UML OERscars - 2021

 The UMass Lowell chapter of MASSPIRG is active in promoting the use of OER materials for students.  I fully agree that it's worth a try for any course.   I'm happy to have been recognized by them at this year's inaugural  OERscars awards ceremony for Applied Discrete Structures. The good news for UML students is that there were faculty from every college recognized for developing and/or using OER materials for their courses. Congratulations to all OERscar winners! 

Chapters 1-3 and Algorithms Appendix converted to MathBook XML

The first three chapters of Applied Discrete Structures have been converted to MathBook XML.  There will be some adjustments to be made (like adding solutions to many of the exercises) but these chapters are in pretty good shape.

At the request of Rob Krueger (Concordia U.), I've also updated and converted the short appendix on Algorithms that we had in the 1989 edition. I added a section on the Invariant Relation Theorem that I've been meaning to write up for a while.  Having the ability to include Sage Cells into the text really enhances the html version.

The html version is available at  http://faculty.uml.edu/klevasseur/ads2

After finals and a few other chair related tasks (64 days left as I type this!), I'll make a LaTex version available.

Developments in Open Source Textbooks: mathbook XML

Rob Beezer at University of Puget Sound is spearheading the development of MathBook XML, which is "a lightweight XML application for authors of scientific articles, textbooks and monographs."  I'm seriously considering a conversion from Mathematica Notebooks to this new format.

I spend a bit of time playing with the current version this week and converted a very small web page with a few sage cells. Then I exported to html.

It wasn't obvious to me what code should appear in the output field of the sage sections, which would be all graphics in this case.  It isn't a problem for the html version since the cells can be evaluated.  Converted to LaTeX, the lack of output is a problem, but it still looks good.