A curated collection of examples

We are seeing so many great examples of what can be done with Doenet, but I fear that I will lose track of these or miss great things that people are doing. Some people might be brave enough to post to “Show and Tell”, but it would be nice to have things organized so they are easy to find.

Here is an idea that might help: we create a PreTeXt book of Doenet Examples. A group of editors curate and solicit submissions for questions that accomplish particular pedagogical tasks (e.g. understanding how limits of functions relate to the graph of the function). The book might be organized by topic so they are easy to find in the same way we are used for finding examples in physical textbooks. You go to the chapter and section (e.g., limits) and you see the live version. But there is also a link to the code on doenet.org where you can modify/learn/use the activity. Each example will also include a list of “problem techniques” (serving essentially as tags). These can then be easily searched using PreTeXt’s search feature. Or they are added to the index.

The editors of this collection should be asking the community for examples. This might encourage authors to submit or write great examples. Or even works in progress that others can improve on. We give credit to the authors (if they want) and they can use this as a published, peer reviewed contribution in their faculty evaluations, even.

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Sure, if you want to create such a book, go for it!

I feel like both points you raised are both interesting and important: how to make such activities/examples easy to find and how to give people credit for their efforts in a way that is recognized and valued by their institutions. I hadn’t thought of a PreTeXt book as a way to organize Doenet examples, but it makes sense and could accomplish both points.

I’m also quite interested in the broader discussion of ways in which Doenet, PreTeXt, and the broader ecosystem can help accomplish both goals of discoverability and credit. For our upcoming PESOSE grant proposal, we plan to propose the development of a content repository of crowd-sourced activities. The content repository doesn’t need to be Doenet-specific. Your comment about making a PreTeXt book of Doenet activities, along with the upcoming ways of better integrating Doenet into PreTeXt, makes me wonder if adding PreTeXt support to the repository should be done sooner than later.

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