“The days are long but the decades are short.” That’s one of my favorite quotes about the nature of time and life, written in 2015 by a then-30-year-old!
Ten years ago in early August 2012, I wrote this post that presented the first public version of part of Active Calculus.
I had just returned from Mathfest 2012 in Madison, WI, where I met Rob Beezer for the first time. A lot has happened in the decade since:
- August 2012, chapters 1-4 of Active Calculus Single Variable are made public (PDF)
- January 2013, chapters 5-8 of Active Calculus Single Variable are made public (PDF)
- August 2014, first print version of Active Calculus is made available via print-on-demand services
- August 2015, Active Calculus Multivariable is first made public (PDF)
- April 2016, I attended the first PreTeXt workshop (then called Mathbook XML)
- August 2017, Active Calculus Single Variable is made available in HTML format; source files post on GitHub
- January 2018, a new online home for the books: activecalculus.org
- January 2019, Active Prelude to Calculus is made public (HTML and PDF)
- January 2020, the Google group “active-calculus-users” is launched
- March 2020 to May 2022 …
During most of the pandemic from March 2020 to May 2022, my teaching and administrative duties at GVSU expanded and took priority. Throughout that 26 month period, I basically ignored the plans I had for Active Prelude and Active Calculus. And I missed working on them.
This June, I was fortunate to attend the UTMOST workshop in Ann Arbor that brought together education researchers, PreTeXt developers, and Runestone developers. I’ll write more about that in a separate post soon, but for now I will simply say that I found the workshop invigorating and it made me excited to return my textbooks to a place of high priority in my professional life.
In the next couple of weeks, I expect to post frequently here, on at least the following topics:
- a reflection on the June UTMOST workshop and some of the future goals for APC and ACS and ACM it has inspired
- news about a new version of one of the chapters of ACS that I’m working on and expect to make public during the fall semester
- my hopes for a fall “calc 2 teachalong”
- a short adoption survey to help me get a better sense of where APC, ACS, and/or ACM are being used
- an updated post with available ancillary materials
As always, thanks for reading, and thanks for your interest in and support of APC, ACS, and ACM.