Category: Reflections

Reflections on learning and teaching and research and life.

Moses loved numbers

Many traditions hold that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. If we assume this is true, then there is one thing I think is clear about Moses, based on the things he wrote: he loved numbers. I’m pretty sure he was a mathematician at heart, or at the very least an accountant, because his books are littered with numbers which are not entirely necessary to get his overall point across.

Just look at this passage from Genesis (NIV):

When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son and he named him Seth. Afer Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether Adam lived 930 years, and then he died.

When Seth had lived 105 years, he became the father of Enosh. And after he became the father of Enosh, Seth lived 807 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether Enosh lived 912 years, and then he died.

When Enosh had lived 90 years, he became the father of Kenan. And after he became the father of Kenan, Enosh lived 815 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Enosh lived 905 years, and then he died.

When Kenan had lived 70 years, he became the father of Mahalalel. And after he became the father of Mahalalel, Kenan lived 840 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Kenan lived 910 years, and then he died.

When Mahalalel had lived 65 years…

And this one:

He spent the night there, and from what he had with him he selected a gift for his brother Esau: two hundred female goats and twenty male goats, two hundred ewes and twenty rams, thirty female camels with their young, forty cows and ten bulls, and twenty female donkeys and ten male donkeys.

The emphasis on numbers is striking.

Now I’m pretty sure Moses didn’t mean to place such an emphasis on numbers in his writing. Presumably his main aim was to let his readers know about the history of Israel, and the nature of God and his relationship with humankind in general and Israel in particular. But still, the numbers are there. Why?

I argue that the reason the numbers are there is because Moses himself loved numbers. I think he couldn’t help the numbers appearing in his writing because he wasn’t even aware he was doing it. He liked numbers, so he thought about them a lot, and so they just turned up in his head when he was writing his books.

And if it can happen to Moses, then it can happen to anyone. I know myself that I can’t help references to childrens literature turning up in my lectures, and I can’t help maths turning up in my everyday conversation, just because I love those things. And I can’t help turning every discussion about maths into a discussion about problem-solving, because I think about the process of problem-solving a lot and it just happens.

But the danger is when the things we are interested in distract from the message we want to get across. For example, what if a teacher absolutely loved sport to such an extent that every example in class was about sport, and some of the students who disliked sport were turned off because of the association? And what if the thing a teacher most loved in the solution to a problem was the fancy trick? Then when they presented the solution they couldn’t help getting excited about the trick and it would seem to their students that fancy tricks were what problem-solving was all about.

But what can these teachers do, since they can’t help the things they love coming through in their communication? Well I think they can simply be aware of it. Then at least they can make sure that even though the things they love are there, the overall message isn’t obscured by them. (Of course the ultimate would be to love the thing you are trying to teach!)

21 May, 2013
Vector philosophy

What is a vector?

When students first meet vectors they are pretty much told that vectors are arrows. They move arrange the arrows head-to-tail to add them, and they lengthen the arrows when they multiply them by numbers. Sometimes the vector is represented using coordinates, but they are told that this is shorthand for the arrow that goes from the origin to that point. Lovely.

And then, in first year maths at uni, they are told that vectors are a list of coordinates. To add them, you add the coordinates, and to multiply them by a number, you multiply each coordinate. You create sets of vectors using equations, which are represented as coloured regions in space – a point is coloured in if its coordinates satisfy the equation. The only way to make sense of this is to think of your set of coordinates as a point, not an arrow. Oh dear.

So which is it then? Are vectors points or arrows?

There are at least four answers to this:

1. Vectors are points, and the arrow picture is simply a way to helps us visualise what the result will be when we add them and multiply them by numbers. So when I see a set of coordinates, I think of the point in space they represent, and when I draw a set of them, I just colour in the points. And when I add them I am just using the rules for how they add to find the answer, but I can visually picture where in space the answer will be by imagining them as arrows.

2. Some vectors are points, and other vectors are arrows, depending on context. So when you add two vectors, the first one is a location – a place to start, if you will – and the other one is an arrow – a direction to go. The result is a the place you get to by starting at the point and moving the arrow, and is of course a point again.

3. Vectors live in two separate worlds, one where they are points, and another where they are arrows. There is a world where vectors represent locations in space and they happily find themselves inside our outside sets. But there is another world, where vectors are arrows and they happily arrange themselves head-to-tail when they want to add. When you have two points, and you want to add them, they quickly move over into arrow-world, do their adding, and then the answer comes back as a point again.

4. Vectors are neither points nor arrows. They are mathematical objects with no innate physical reality at all. The concept of drawing a vector as a point or an arrow is simply a way to represent them on paper and it is not what they actually ARE.

And which answer do I think is the right one? All of them, none of them – this sort of discussion is philosphy, not maths, and in philosophy there’s no right or wrong. You pick what works for you. Indeed, being able to see it from different viewpoints only enriches your understanding.

Still, I do quite like the “separate worlds” idea.

This comment was left on the original blog post:

David Roberts 23 July 2013:

I think the main difference is that a vector as an arrow is an inherently geometric idea: you draw them, move them around the page and so on. The list of numbers is more algebraic, and more static: you can’t pick up (2,5,1) and stick it on the end of (22,7,0) like you can with those vectors represented as arrows.

There are really different things going on when you move vectors as arrows around the page that don’t happen in the list of numbers approach. The trick is that those concepts don’t get formalised for several years after R^n is formally introduced, and are usually couched in a much more complicated and abstract setting.

16 May, 2013
Essay outlines, not plot summaries

The Writing Centre put something on Facebook today about how to organise an essay and I’d like to quote something from the link they put up:

Though there are no easy formulas for generating an outline, you can avoid one of the most common pitfalls in student papers by remembering this simple principle: the structure of an essay should not be determined by the structure of its source material. For example, an essay on an historical period should not necessarily follow the chronology of events from that period. Similarly, a well-constructed essay about a literary work does not usually progress in parallel with the plot. Your obligation is to advance your argument, not to reproduce the plot.

From “Organizing an Essay “, by Jerry Plotnik, University College Writing Centre, University of Toronto

While reading this, suddenly something about my own marks for essays in Year 12 made a whole lot more sense. How dearly I wish someone had said this to me when I was in high school!

But of course, while you may sypmathise with my regrets, you may also be wondering why I am talking about essays when this blog is about the learning of maths… Well it occurred to me that the above quote applies to the writing about anything really, including your notes about your maths course.

Some people when they study for a maths exam will start at the first lecture and proceed to write down everything they were told in the order they were told it. They make their official cheat sheet for the exam and it has headings “Lecture 1”, “Lecture 2” etc. These people invariably find that they don’t do so well in their exams, and I never found a decent way of explaining why it doesn’t work. It’s because they are basically writing a plot summary of their lectures!

What they should be doing is writing an essay outline. In an essay, you are not just repeating what you saw, but synthesising it into new knowledge. Similarly, when you are studying a course, you should be reorganising the content into a a structure that makes logical sense, and where the connections between things are clear. This is not necessarily the same as the order it was taught in. (Indeed, sometimes you can’t teach things in this order because some things have to be learned before other things to fit with how your brain works, but the logical strucure works the other way around.) There’s no point simply repeating the things in the way you saw them – you’ve seen that already in the lectures themselves. Instead, you have to write something that shows your understanding of the content. You’re writing an essay outline, not a plot summary.

Maybe next time I see a student studying in an unhelpful way I will tell them they’re not supposed to write a plot summary, and I’ll give them an essay question instead: “Discuss the logical structure of the ideas in this course.”

23 April, 2013
Forget pi, it’s cos squared that’s wrong!

For a while now, a debate has been raging about whether we should scrap using pi in all our equations and instead write everything in terms of tau (which is 2 pi). Most of the time I stand at a distance from this debate, thinking it rather tedious and preferring instead to fun things with pi like draw its digits in chalk on the footpath. But every so often I get involved.

The last time I got involved, I made a video satirising the whole thing and suggesting that both pi and tau are wrong and we should instead use eta (which is pi/2). You can see it here . Every so often I check on the video to see how it’s going and I read with some amusement the comments people have posted there. In one of these comments I learned that Michael Hartl, the main advocate for Tau with his Tau Manifesto, has actually added a reference to me in the latest version of his Manifesto, saying that eta is not that bad a choice after all for certain applications! How ironic (in a gratifying sort of way).

Anyway, because of this I have been drawn back into the debate again and have found myself watching YouTube videos and reading blogs on the topic, and commenting on these videos and blogs.

The time has come to write a blog post of my own…

One of the main arguments that our tauists put forward for using tau is that it makes teaching trigonometry easier. They claim that using pi is one of the main reasons people don’t understand radian measure when learning trigonometry, saying that it’s silly for a full turn to be 2 of something.

And this is where I am compelled to make this blog post: all that may possibly be true, but if you’re going to pick something to fix in the way we teach trigonometry, which constant you use to describe how far it is around a circle is not the thing to pick. The pi versus tau issue pales in comparison to this little gem, which is a fundamentally wrong thing to write and causes all sorts of confusion:

cos² x + sin² x = 1

The first and most basic confusion is that students are forever typing “cos^2 (x)” into their computer-marked assignments, and then asking me to help them because the computer doesn’t mark it as correct.

And the reason the computer isn’t marking it as correct is of course that the computer does not recognise that as a legitimate thing to write, for the very simple reason is that it’s NOT a legitimate thing to write! The symbols cos and sin are functions which means that the true meaning of cos²(x) ought to be cos(cos(x)), as it is in all other situations when we use powers on functions. If we told them this is what it meant, then they wouldn’t think it was the answer to their assignment question. I also believe it might make it a little easier for them to understand why cos⁻¹(x) is in fact the functional inverse of cos and not 1/cos(x).

On the other side of the coin, we don’t do this with any other functions do we? We don’t say either of these do we:

(exp(x))² = exp²(x)
or
(√ x)² = √ ² x

That’s ridiculous. Why do it for trig functions?

And finally, are we really that lazy? I went looking on the internet for the reasons why people write the abomination above, and every one of them just says “for brevity”. Really? For brevity!? Honestly, it may be breif to you but it uses up hours of your students’ and my time – time that could have been saved with four strokes of your pen!

Ok, so I got more and more passionate and less and less cohesive in each paragraph there, but I think the point still stands. I think the teaching of trigonometry and a lot of other things too would be much easier if we all just wrote:

(cos x)² + (sin x)² = 1

These comments were left on the original blog post:

Sam Cohen 6 April 2013:
I like what you say, David, but I just wanted to flag up that I regularly write X^2 to mean the square of X, even when X is a random variable (and so, in my language, a function of the outcome \omega). I would argue that we do, frequently, want to write f^2 for the function x->(f(x))^2, particularly when thinking of functions as key objects in their own right, rather than as secondary entities to numbers, etc… Just my two cents.

David Butler 7 April 2013:
Fair call with the random variable thing Sam, if you view a random variable as a function from Omega to the real numbers. And yes, with functions like polynomials, we usually consider a polynomial as an abstract object constructed by addition and multiplication of other basis polynomials. So if p is a polynomial it probably does make more sense for p^2 to mean (p(x))^2. *sigh* It’s never simple is it? Still, I wish people gave this sort of reasoning rather than just “brevity”. 😉

Tomas 23 November 2013:
I love debates about Pi ,or Tau …. Pi or Tau were , are and will be always wrong and not accurate numbers. You all know this omfg 🙂 Pi was made up first with physical measurement .. you are unable to find it with any method , and juts still using this crap. I simply don’t get it. Start to think outside the box and find the real constant and new equation how to count circumference and stop using this made up crap and endless debates about, which are not solving anything (no offense). Just one advice 10:3= 3,2 this is the right result, solve it ,and you will maybe open new dimension of thinking and understanding for yourself . There is a reason ,why we using our stupid decimal math system . Peace. 😉

6 April, 2013
Playdough wins again

Recently I asked the boss for some money for some new stuff for the MLC: laminating for the new signs, batteries for the clocks, an HDMI cable for the electronic sign, new trays for the tea and coffee, and also new play dough. In her email to approve this expense, she said, “Play dough eh? Have fun.” You could almost see the smile as she thought of all the unusual things we have asked for in the past.

I don’t judge her. Firstly because our good Pro-Vice Chancellor for Student Experience is a most excellent advocate for good teaching across the uni, secondly because not many people realise just how awesome playdough is for teaching maths, and finally because we do ask for some pretty unusual stuff.

Not that I needed justification for making my unusual request, but all the same I got my justification yesterday when the playdough came in handy in a way I had never used before.

A student was studying for her Statics test (“Statics” is a physics course that the Engineering students do). She was trying to understand why a particular force would produce an anticlockwise rotation around an axis in 3D. We looked up the right-hand rule in the book, and we drew pictures and waved our hands, but she just could not see it.

I was just saying, “You have to think of the object the force is pushing on as a solid box…” when it suddenly occurred to me that I could actually make a solid box! So I jumped up and ran to get the playdough out of the cupboard. She watched nonplussed as I moulded it into a box, drew some coordinate axes on paper and plonked the box down on the paper.

“Here is your force,” I said as I pushed with my finger on the corner of the box. And lo and behold, it rotated anticlockwise around the axis! The look on her face as all the confusion melted away was priceless. Seeing this look on people’s faces one of the reasons I love my job, but it also totally justified spending the University’s money on some nice new playdough!

4 April, 2013
Birth stories in the MLC

One of my favourite memories of the Drop-In Centre happened not too long after I started here. One of our regular visitors happened to be pregnant at the time, and as always happens when parents are in the presence of a pregnant woman, it wasn’t long before we began swapping birth stories. And not just ones from our own experience, but also the ones related to us by other parents before the births of earlier children. I won’t relate any of these birth stories here, because I don’t want to freak you out (like the way we freaked out those poor 18-year-old male students studying at the same table as us during this conversation).

I remember thinking later how strange it is that parents naturally want to tell birth stories to pregnant mothers. And the pregnant mothers listen to these stories with interest, no matter how gruesome and frightening the story is. Why is that?

The reason came to me during the last couple of weeks of summer semester. It came to me because large numbers of students asked me what their maths courses in second year would be like. They soaked up all the information I was willing to give even if it frightened them a bit that there would be statistics, or more proofs, or they would have to remember this infinite sum stuff. And why? Because the fear of the unknown was worse than the fear of the known.

This is why pregnant mothers listen to birth stories: so that when their own birth experience comes, they know what might or might not happen and how to deal with it if it does – in other words, to reduce the fear of the unknown. They even listen to the stories when they have had a child already, knowing that one birth is not enough to know about all possible births that could be.

And in a flash I realised that one of our longstanding policies in the MLC was wrong. In the past we had a general policy of not allowing the second years to stay. Of course we’d been as nice about it as we could be – telling them that the first-years need us more, that not all of the staff are experienced in their particular maths, and that they should make their lecturer work for them – but to all intents and purposes we had turned them away.

But I realised there was a certain advantage to having them in the room with the first-years: they can tell stories from first-hand experience about what the future will be like for the first-years! If they weren’t there, it’s just us, and they only get our stories, and our stories become less relevant as time goes on, like the stories my great auntie told us about having babies in her hallway in Wallaroo 50 years ago. (Ok, I had to tell at least part of one actual birth story.)

So we have a new policy: we’ll still tell the second years they should talk to their own lecturer, and that first-years have a greater need, but we won’t turn them away. Because they can help the first-years with their fear of the unknown.

1 March, 2013
Beware of the Toast
There is a little trick someone played on me once as a child and I have been playing on the students in the Drop-In room this week. It goes like this:

Answer the following questions:
- What would you find in a haunted house?
- What do you call a meal of meat cooked in an oven?
- What is the part of the country that is next to the sea?
- When you have more than everyone else, what would you have?
- What do you put in a toaster?
The answers to these questions are of course, a ghost, a roast, the coast, the most and… bread. You weren’t thinking toast were you? 😉

You may ask why I’m playing such a mean trick on my students, when normally I am adamant that we shouldn’t make our students feel stupid. Fair point, but I think it will help them feel less stupid in the end.

You see it all started when one of the students was doing “volume of revolution” problems. Every problem so far had required him to take a 2D shape and rotate it around the x-axis, thus creating a solid 3D shape. The next problem, however, required him to rotate around a different line outside the 2D shape, thus creating a 3D shape with a hole in it. It said on the page it had to be rotated around a different line, and yet he still rotated around the x-axis anyway. “Why did I do that?” he asked. And in response I played the above trick.

The point is that humans are good at following patterns, so good that we don’t even know we’re doing it. In general this is actually a good thing – it means you can set a table, sing music, do jigsaw puzzles, count, learn languages and and even learn maths. But sometimes it fails us, because things don’t always fit into a pattern. Just because the first four answers rhyme with GHOST, it doesn’t mean they all will; just because all questions so far require rotating around the x-axis, it doesn’t mean they all will.

So for students, the message is to keep your mind open. Don’t just follow the pattern, but think carefully about what the problem at hand requires you to do. For teachers, we should be careful to put in more than one type of example, so that students aren’t encouraged to form a pattern that isn’t there. In short, for all of us: Beware of the toast.
28 January, 2013
Who tells you if you’re correct?

At our uni, the first year maths students do the majority of their assignments online using MapleTA, and this week MapleTA was having problems. As always happens with technology glitches, it was an absolute schemozzle. It was bad enough for students that it was intermitently not working at all, but what made it worse was that even when it was working, the “preview” and “how did I do” functions were both failing. This meant that students could not use the computer to check if they were right, and a lot of them were extremely distressed by this.

And this has confirmed something that had been bothering me for a while: many students are not learning the skill of telling if they’re right for themselves. I had suspected this to be true, considering how many students in our survey on “cheat” sheets mentioned how useful it was to have a way of checking they were correct, and also considering how many students in the MLC ask us the question “can you check if this is right?”. It seems that a lot of students need an authority outside themselves to tell them they are right, whether it be the computer, the cheat sheet, or the MLC staff.

It’s strange, but I remember as a student spending hours trying my assignment questions in multiple ways, or reproving a result to make sure it was really true and I really could use it in my assignment, or simply subbing my answers back into the original equation to see if they worked. And in our puzzle gathering, One Hundred Factorial, we often ask ourselves how we can tell if we’re right and sort out ways to be sure. It’s clear that at some point I learned to be sure I was right on my own.

When will our current students learn these to do this? Because right now they seem to be relying on others to tell them they’re right. Yet at some point there won’t be a higher authority, and they’re just going to have to know if they’re right for themselves – most imminently, during the exam!

I’m not suggesting going back to the frustrating days of not being able to check if your syntax is correct, or not being able to submit the assignment multiple times. These things encourage students to at least try and retry the questions, rather than see it as all too hard, and this has very positive learning benefits. But what this means is that it falls to us, their teachers, to encourage the confidence and skills to know they are right for themselves. We can always show them how to check their work, rather than check it for them when they ask us. We can always help them check their work on paper even before they put it into the computer. And we can keep building their confidence so they will be more independent, and won’t feel as strong a desire for someone outside to tell them they’re right.

This comment was left on the original blog post:

Carol Matthews 18 January 2013:
That’s a very good point David. I remember in my high school doing a mock maths exam at which we were permitted calculators which were new and, as it eventuated, gave wrong answers to a value of 0.10. What stunned the teachers was that the vast majority of us accepted the calculator’s answer, without question either not noticing the error or assuming that we, not the calculator, must be wrong.

17 January, 2013
Don’t clean the whiteboard

In the previous post, I talked about classroom archaeology: the concept that we leave behind evidence of the learning that goes on in our classroom for others to find, and since people will see this evidence whether we like it or not, we should leave some useful artefacts on purpose.

This post is about one simple idea I have for an archaeological artefact we can leave behind: a full whiteboard.

Your typical university classroom is woefully bare – there is little or no evidence that learning has happened in them at all, letalone what learning it actually was. In general we don’t have topical posters to inspire questions in our students, we don’t have a list of this semester’s topics marked to show where we’re up to, and we don’t put the students’ work on the wall for people to see. The main reason for this bareness is that the classrooms we teach in don’t “belong” to us – everyone shares them and classes traipse in and out of them all day.

And this is precisely why I think the full blackboard is such a great idea! If you leave on the blackboard what you did in your class, then the next person who uses it can see what learning was going on there. If they are from a different discipline, then they might just get a kick out of knowing that your topic is actually taught at your university. (Indeed, just yesterday a lecturer in Media expressed this exact opinion about seening Physics on the whiteboard when he enters his lectures. And I myself enjoy walking through Hub Central and seeing the intricate diagrams and calculations left behind on the whiteboards by the students studying overnight.) Not only this, but if you have the good fortune to have no-one else use the blackboard between now and your next class, your own students will have the benefit of seeing right there what you did last time.

Now I know that it is many a teacher’s pet peeve to enter a classroom to be faced with a “dirty” whiteboard, but I think the benefits far outweigh a little bit of annoyance. And anyway, if everyone did this, you’d just clean the whiteboard at the beginning rather than the end of the class, and so everyone would still doing the same amount of cleaning overall wouldn’t they? (Possibly less cleaning if you think about it, because if you don’t plan to use the whiteboard at all, you won’t have to clean it!)

So in the spirit of having a healthy sense of classroom archaeology, please: don’t clean your whiteboard!

7 November, 2012
The one most important thing you can do in MyUni to make your students’ lives better
MyUni (known as “blackboard” to people not at Uni of Adelaide), is a powerful tool for supporting your students’ learning. There are a whole lot of awesome things you can use it to do: use discussion boards, have virtual classrooms, set up group assessment, student wikis, and the list goes on. The bread-and-butter of MyUni is of course to put up the lecture notes, assignments and prac instructions.

And this brings me to the most important thing you can do in MyUni to make your students’ lives better: label everything properly. And not just any labels – descriptive labels.

Let me illustrate with some examples:

Example 1

Imagine yourself as a student doing your assignment and needing to remember how to, say, produce a QQ plot in SPSS. You remember that you had a computer prac at some point in the past where you learned to do that, and that the prac instructions told you how. So you go to the part of MyUni where all the prac instructions are. And you are faced with the following picture to the left.

And now you have to go through every prac one at a time, dowloading one pdf after another, to find where the instructions are. You have an intense feeling that perhaps it’s just not worth it.

If only the lecturer had labelled them with a description of what was in them! something like this:
- Prac 1: Entering and importing data, saving data
- Prac 2: Descriptive stats, graphs, importing into Word
- Prac 3: Labelling categories, making tables, drawing scatterplots, calculating regression
- and so on…
Then you as a student would be able to find the instructions yourself and not have to ask for help, or worse, just give up.

Example 2

Imagine yourself as a student studying for your exam. You have been going through your assignments and you find that you really need to go over the topic “integration by parts”. So you decide to go and watch the appropriate lecture recording.

You go to the part of MyUni where the lecture recordings are and you see the picture to the left. There is a list of the lectures at the bottom, but they are organised by date. You don’t have dates in your own personal lecture notes because you organise them by topic, since that fits with your learning style. How on earth are you supposed to know which one is the one about integration by parts? You’re not about to watch the first ten minutes of ALL of them to figure it out!

If only the lecturer had put each individual lecture as its own item with a little description of what it was about, you’d have a much easier time as a student. Indeed, you’d get a really good picture of what was going on in the course if for some reason you were forced to miss some lectures. (It would be even better if the MyMedia setup allowed lecturers to choose descriptive titles for each lecture at the time they recorded it, which was automatically included in the info here…)

Example 3

Imagine yourself as a student trying to do an assignment. You remember that you lent your lecture notes to a friend earlier in the day, so you go into MyUni to download the slides. You know you are particularly looking for the bit on Indifference Curves, but when you go to the bit with the slides you see this:

You know it’s one of Module E, F or G, but which one? If only there was a description of what was in each lecture, you might actually be able to choose which one. And in fact you might possibly get an appreciation of what the whole course looks like since the topic list would be right there. As it is, you waste precious time, and vow never to lend your notes to your friends ever again.

Conclusion

Do you see how important this one thing is? Do you see just how annoying it can be for a student to have to deal with a lack of labelling, and how it can actually seriously impede their learning? Do you see how proper labelling might actually smooth the way for the students to become more independent?

This is why I think it is the one most important thing you can do to label everything properly. Lecture notes, lecture recordings, practical notes, assignments, tutorials – everything. It really will help your students learn more than you will ever know.

So please, label everything clearly in MyUni!

This comment was left on the original blog post:

Ryan Hattam 18 January 2013:

Hi

Great advice! As a former student and now a MyUni Admin I’ve been in to many courses, and agree completely with the 3 examples!

A couple of points on example 2:
In MyMedia a lecturer can include notes when they record. There is a notes field on the MyMedia Capture Application in lecture theatres, and on the file upload screen of the website.
You can enter as much or as little text as you like. This text is then viewable and editable on mymedia.adelaide.edu.au with the other session editing capabilities.
This text is then automatically included when you embed an individual session on a page.

We experiemented with a few ways to get the note text on the playlist, but because of the arbitary size the text could be, it was tricky to keep the playlist a certain size. Just showing the note of the current playing video was investigated, but it didnt really solve the problem! However, if you click on ‘download links +’ below the playlist, you get the download links, with recording names and the notes! The recording names match up with the names in the playlist, so you can locate the right one and select it.

The next iteration of the playlist will hopefully include the notes inline, reducing the step of expanding the download links to read them!

-Ryan
26 October, 2012

Category: Reflections

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Conclusion