Subject: categories: Virtual classrooms and Cat Th Education

From: Patrik Eklund <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 10:08:01 +0100 (MET)

Dear Friends and Colleagues!

I will be speaking categories and categorical education but let me begin
with technology.

We have been using virtual classrooms now for quite a while. It's useful
for courses at all level, distant supervision can be carried out, etc.
You can even do research collaboration in this way. Many already do, with
different ambitions concerning technology and content. I am sure that I am
not aware of on-going processes, and if any reader already has gone far
beyond this, please stop reading and accept my apology for this spam mail.

I am not speaking NetMeeting or Skype where you only have audio and video
transmission. We are using Marratech where you have whiteboards and shared
applications. In particular, the whiteboard is very useful as you can have
many of them at the same time, and what is next best, you can save the
whiteboard files and use/update them online before and after meetings,
i.e. you can prepare your agenda/slides and the whiteboard prior to coming
together in the virtual classroom.

The best thing is that the Marratech client is free of charge. The server
is rather costly but we have one in Umea and I would like to make this
available for Virtual Cat Th Education.

Basic and Advanced courses in category theory both for mathematicians,
but also, as in my case, for computer scientists.

I came to this idea now when I am trying to recruit interest in my own
department for these topics. E.g. I want to do some basic things with
categories, functors, and natural transformations. From there monads are
rather close by. Further, I want to teach topoi/toposes and also say some
words on \lambda-calculi. Universal algebra, categorically, is a further
priority. Etc etc.

***

Anybody out there sharing these ideas? Can we develop something together?
The problem often being that each and every site may come up with 4-7
students, but combining 4-5 sites gives a nice classroom. And, of course,
teaching can be shared. Joint lecture notes would be important, I
believe. Etc etc.

Drop me a message if you are interested in developing these ideas further.

Cheers,

Patrik
[email-masked]
+46 70 5864414