Markdown for learning materials

19 September 2013

Markdown is all the rage among geeks, but should educators even care? I would say that Markdown is an excellent option for educators who like to learn new things and don't mind having a period where they might feel like working with their traditional tools made them more productive. Below are the main advantages, text below referring specifically to the Pandoc flavor of Markdown:

Pure text: This might sound like a terrible reason, but being based on pure text rather than proprietary formats like MS Word has a number of advantages as will be outlined below. This does not mean that the final format is in plain text, since you can export the document to almost any type of file you can imagine
Multiple export formats: Files in Markdown can be exported to PDF, slides, web pages in HTML, LaTeX, MS Word documents, among many others. This means that if you are writing a paper, but want to turn that paper into a Web page, you are just one click away.
Semi-automatic translation: Because the document is in pure text you can simply upload it to a tool like Google Translator Toolkit, have it automatically translated to another language of your choice, and then have a human translator make minor changes. Because all the formatting is created through characters like * or # or _ , your final format will maintained exactly as is, be that a PDF, slide presentation, word document, etc
Reuse: Because you use the exact same way of writing to articles, blog posts, slides, among others, it's just natural that you will be looking through your old documents and reusing chunks of texts rather than writing them again. Actually, after some time you will probably find yourself creating chunks of text solely for the purpose of reusing them in multiple locations, but don't worry about that for now, this will come naturally.
Semantic citations with CiTO: Bibliographic citations in Markdown using the CiTO ontology means that when you cite a paper or a book, all the information about that reference will be available to you. In a traditional citation software, when you cite a reference you are able to see the usual info about authors, date of publication, etc, but in a semantic citation you would also have a connection to the abstract, databases that might have cited that reference, and any database that might connect to that reference in the future. All of this is obtained simply by adding the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) when you add the reference to your text.
Math equations: In contrast with softwares such as Microsoft Word where a math equation might not display properly when you transform that page into a PDF or Web page, math formulas in Pandoc Markdown are consistently transformed across files.
Tables: Tables are not only extremely easy to put together, but if you are performing data analyses you can very easily have tables automatically populated. The advantage is that if you modify your analysis in any way, ultimately affecting every cell in the table, using Markdown all results will be automatically updated without the need to manually do each cell all over again.
Styling CSS: Let's say you have a collection of one thousand documents, and all of a sudden you decide that you want to change their look and feel. Using cascading style sheets (CSS) the change can be made in a single document and then automatically spread to all documents. Of importance, this doesn't work all that well for PDF, although there are some potential solutions to this problem with software such as Prince XML
Integration with data analysis: As mentioned in the point about tables, it is fairly easy to integrate Markdown with statistical languages like R using packages such as knitr
Amazing slide presentations: Although Pandoc Markdown does have a way to generate slides, Slidify has a number of advantages that justify going along with it: Support for many different presentation modes, quizzes, dynamic graphics, among many other features.

There is obviously more, but this probably good enough for a post. If you would like to give it a try, perhaps the best way is just to start using it in a tablet computer like the iPad, there are excellent review articles talking about different apps

by Ricardo Pietrobon

About Me

My name is Ricardo Pietrobon and I am interested in big data and situated cognition applied to immersive distance education.