[school-discuss] Re: Welcome to Two New Schoolforge Members

[Gunnar Stefansson <gunnar@hafro.is>]

Hello, all

By way of introduction, my name is Gunnar Stefansson. I currently
teach at the Univ of Iceland (stats and maths), give courses at the UN
University (fishery science) and conduct research in fishery science
(quantitative fish population dynamics) at the Marine Research
Institute, Reykjavik.

I have long been interested in computerising my teaching and some 10+
years ago I started using powerpoint for presentations.  A few years
ago I decided that this had become archaic and started looking for
mechanisms by which I could link my in-class slides to other things
such as quiz questions, elaborations on the slide, other courses, etc.
As I couldn't find anything that suited my purpose, my hobby in recent
years has been to try to design something and this has resulted in the
tutor-web.

The tutor-web (http://tutor-web.net) is designed so that an instructor
can flip through his eletronic slides while presenting material to a
class.  A student can subsequently flip through the same slides on the
Internet, accessing background detail, examples or quizzes as (s)he
goes through the tutorial.  Everything is on-line, in open formats and
does not depend on anything proprietary.  Presentation is mainly in
html but it is foreseeable that one will want to present also
slides-only in pdf and there is nothing to stop this - just a question
of defining more output formats.  The student can also obtain a
printable version of the tutorial, which provides boxed slides
embedded in the detailed text (postscript or pdf).

At present there is no decent interface for a teacher wanting to set
up his/her own new tutorial, but this is on the ToDo list along with
piles of other things.  Setting up a small tutorial is no big feat,
though, since it can be done either by setting up individual ASCII
slide-files or a LaTeX document to be split up later.  Linking things
together, clean-up details and coming up with decent questions is the
bear, though.

The system is open in the sense that anyone can have a copy of it and
any student is free to access it.  You'd have to be a fairly brave
soul to attempt installing it at this stage, though.

I have learned quite a bit from discussions on this list and am
particularly excited in efforts to bring developments together.
Although my main interest is in undergraduate (College) teaching at
this time, I believe there are a sufficient number of similarities
with requirements in High Schools that there is reason for
collaboration across the traditional school/class/age groupings used
in physical schools.

Gunnar