Learning Platform

Elementary level (elementary and middle school)

This is the level at which our content is the weakest; we don't have much content and much of what might otherwise be relevant is written from an advanced standpoint which makes it relatively useless for someone trying to learn the subject. As a first step, we could add suitable content in the form of textbooks, exercises, and solutions. It would be good to obtain the assistance of someone with experience teaching/facilitating learning at this level.

Intermediate level (high school and undergraduate)

Content is at this level is better, but the encyclopedia format is not optimal for "learning". Restructuring in Textbooks and Problem sets would be a good thing here.

Advanced level (graduate and research)

Note that research monographs are not SO different from textbooks -- the technology that supports "independent learning" should work for researchers as well as for undergraduates. Also, much of our current content is at the advanced level, so trying to clone the Springer Graduate Texts in Mathematics series (at least at the outline level) might be a sensible thing to do.

Semantically enhanching texts with automatic links to terms and eventually linking formulas to computer algebra systems and proof assistants, socially enhancing them with discussions and attached entries, as well as individualized personal enhancements such as highlighting and notes can go a long way towards making the literature more useful for learning purposes. We have a test illustration of this with the Balduzzi paper. Going further, a next project would be to take a collection of related articles (I am thinking of making a collection of around 40 articles on mathematical bioilogy from PLoS) and put them up on PM and start enhancing them in the same manner. Not only would this be "more of a good thing" but it would introduce a new aspect --- when one has multiple related articles, the system can make explicit the relations between them in a way that is not possible in a conventional (offline or online) archive or journal, thus binding them together into a coherent whole which is more useful than the sum of its parts (in a way that can be quantified using the techniques from Balduzzi's article ;) ).