InSITE: Didactics of ICT

Said Hadjerrouit of University of Agder had a talk on Didactics of ICT in Secondary Education. Hadjerrouit first described a lack of research on the didactics of ICT, and that he believed that there would be much to learn from the didactics of mathematics. I agree. In mathematics, there has been much research done on separate areas of mathematics (algebra, numbers, geometry, probability etc), and this has meant that the field of mathematics education has never become a purely theoretical subject, but has remained close to the actual teaching tasks. It seems to me that ICT does not have such a clear division into subfields, and that therefore, didactics of ICT may risk becoming too general and not too useful.

Hadjerrouit has taken part in small-scale projects with teachers, students and pupils in secondary school to learn ICT (not just use it), but from the presentation I got no clear sense of what the outcome of these was. Surely, the paper could be consulted for more on this.

ICT in mathematics education

I have been interested in ICT in mathematics education for many years.

The most important result so far is the paper A Taxonomy as a Vehicle for Learning (written with Cornelia Brodahl of University of Agder) which will be presented at a conference this week.

Four main areas

In this blog, I will write about anything connected to my work, but it will tend to include more about my main research interests, which are:
1) History of mathematics in mathematics education
2) Gay issues in teacher education
3) ICT in mathematics education
4) Wikis in teacher education

To get this blog started, I will, in the days to come, write short posts on these four topics to introduce them.