goals

[Joe Corneli]

"A large body of evidence shows that explicit, challenging goals
enhance and sustain motivation." --Alfred Bandura

Hi all:

Just writing to remind you to think carefully about your goals for the
course. If you're having a hard time coming up with a clear goal, make
that your first challenge to overcome! In some cases it may be hard
to know where to begin, but unlike with math questions, there's really
no wrong answer :) I'm happy to provide feedback and I'd encourage
you to talk to give feedback to one another as much as possible...

Feel free to brainstorm here in the list. Participants who are
studying for a specific exam (e.g. the GMAT or something like that)
may have it
easy. It's OK to pick both a generic goal (e.g. calculus or
precalculus) and a more specific goal (e.g. understand something about
fractals)...

Joe

[Alan]

To amplify on what's in my self-intro, my main goal here is to get
feedback on the resource guide at http://qpr.ca/math/resources in
order to see if the interface is effective and whether it is worth
continuing to maintain it. If so, then I will start looking at
algorithms for providing user-specific rankings based on giving
priority to evaluations by other users whose evaluations agree on
things that both have seen (so that if you are a user then what gets
listed first for you will be what has been rated highly by those other
users who are most like you).

[Jubal E.]

Alan,

Do you want some help getting your page design up to speck? I only
know a tiny bit of PHP, but I could help out with HTML and CSS, in
either xhtml 1.1 or HTML5 and CSS3? I am not incredibly fast, or
fancy, or a professional, but I can write solid minimalist standards
compliant code. Just an offer. And yes I do think that its worth
maintaining, a good database is always useful and with a little work,
some SEO and a little more functionality, it could be a brilliant
site, and what better time to work on and test it than with a group of
engaged autodidacts to test it for you and help out with development,
It could even be a great final project for everyone in the course. Do
a write up and review of what things you learned from what services or
something like that.

Anyway I think its a great idea and if I can help you out at all I'd
love to.

Jubal E.