AlgebraHut.com Blog

Lately, I have been doing alot of work, which seems odd because my workload is not as bad as usual.  I thought I would have it easier this semester with only teaching 4 classes (18 hours), but I feel as though I’m working more than usual.  Anyway…

If you are a legitimate reader of my blog (and not a spammer), don’t bother commenting.  There is one IP address in particular that is spamming me comments several times a day.  I have over 600 comments awaiting moderation.  There is no way for me to find the 1 or 2 honest, sincere comments out the 600 or so canned comments.

I stayed up late last night working on something which I am proud of:  a special relativity simulation.  I plan on giving a talk about Special Relativity and I wanted a virtual demonstration.  Much to my surprise, I could not find one!  Okay, well, I found one, but it wasn’t a very interactive simulation.

So I made my own using the only programming language I know:  javascript.  To resize the image, I used canvas, which is an html 5 element supported by Firefox 3.5 and Google Chrome.  I tried using ex_canvas for internet explorer, but I don’t think excanvas supports canvas text rendering, so ie cannot render my simulator (either that or I did not code something properly).  Maybe one day IE will support the standards like canvas…

Anyway, I hope you like it.  You can input the speed, in terms of percents of the speed of light.  For example, a speed of .5 means 50% of the speed of light.  Acceptable speeds are anywhere from 0 to 1.  Anything over 1 would be faster than light.  So don’t do it!

The default image is a goofy picture of me.  However, you can use any image you’d like.  Just input the url of the image you want to use in the second textbox on the page.  You may have to click the ‘Show Me!’ button twice in order to show the image.  Also, you should probably use images that are smaller than 300px wide, otherwise, they will start to overlap in the simulation.

Well, hope you enjoy it.

~Dylan Faullin

I am terrible at blogging.  I never post a blog as often as I promise or intend to.  Well, tomorrow, the Fall semester begins and I will once again be swamped with classes to teach and papers to grade and meetings to attend.

Which means an end to playing around on Algebra Hut.  I feel as though I have accomplished quite a bit this summer with algebrahut.com.  I have managed to create a few very useful web apps.  Now, I will be working on a project related to teaching at the school.  I am attempting to put my entire lecture online for Intermediate Algebra (click here for the prototype).  This is related to the Teaching Naked project but is now also related to my previous post regarding FREE education!

I have made a great number of changes to my online graphing calculator, which I am now officially declaring to be in the ‘Alpha’ stages of testing.  I have looked for ways to make the process go more quickly and getting a product fully developed in a faster time frame, but I don’t see many easy options.  One of my major concerns is having a dedicated server, which I cannot afford at this time.  But I read somewhere not to worry about getting a dedicated server until you have lots of people using it first.

There were still many features I wanted to add to the online graphing calculator, but I think I’ve run out of the easy ones to do.  The features I still need to implement will be day long projects, one detail at a time.

I have also created and am heavily using a web app I call MyMathExample.  This has helped save me a ton of time with the above mentioned project of putting my lecture online.  This app only works on internet explorer because it heavily uses execCommand, which hasn’t been fully implemented in other browsers.

I also have tweaked a web app I like to call Math Mailer.  It essentially just sends an email message.  But it is set up to more easily include mathematics in the message.  I have removed the requirement that your email address be registered with my now defunct forum (thanks to a ton of spam and no real users).  To prevent abuse, I added in reCaptcha before you can send the message.  Careful though, because if you miss the reCaptcha, you will completely lose your message.  I haven’t figured out a way to retrieve the message in the event that you miss the reCaptcha.  It is also now cross-browser compatible.  I successfully tested it on IE7, Firefox 3.01something, and Chrome.  Some of the format buttons do not work with Firefox (or Chrome I think), again due to the not-fully-implemented execCommand.

Another thing to be careful with in the Math Mailer is that your message *may* get knocked down by spam filters to the junk mail folder.  I think the reason for this is that it sends your message both to you and whomever you chose to send it to.  Since it is sent to multiple parties by a script, spam filters are suspicious of it.  I had to select ‘This is not spam’ just once in yahoo, and the rest of my test messages made it to the inbox just fine.

Also, the email that is sent is an HTML email.  So the receiver of the email will need to have the capability to view HTML emails to see the math.

Well, it’s already late.  I need to be rested for the first day back at work in over two weeks.  Please leave comments unless you are selling something. 

Thanks for reading.

~Dylan Faullin

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how I would design the higher education system if I could create it from the ground up.  I thought it would be fun to organize the features of such a higher education system like one of those Web 2.0 startups, listing all the features with big, green check marks for all the free features. 

So this is what I think a Web 2.0-type College would look like.  More to the point, I honestly think this is the direction of higher education:

Feature	Description	Included*
FREE Textbook for each Class	A free ebook will be provided for each class.  Print versions can be made to order at low cost.  Optionally, supplementary material can be purchased.
Enroll in Unlimited Classes each Semester	Pay for 15 cr.hr. this semester, stay actively enrolled in 15crhr.  Students can work at their own pace, finish a class early, and enroll in another class without paying extra tuition.  Alternatively, a student can ‘pause’ a course to start a new one. Later, they can resume the paused course or start over if necessary.  So long as the student does not exceed 15 active credit hours at any one time.
Education-on-Demand	Learn what you want, when you want.  Archived lectures are available 24hrs a day/7 days a week.  Learn at your own pace.
Free and Flexible Course Resumption	Didn’t get a passing grade for that tough class last semester?  No need to start from the beginning.  Resume the class from whatever point you’d like.  This means no having to repeat the material you’ve already mastered.  Students start over from the point where it all went downhill and get to spend more time on the material that was more challenging.
Live Class Broadcast in  aVirtual Classroom	You can choose to participate in a live class in person or virtually.  Watch and participate in the lecture from the comfort of your own home.  Interact with the teacher and students during the lecture through an embedded, easy to use chat.
Low Student/Teacher Ratio	30:1 average student:teacher ratio, always!
Teacher/Tutor Available at Any Time	Have a question that needs an answer?  Get the help you need any time by whatever means is most convenient to you:  email, forum, live online, or live in-person.
Convenient Peer-to-Peer Collaboration	You never need suffer alone.  Use our social network to find students working on the same material as you.  Work together with your classmates on tough assignments.
Objective-based Learning which means NO SEAT TIME Requirement	Each class has a check-list of objectives.  Pass those objectives, pass the class.  It’s as simple as that.  You are not required to spend a fixed amount of time in the class.  You can spend an entire year or an entire week on a course.
Proctored Exams or Standardized Final Exam	You have the option of either having all of your exams proctored throughout the course (using our extensive Proctoring Network) or taking all exams unproctored in lieu of taking a Proctored Standardized Final Exam for the course (ie College Algebre CLEP test). Student is responsible for the cost of taking the Standardized Exam.
Online Tools Available for Free	We have researched and compiled a list of the best online educational tools available and have integrated them into our courses. You have the best that the internet has to offer all within just a few clicks of the mouse.
Convenience and Quality	It’s your education.  You choose what you want to learn and when you want to learn it.   We are a reputable, highly regarded institution that has maintained high standards of learning while providing flexibility to the learner.

*Included with the Cost of Tuition

Interestingly, since I started compiling my list of features for Higher Eduction in the Future, I have come across a few articles that seem to support my prognostications:

Free, the Book!

Free/Cheaper Education Through Social Media on Mashable.com

Obama Initiative for Community College (notice the mention of free educational tools/courses funded by the gov’t)

It seems to be a convergence of a society upon an idea.  Let me know what you think.  Thanks for reading.

~Witch Doctor

I am doing a separate post today for another category, regarding ‘Teaching Naked’ (see my previous post called ‘The Plan’ on this topic).  The training was completed earlier than originally planned, which forced me to work on presentation more quickly than I had planned.  All in all, I am happy with the end result.

Here is what I created for my presentation.  I plan to use this in the Fall Semester.  The students will essentially do the lecture outside of class by visiting this page:  Click Here.  They will watch the powerpoint (converted to flash).  The powerpoint will direct them periodically to stop and look at examples, the links of which are posted to the left of the powerpoint.  They will be required to fill out a lecture outline with their notes from the lecture.  So, either they do the lecture themselves or copy it from someone who did.  I think it is beneficially either way.  Besides, that’s not much different than how they do the homework.

By requiring the lecture to be completed outside of class, this will free up 100% of the class time for more focused, one-on-one type of help, or for demonstrations.  I can skip the routine stuff and spend extra time discussing the typical mistakes.  The lectures can now be more flexible, instead of being so insanely driven by ‘I have to get to this point today or I’m behind schedule’ or, more often, ’I have to get to this point today because I’m already behind schedule’. 

It is best viewed in fullscreen.  While I understand that you may want to explore the page rapidly just to get a summary of what I’ve done, don’t do this too quickly, as my server provider will lock down my website from ‘high cpu usage.’  I know this because it happened to me when I was testing the links.  The dangers of shared hosting….that’s a topic for a future post.

I have only completed one section of the course (out of nearly 40).  It was my original intent to complete all 40 sections this summer.  Then I lowered my goal to just completing the first chapter (6 sections).  Now that is in danger of not happening.  I need to get on the ball.

I’ll either try to stay one chapter ahead, and use this all semester.  Or I might just give myself a break and just do Chapter 2, pilot it, see how it works, before doing the whole course like this.  I probably need to make sure it is effective, accessible to all students, and something my students will benefit from, before I do the whole course.  I’d hate to spend hours upon hours completing the online lectures for the whole course, only to find out that the students hate it, the grades are worse than usual, etc, etc.

Well, let me know what you think.  I could certainly use the feedback.  i just realized that some of the links are broken.  I will have to fix that….sometime soon.

Thanks for reading.  Please leave comments or questions.

~WitchDoctor

I apologize for waiting to post.  I have been busy at work with teaching a couple of classes this summer.  Whenever I can spare the time, I am working on special projects for AlgebraHut.  The one project which I’ve really put alot of time into is an online graphing calculator.

It’s working name right now is JS-83.  I wonder about the legality of such a name, since it sounds similar to another brand of graphing calculators.  The JS stands for javascript.  The entire calculator is written using HTML and Javascript, which goes to show you the power of these basic web authoring tools.  I do use some PHP, but only for handling logins and registrations.  The calculator itself is powered only by HTML and JavaScript.

At the moment, it doesn’t have ALL the functionality of a TI-83.  It has a good selection of functions which puts it somewhere between a regular scientific calculator and a fully-functional graphing calculator.  I mostly teach Algebra and this calculator is certainly sufficient for those classes. 

JS-83 can do all 1-var statistics, which will get you through about 70% of an Elementary Stats class (it won’t do hypothesis testing or linear regression…yet).  It can find quartiles, but I haven’t taken the time to program box plots yet.

JS-83 also does *most* matrix operations.  Determinants, row operations, row-echelon (ref and rref), multiply two matrices, etc.  An additional benefit of JS-83 is that the calculator displays the matrix in a nice, readable format using mimetex, both in the output window and on the button you press when you want to call up the matrix.  JS-83 is most nearly fully-functional when it comes to matrices more than any other aspect of a standard graphing calculator.

JS-83 can graph functions only (no parametric or polar…yet).  About the only thing you can do with the graph at the moment is adjust the window and the resolution.  You can graph each function separately (default) or several on the same window.  You can also use different colors for each function.

Other features:

Share Data:  You can import someone else’s data or export your data to share with others, easily.  Exporting requires registration.  Don’t forget your username/password when registering. because I currently have nothing in place to help you retrieve your account if you do forget.

View/Save/Print Session:  You can scroll your output window to view previous calculations.  If your output window gets cleared, you can still view your entire session, print it, and/or save it to your computer.

Keyboard:  There is a little number key pad with a few letters and symbols.  These can be typed in with a keyboard, but I put these on the JS-83 with the idea that I might be using the calculator with a smart board, where using the keyboard on the computer would be inconvenient.

Please check it out, let me know what you think.  If you find anything wrong or if something isn’t working, please let me know by commenting here.

Calculator URL:  http://www.algebrahut.com/js-83

Calculator with some Data Imported:  http://www.algebrahut.com/js-83?darthvader&data2

Thanks for reading.

~WitchDoctor

I have been working on many projects for Algebrahut.com in the past month since the Spring semester ended.  I’m sorry for not updating more often.  But I’m having too much fun writing code (like I’m some big time coder…lol, I am a hack; not to be confused with hacker).  I’ll try to list all the updates here:

• Redesigned the home page:  http://www.algebrahut.com
• Completed a project for the first time:  MyMathExample Builder.  This web app let’s you create a webpage for explaining a math problem.  Actually, I should take that back.  I still need to make the help page.  But the page itself is complete.  Options:  Page Title, Audio, Print Button.  The web app only works on Internet Explorer.  However, the webpage that you create with it works on at least Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox3.  I haven’t tested on anything else.
• Major Progress on my greatest project:  JS-83, an online graphing calculator.  I am currently finishing up work on making it possible to save and share data.  This also only works on IE.  I have created a massive javascript math file, that I would imagine should work in other browsers too.
• Completed another project:  Coin Counting Game.  I am actually trying to sell this one on www.teacherspayteachers.com.  You can view the demo by clicking here.  It is designed for elementary school age children.
• Just today, I began working on a project for conducting an Online Learning Session.  Details to come…(if it doesn’t completely fall through by the end of next week).
• Working very slowly on my ‘real job’ project, which is to take my classroom lectures and digitize them as part of my ‘Teaching Naked’ initiative.

Well, there might be other things, but you can see from the list that I have kept myself busy this month.  I have learned a little about databases, php, even more about javascript, and I actually still like this stuff.  I think I may have missed my calling…

Thanks for reading.

~Dylan Faullin, Algebrahut.com

 
For the Fall2009/Spring2010 school year, I plan on trying the Teaching Naked theory of education, in at least one of my classes.  In truth, I experimented with the idea a little bit this past semester (Spring 2009).  I put the lecture material for a few sections of the first chapter online and told the students that they were expected to learn that material on their own.  

I don’t know if I would call what happened a success, but it wasn’t a complete disaster either.  I didn’t get any complaints about it.  However, I didn’t see any great improvement in performance on the material either.  I attribute this neutral outcome to inconsistency.  Half the chapter was online, half was done in traditional lecture format.  I wonder what the outcome will be when I make a complete transition to this new style of teaching.

Essentially, the idea is to make your traditional, ineffective classroom lecture available outside of class in a digitally-enriched and more engaging, interactive format using widely available technology.  Class time is then used for more targeted activities, such as spending additional time on the historically weak areas of the majority of students or spending time helping small groups of students or performing classroom demonstrations or introducing hands-on applications that make the subject more accessible and relevant to the student, etc.

Determining what to do with all the extra classroom time is the intimidating part of this model.  I personally don’t have many classroom demonstrations or hands-on activities up my sleeve.  This is why it is called ‘teaching naked’, because you, the teacher, are now on the hotseat.  The teacher is now forced to improvise from week to week, based on indications from the students and the class as a whole.

This is not an educational model that you can decide to adopt at the last possible moment.  It will take planning.  In a totally unrelated project, I had typed up an outline of each of my lectures and made them available to the students.  I will use these outlines (which I call ‘Digital Notes’) along with a powerpoint/html presentation of the material to move my lectures out of the classroom and on to the internet.

I have a working prototype here, though it is still incomplete (missing audio and powerpoint slides with better directions).  Click here to download the Digital Notes for the relevant material so you can better follow along.

I will update this page when I have a better prototype for what I plan to use in the Fall or if my plans change.  If you’d like to follow my progress as I attempt this transition, I will refer you to my blog.  This blog will contain thoughts on other topics as well, but I will be sure to tag the entries pertaining to this page as ‘Teaching Naked’.  You may also post comments on my blog, which is a good way to participate in a forum-type discussion.  I would also appreciate any feedback and will respond to comments whenever possible.

Thanks for reading.

~Dylan Faullin, Algebra Hut

I am sincerely sorry for not updating in a while.  I am teaching 15 credit hours this semester.  That may sound like a normal load, except that 4 of my 5 classes meet 5 days a week (even though they are only 3 credit hour classes).  That means I am in the classroom 23 hours a week!  I was handling it okay for a couple of months, but these last two months have really been exhausting.

The only uptick is that I do get paid a little overtime (an extra $1500 or so, which comes out to about an extra $100 per week).  It’s nice, but sometimes your time is more valuable than the extra amount on your paycheck.

I have established myself as a ‘techie’ on campus.  I don’t think I’m necessarily that adept with technology, but relatively speaking, I must come off looking that way.  This summer, I have the opportunity to create a new  technology-based curriculum for one of my classes and actually get paid (a small sum) for it. 

I have a few ideas as to what I’d like to be able to do.  Some of my ideas I’ve already made public, like the online lectures using flash-converted powerpoints and those webpages I created for going through math examples.  I am also getting a ’smart board’ in my classroom.  This $10,000 piece of equipment is really neat.  I have been using one the last couple of weeks for one of my classes (guinea pigs) and it has mostly gone well, considering the major rush I was in to finish the material on time.

The semester is not quite over yet.  One more week to go.  Finals week.  Lots of grading.  I’ll be glad when it’s over.  Then I’ll have the next month and a half off.  I will be working on my new curriculum but also some of the projects I started here on Algebra Hut, one in particular I am especially excited about working on.  I call it the JS-83.  It is very much a work in progress, but I think it has great potential.  In fact, I even notified a textbook company of its existence, in case they might like to purchase it.  As of now, anyway, it only works on IE (though I honestly haven’t tested it in Firefox, I’m almost sure it won’t work in Firefox or any other browser).  Visit it and let me know what you think of it.  Hopefully by July, it will be fully operational (crosses fingers).

Thanks for reading.

~The Witch Doctor

Well, I’m in the middle of my spring break.  I thought this would be a time for me to work on Algebra Hut, but so far I have had very little free time.  I rented a couple of games for the Wii.  I am really enjoying Paper Mario.  If you like math and haven’t played Paper Mario, I would highly recommend it.  The dialog is funny and well written.  The game play is very interesting, because you are a 2D character playing in a 3D world.  So, having that game around is not helping me get things done.

About a week and a half ago, I got sick and did not get much done for the whole week.  I managed to get to work, but not much else.  So it has been at least 2 weeks since I’ve done anything with Algebra Hut.

Before I got sick, I made some major progress on one of my ’secret’ projects.  I have most of the major elements in place.  Now it is just a matter of putting on the polish (which I am not as excited about).  Unfortunately, it is only working in Internet Explorer and, for now, it will stay that way.  Parts of it seem to work in Firefox, but the php script I wrote doesn’t follow through like it should when using Firefox.  I am not really sure why the script would care which browser is being used.  I personally don’t use Firefox and am not familiar with writing html and scripts for Firefox, so I am not feeling too motivated to make my ’secret’ project compatible with all browswers.

When I have completed the finer details on my secret project, I’ll make an ‘official’ announcement here.

I am also taking a web design class.  So I am getting a more formal training in writing html and css (so far).  The course description said something about learning php, but I don’t see much of it in the textbook.  I purchased the textbook as an ebook, which was much cheaper.  However, it is more of a lease than a purchase.  I lose access to the textbook after 180days.  Being able to do a ctrl-f search on the text is nice though, and typing my assignments up as I read the text is easy, because I can have notepad up and the textbook up on my computer screen at the same time.

I am hoping to use what I learn in this class to better design Algebra Hut.  In fact, one thing I am realizing more and more is that I really need to restructure my site.  When I was setting everything up, I just put files where ever it was most convenient.  However, as I add more and more pages, it is getting too chaotic.  I need to take the time to better organize my files.  It’ll take more time upfront, but it will be much easier to maintain and make changes later.

So, over the next couple of weeks, I plan to restructure the files on the server.  If you are visiting this web site, you may find certain links aren’t working properly.  This should only be temporary.  If a link is broken, check back in 24 hours.  If it still isn’t working, leave a comment or send an email and I will look into it.

Well, thanks for reading.

~The WitchDoctor

I am a weekend web design warrior!  I’m actually starting to look forward to the weekend, when I get the chance to try to create a new page with a particular function in mind.  I am working on a couple of things which I think are BIG. 

Through my studies on the internet, I have discovered some html code that allows you to edit an area of the web page as a WYSIWYG, which can then be saved as html code.  For anyone who knows anything about html, it is a content editable div.  If you haven’t heard of it, you should look it up.  From what I gather, it is a relatively new thing.  One drawback:  I think it only works on IE, not firefox or netscape.  But if enough people use it and like it, the other browsers will have to come around.

I wrote my first PHP script last weekend.  I didn’t write it from scratch.  But I found a couple of good tutorials on PHP scripts and sort of combined them together to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish.

Also, I managed to create a ‘favicon’.  You should be able to see it when my website loads up.  It is the little icon next the the web address.  Let me know what you think.  It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to get that working.  And as I’m just looking, I don’t see it, so I wonder if it broke again!  Such trouble for such a small thing….

Anyway, I really shouldn’t spend too much time on here tonight.  I’ve got papers to grade (as usual) and I don’t really have any complete product to show off yet.  Not that anyone is reading at the moment, but I want to unveil my two BIG projects after they have been completed, not in the development phase.  So stay tuned…

~Dylan Faullin

PS  I was reading my last post.  In that post, I mentioned trying to put the powerpoint together with the examples.  Since writing my last post, I have found away to do that seamlessly, so that a student can view the powerpoint for a moment, pause it, flip over to the examples, look at a couple of those, then go back to the powerpoint.  It all works nicely.  Take a look:

http://www.algebrahut.com/colalglectures/colalg14lectureframetest.html

Thanks for reading.