MAPLE and MATLAB, and workshops for the HP-28S and Casio fx-8000G. The proceedings with invited addresses and contributed papers will be published by ...
DID YOU MISS THIS TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE? THERE’LL BE ANOTHER NEXT YEAR Annie and John Selden UME Trends, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 1989, 8 Frank Demana, Bert Waits, Tom Ralley, and Alan Osborne of the Mathematics and Mathematics Education Departments at Ohio State University organized the Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics, held on the campus in Columbus, October 27-29, 1988, with support from Apple, Addison-Wesley, Charles Merrill, and Texas Instruments. With over 300 participants, it was so well received that they are already planning the second annual conference for November 2-4, 1989, at OSU. Mark your calendars; it was definitely worthwhile. The hardware, software, and courseware for technology, from VAXs to PCs to graphing calculators, plus implications for curriculum were very adequately covered with invited talks ranging from Tom Tucker’s opening “The Twilight of Pen and Paper: Collegiate Mathematics Between the Centuries” to Stephen Wolfram’s “Mathematica: A System for Doing Mathematics by Computer”, which audibly wowed the participants. There were three parallel contributed paper sessions devoted to technology in precalculus, calculus, and postcalculus, demonstrations MAPLE and MATLAB, and workshops for the HP-28S and Casio fx-8000G. The proceedings with invited addresses and contributed papers will be published by Addison-Wesley. Participants were among the “converted”, agreeing that the new technology will have a drastic effect on how we teach collegiate mathematics, even though no one yet knows just what that will be. Educational research issues were on the conference agenda and John Harvey presented “Changes in Pedagogy and Testing in college Mathematics Necessitated by Technology.” However, lacking from all the razzle-dazzle and high tech of the software was any significant incorporation of ideas from mathematics education research. Are most software developers simply unaware of its existence? Hypertext and ISETL show great promise for conceptual learning in mathematics—perhaps the organizers could include these next year.
