On 9/3/13 8:41 AM, u...@flooved.com wrote:
1. In addition to W|A mention above, we are in in the process of
integratingwww.writelatex.com , who we think are really useful for
easily producing high quality material in Tex. We also integrate
MathJax for students to very easily use Latex within their
annotations. I wonder what you think about this? Do you think this
low threshold will persuade students to start using Latex? Can you
share your experience with students using Latex for the first time?
Thanks for your email explaining a lot more about your goals and
strategies. Personally, I think the more that people spread the word
about free and open-source materials, the better. And a collaborative
annotation system for books is certainly something interesting to see.
Just curious: have you seen the Sage cell server?
https://sagecell.sagemath.org
In some ways, it's like Wolfram Alpha (you can easily run mathematical
computations over the web). In other ways, it is way more capable (you
have access to the full power of Sage, not just a restricted version;
you can embed live computations into any webpage without needing a
special browser plugin, which include mathjax, 3d graphs, interacts
(live sliders, buttons, dropdown lists, etc., which are just about as
easy to create as Mathematica Manipulate commands), and many more things.
We're working on the Sage cell server as part of the UTMOST project, and
a variety of people are using it:
http://sagecell.sagemath.org/static/about.html#in-use
Also, you might be interested in seeing the Sage Cloud that William
Stein is working on: https://cloud.sagemath.com. For example, just last
week he released a latex editor with side-by-side pdf preview, with
forward and inverse search (which writelatex doesn't have, IIRC). Just
create a new latex document to see it. The latex editor in Sage Cloud
lets you transparently embed Sage calculations and plots into your tex
document (using sage-tex), and is really nice. The latex editor is also
*truly* collaborative---changes by many people are updated in your
editor in real-time, using the same algorithm that Google Docs uses.
You also get access to a full command line shell to work with your
documents, so it is easy to use git or mercurial to check in changes and
push them elsewhere. Snapshots are also taken every few seconds to
ensure that you don't lose work.
There are some really exciting things happening in the Sage community
regarding enhancing educational materials.
Thanks,
Jason
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