9-a037-1b978f13e612%40googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[PJO]

I would also like to have a copy (missed the original posts here)

Can someone with a copy share it? Shouldn't this be shared with bittorrent by supporters?! 

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Are you sure it isn't working? It's a very big file and takes quite a long time to load.

[RichardWilliamSmith]

I uploaded a copy of this to neocities, which you can find here

https://richardsmith.neocities.org/site/Active_Calculus_v0.1.html

Be aware that the file is 17.5mb and will probably take a while to download.

Regards,

Richard

[Daniel Cunningham]

Thanks, Richard -- this link works (the array of earlier ones didn't).

At first glance... WOW!  Something else.  Kudos to you.

I'll be teaching my two boys calculus this summer, and I may just chose this one.  I believe that the non-linearity may really lend itseld to letting student learn the way they want to.

Best regards,

-- Daniel

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/tiddlywiki/ZwPkUCfDzqI/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to tiddlywiki+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to tiddl...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/4329ff03-53f3-4807-bfdf-144f3c244d16%40googlegroups.com.

[Steven Schneider]

Richard, this is a really excellent project. Thanks.

Along with others in this thread, I share the goal of producing textbooks and other educational resources in TiddlyWiki. I think of them as "writeable texts" in that students will be able to write on / in / against the text. To me, this is a pedagogical goal, as it will increase serious reading of dense texts (such as in history or humanities or social sciences or engineering or business) as well as allow problem solving in any disciplines (including math or accounting etc). 

# I am especially interested in taking open texts published as ePub (or mobi or wxr or odt: this is one example) and rendering them in TW so that students can submit assignments as comments on the text. 

# I am actively working to develop tools that use resources from the Internet Archive as teaching materials.

# I am interested in developing TW in other educational settings

# And, I continue to develop DesignWriteStudio as a platform for teaching reading & writing of interactive texts, using TiddlyWiki as both the object of study as well as object of activity.

It seems there is a broad level of interest in these ideas, and I will add a new thread to this group inviting interested folks to join in some sharing & perhaps meeting about these ideas....

//steve.

On Tuesday, April 25, 2017 at 11:26:18 PM UTC-4, Daniel Cunningham wrote:

Thanks, Richard -- this link works (the array of earlier ones didn't).

At first glance... WOW!  Something else.  Kudos to you.

I'll be teaching my two boys calculus this summer, and I may just chose this one.  I believe that the non-linearity may really lend itseld to letting student learn the way they want to.

Best regards,

-- Daniel

On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 8:03 PM, RichardWilliamSmith <richardwi...@gmail.com> wrote:

I uploaded a copy of this to neocities, which you can find here

https://richardsmith.neocities.org/site/Active_Calculus_v0.1.html

Be aware that the file is 17.5mb and will probably take a while to download.

Regards,

Richard

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/tiddlywiki/ZwPkUCfDzqI/unsubscribe.

To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to tiddlywiki+...@googlegroups.com.

To post to this group, send email to tiddl...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki.

[Daniel Cunningham]

You're doing some great work over there, Steven!  I've an action item or three on my list to review some of the impressive adaptations you & your students have done.  Impressive, to say the least!

Best regards,

-- Daniel

To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to tiddlywiki+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

To post to this group, send email to tiddl...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/e0bff67c-b212-47ea-b064-8e438c817224%40googlegroups.com.