January Optimism about OER

ivan

Last year in March I did a lot of soul searching about my mission in the EdTech space. At the time, figuring out the incentives for authors and teachers to produce open educational resources (OER) seemed like an insurmountable mountain to climb. I didn’t see a clear path for interoperability between content sources. OER yes, but OER how?

Since then I’ve learned a lot more about the open content landscape and I’m starting to feel more optimistic about the prospects for OER. Could year 2018 be when the switch-over happens? I think so.

 

Continue reading “January Optimism about OER” →

The school of the future

ivan

It has been a long time since I last wrote something, but I haven’t been idle altogether. I’ve been planning what to do next for the books, calculating my move, so to say. It’s slowly starting to become clearer. Given my background as linux sysadmin and tutor, it only makes sense if the revolution looks to me like an open source software stack for schools. Read on to find the general strategy. Listen to this good tune if you’re missing an accompanying soundtrack; here is some more tunes in case the blog post ends up long.

I’m going to write a toolbox for every school out there to print their own textbooks and other educational material.

The best-in-class existing exercise framework is already available as open source and can be hosted on the school’s server (or virtual on AWS for $40/mo), but since we’re going to have a “school server,” wouldn’t we want to run some other stuff on there too?

I’m thinking:

  • printable exercises sheets for doing in class
  • printable problems to give as homework
  • printable exams (different version for each student)
  • print affordable textbooks (using POD service like lulu.com)

I’m happy for all the kids with iPods and computers at home, but not every school has the budget for computers, so let’s try to keep the costs to at most $20 per class for the week. A few good laser printers could keep the school running with students learning from top notch material, at the cost of a few thousand dollars per month. Toner and paper.

Okay, but where are you going to get the content.

There’s plenty of OER out there, but there could be more and it could be made more easily accessible.

Content framework

Here I must confess, I will be biased, because as a django person, I see the world through my own prism. A very good way for presenting structured content exists already, as free software. That’s the best place to start. Everything else on the content management side, and exporting printable PDFs I can script myself. The main content pipeline will be something like .md --> .tex --> .pdf; the softcover/polytexnic toolchain is very good at this.

UX

The key is to make it easy for teachers to browse, use, and contribute content. The graph structure (and possible common core math categorization) will help the browsing, the .toPDF() methods will make the content immediately usable, and the only real problem remaining is the user experience that entices teachers to contribute content. That’s the biggie. But it can be done.

Software requirement specification

Given a collection of content items (paragraphs of text, entire sections of book, exercises, or problems), the system allows teachers to assemble custom “playlists” which consists of a sequence of content items with a `.toPDF` method.

No way I’m going to let them run the high schools. We’re taking over that business too now.

Aren’t big publishers better?

The market forces will prevail. What is better for a cash-strapped school, to order some crusty mainstream algebra textbook, that may or may not be standard-compliant, but sure is long and talks to students as retards, or to demand the printing of one copy of the best free book on the subject, for 1/10 of the cost.

How will you make money?

Nothing changes really. Minireference continues to sell university-level textbooks; we just make the high school material and the toolchain free. As for the potential loss of business due to high schools printing on their own instead of buying textbooks from me, I’d call that a win overall.

Digital vs. print and the future of books

ivan

I’m reading an interesting paper by M. Julee Tanner that compares the cognitive aspect of digital vs. print delivery for book-length material. In summary, the printed book is not dead!

I’ve always thought the print medium (especially typeset by LaTeX) is far superior for learning and comprehension, but I figured this was my “old timer” ways (I’m 32). It seems I’m not the only one though:

Despite decades of work by computer and e-reader engineers and designers to improve the optics, display, and ease of navigation of virtual texts, readers still have a general preference for the print presentation, especially when it comes to longer, more challenging material.

The author states many good things print books have going for them, but the most interesting to me is the following quote:

[…] the greatest difference in metacognitive strategy was also found among the users of e-readers, in their reluctance to review previously read passages by virtually turning back pages. It seems that the perceived unwieldiness of screen-tapping to turn pages did negatively impact comprehension of expository texts on the e-reader platform (Margolin et al., 2013).
Since monitoring one’s understanding while reading, reviewing previously read material if necessary, underlining, and taking marginal notes are so vital to the comprehension of more challenging texts, it is important for students and educators to know how applicable these metacognitive strategies are to virtual texts.

Indeed, think about it—if you’re reading a complicated passage in a math book, wouldn’t you want to flip back and look at the equation which you saw five pages ago? In a printed book you could do that (you could in fact leave you finger on that spread and conveniently flip between the two pages). In a PDF read on the computer, it’s also somewhat passible to flip back (though a bit imprecisely), but on an eBook reader it’s not easy to do.

Learning math/physics (or other cognitively demanding material) from an eBook reader feels a bit like I’m placed in front of a slide deck: information comes, then it’s quickly taken away, leaving me in a disorganized state of mind.

Here’s the full reference: Tanner, M. J. (2014). Digital vs. print: Reading comprehension and the future of the book. SJSU School of Information Student Research Journal, 4(2). scholarworks.sjsu.edu/slissrj/vol4/iss2/

Internet propaganda

ivan

TL;DR: The fight on the Internet is not just about True vs False, but also True vs Noise.

I’m reading this article about Internet propaganda in China, and I can’t help but wonder how much of this exists in the West. How many PR firms employ armies of paid commenters ready to intervene and vote up (or down) any content item? How many politicians employ the services of these PR firms?

I find it very interesting to dissect the tools of the System—to try to deconstruct the methods which the powers that be use to control the People. There seems to be three forces at play for any issue X. Voices in support of X, voices in opposition to X, and noise. Assuming X is something the people want, people-opposing forces (which we’ll call the System for simplicity), have at least two options to silence the X discussion:

  1. Pay shills to post opinions against X.
  2. Produce noise to drown out the X discussion altogether.

In totalitarian regimes (think Russia), official police and secret police act to suppress the supporters of X, while in “open societies” (the West) corporate media control (which is a mix of options 1. and 2. above) are used to suppress X.

It seems China’s regime is siding with the Western approach for their Internet censorship. Here’s a quote from the above article:

It’s not clear the degree to which paid comments influence the conversation the way Communist Party members hope they do. Xiaolan says the paid commenters could be adding noise to the conversation simply to drown out normal people’s desire to converse online.

The noise strategy reminds me of the “jammer towers” (заглушителни станции) that I’ve seen in Bulgaria during the communist days. The idea was to isolate the Bulgarian people from FM transmissions from neighbouring Greece and Turkey. I’m guessing they were going for FM and/or TV, because I know AM radio is more difficult to block.

Could it be that the whole education system is intentionally dysfunctional? An informed and educated citizenry would be much harder to indoctrinate and control. No. Surely this is a crazy idea to imagine science education is intentionally restricted to a small group of people, who are indoctrinated with the “you’ll get a big paycheque”-mentality in school, and forced to join the System immediately upon graduation to repay their student debt. In any case it’s worth checking. If science textbooks were made intentionally inaccessible by the system, then making more accessible science and technology textbooks will lead to more politically active citizens, armed with metis. Let’s see.

Linear algebra applications

ivan

I spent the last month at the chalet in Petkovo, the village where my grandfather is from. Check out the view from my office:

View from the office in Petkovo

I have good progress to report on the linear algebra book. Sandy (my editor) has gone through the first few chapters and looks on track to finish editing the book by the end of October, which means the NO BS guide to LA will be available in print soon.

On my side, I’ve been working on the applications chapter. In this chapter I discuss all the cool things you can do using linear algebra. The topics covered include linear programming, error correcting codes, solving for the voltages in electric circuits, and other applications to economics and science. It really feels good to be able to discuss all these applications, and substantiate the claim I make in the book’s introduction, namely, that learning linear algebra will open many doors for the reader.

In other news, I think I’ve finally found a civilized way to generate html and .epub versions of the book: polytexnic, which is part of the softcover platform for self-publishers. Here’s a quote from the documentation:

The real challenge is producing EPUB and MOBI output. The trick is to (1) create a self-contained HTML page with embedded math, (2) include the amazing MathJax JavaScript library, configured to render math as SVG images, (3) hit the page with the headless PhantomJS browser to force MathJax to render the math (including any equation numbers) as SVGs, (4) extract self-contained SVGs from the rendered pages, and (5) use Inkscape to convert the SVGs to PNGs for inclusion in EPUB and MOBI books. Easy, right? In fact, no—it was excruciating and required excessive amounts of profanity to achieve. But it’s done, so ha.

Stay tuned for .epub version of the books in the No BS guide series.

Math makes you cry? Try SymPy!

ivan

This summer I wrote a short SymPy tutorial that illustrates how a computer
algebra system can help you understand math and physics. Using SymPy you can solve all kinds of math problems, painlessly.
Check it:



Sympy tutorial (PDF, 12 pages)

Print this out, and try the examples using live.sympy.org. The topics covered are: high school math, calculus, mechanics, and linear algebra.

SymPy makes all math and physics calculation easy to handle, it can even make them fun! Learn the commands and you’ll do well on all your homework problems. Best of all, sympy is free and open source software so your learning and your calculations won’t cost you a dime!

Comments and feedback below, on HN, on fb, or via twitter.

Linear algebra concept maps

ivan

I spent the last week drawing. More specifically, drawing in concept space. Drawing concept maps for the linear algebra book.

Without going into too much details, the context is that the old concept map was too overloaded with information, so I decided to redo it. I had to split the concept map on three pages, because there’s a lot of stuff to cover. Check it out.

Math basics and how they relate to geometric and computational aspects of linear algebra

The skills from high school math you need to “import” to your study of linear algebra are geometry, functions, and the tricks for solving systems of equations (e.g. the values $x$ and $y$ that simultaneously satisfy the equations $x+y=3$ and $3x+y=5$ are $x=1$ and $y=2$.)

The first thing you’ll learn in linear algebra is the Gauss–Jordan elimination procedure, which is a systematic approach for solving systems of $n$ equations with $n$ unknowns. You’ll also learn how to compute matrix products, matrix determinants, and matrix inverses. This is all part of Chapter 3 in the book.

In Chapter 4, we’ll learn about vector spaces and subspaces. Specifically, we’ll discuss points in $\mathbb{R}^3$, lines in $\mathbb{R}^3$, planes in $\mathbb{R}^3$, and $\mathbb{R}^3$ itself. The basic computational skills you picked up in Chapter 3 can be used to solve interesting geometric problems in vectors spaces with any number of dimensions $\mathbb{R}^n$.

Linear transformations and theoretical topics

The concept of a linear transformation $T:\mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}^m$ is the extension of the idea of a function of a real variable $f:\mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}$. Linear transformations are linear functions that take $n$-vectors as inputs and produce $m$-vectors as outputs.

Understanding linear transformations is synonymous with understanding linear algebra. There are many properties of a linear transformation that we might want to study. The practical side of linear transformations is their nature as a vector-upgrade to your existing skill set of modelling the world with functions. You’ll also learn how to study, categorize, and understand linear transformations using new theoretical tools like eigenvalues and eigenvectors.

Matrices and applications

Another fundamental idea in linear algebra is the equivalence between linear transformations $T:\mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}^m$ and matrices $M \in \mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$. Specifically, the abstract idea of a linear transformation $T:\mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}^m$, when we fix a particular choice of basis $B_i$ for the input space and $B_o$ for the output space of $T$, can be represented as a matrix of coefficients $_{B_o}[M_T]_{B_i} \in \mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$. The precise mathematical term for this equivalence is isomorphism. The isomorphism between linear transformations and their matrix representations means we can characterize the properties of a linear transformation by analyzing its matrix representation.

Chapter 7 in the book contains a collection of short “applications essays” that describe how linear algebra is applied to various domains of science and business. Chapter 8 is a mini-intro to probability theory and Chapter 9 is an intro course on quantum mechanics. All the applications are completely optional, but I guarantee you’ll enjoy reading them. The power of linear algebra made manifest.

 

 

If you’re a seasoned blog reader, and you just finished reading this post, I know what you’re feeling… a moment of anxiety goes over you—is a popup asking you to sign up going to show up from somewhere, is there going to be a call to action of some sort?

Nope.

Getting started with ML in python

ivan

Next week I’m interviewing for a Data Scientist position so I figured I better brush up my machine learning skills. I found some neat youtube tutorials [1,2] on using scikit-learn so I thought this would be a good place to start.

From experience, I was expecting that setting up the dev-environment with numpy, scipy, ipython notebook, etc, would take me half a day (compiling and debugging things that don’t work out of the box), but I was pleasantly surprised when a few pip commands later I had a fully functional environment. I’ve pasted the sequence of commands below for all those in case you want to learn yourself some ML too.

Create a virtualenv

The first part is to create an isolated virtualenv for the project. Think of this as “basic python hygiene”: we want to isolate the python libraries used to follow the tutorial from my system-wide python library. (For most people this is just “best practices” but in my case my system-wide site-packages contains outdated versions, and or half-broken dependencies because of the dysfunctional relationship between fink, macports, and homebrew that plays out on my computer.) To setup  a virtualenv in a given directory and activate it, proceed as follows:


$ cd ~/Projects/MLpractice
$ virtualenv pyML
$ . pyML/bin/activate # . is the same as source

Install prerequisites

Next we’ll install all the prerequisite packages and scikit-learn. Note that the command line starts with (pyML) which indicates that pip will install these packages in the pyML virtualenv and not system-wide.


(pyML)$ which python
(pyML)$ which pip

(pyML)$ pip install numpy
(pyML)$ pip install pyzmq
(pyML)$ pip install ipython[all]
(pyML)$ pip install scipy
(pyML)$ pip install pyparsing

$ brew update
$ brew install freetype
$ brew link --force freetype
$ brew install libpng
$ brew link --force libpng
$ brew install libagg
(pyML)$ pip install matplotlib
(pyML)$ pip install psutil

(pyML)$ pip install scikit-learn

Done

Now everything is ready and setup for us.
We can clone the repositories with the example code and start the ipython notebook as follows.


$ git clone git@github.com:jakevdp/sklearn_scipy2013.git
$ git clone git@github.com:ogrisel/parallel_ml_tutorial.git
(pyML)$ cd sklearn_scipy2013/notebooks/
(pyML)$ ipython notebook --pylab inline

Your default browser should open showing you iPython notebooks for the first tutorial.
Let the learning begin—both for machine and human alike!

A scriptable future for the Web and home servers

ivan

I’m organizing papers today, and I keep finding dev-notes and plans for my big “home server” idea about being able to run all your “cloud services” on your own hardware with all the data protection this entails. But what is easy to imagine can be difficult to bring to reality. There are a lot of technological aspects to figure out (dyndns, mail, www, filesharing, apps?), but there is also the lack of interest in privacy matters of the general public.

The freedom of computing and the Internet is a question that depends on technology but also on public relations. I recently came up with a plan for one possible way to get FOSS into homes. PR is indicated in brackets.

  • Phase 0: Develop FOSS clones for most popular cloud software. [100% done]
  • Phase 1: Non-tech-savvy users learn to deploy “own server” in the cloud based on a FOSS software stack. [2015]
    (Run your own Google with just one click! Customize and automate everything. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do on the Internet.)
  • Phase 2: Non-tech-savvy users move their existing “own servers” to run on their “home server.” [2020]
    (The Internet is distributed; be the Internet. Who got ur logs? Protect your privacy and that of your family and friends. Political discussion is not a crime. Unlimited storage—just add USB drives to the RAID. )

I think the two-step process for the home server is much more likely, even realistic. Both phases involve transitions to better features. The transition to Phase 1 will be interesting for power users, but if everything is scripted, then even non-tech users could “run their own” thing. For it to happen, we need to get to “same thing as … but with more ….”  Only after we have a mature system of own apps can we then move to Phase 2 where we say: “same thing as own, but at home.”

I’m a big believer in humanity and our ability to learn adapt and advance so I think we will be able to “domesticate” the power of computing as we previously domesticated fire and electricity.