Once again a real swifty of a newsletter, this time introducing not one, but two websites. The first is a very recent production by a small group of highly respected mathematicians and mathematics educators with what I consider to be a stellar goal: an articulation of what is important about mathematics, why is it important, why we owe it to our students themselves, not just to the country's economic status, to teach them all aspects of that important area, why educational research is essential to the necessary continuous improvement in teaching it, what that research is, and what we can reasonably expect of it. And, as one of its authors described it to me: "It's non-partisan, that is, it doesn't officially take a stance in the math wars, just advocates the improvement of (meaningful) math-ed." Me, I call that exciting. You can find this document at http://www.mathismore.net/
The other website has rather a different nature. As I have mentioned before, one happy chunk of my professional identity is engaged in trying to make available to the anglophone world the research that has been done over the past 35 or more years in France in a mathematics education research program entitled Didactique (or, as we are gradually converting to entitling it, Didactics), founded and still worked on by Guy Brousseau. I have been pleased with the interest that folks have shown in Didactique, but distressed by its inaccessibility in terms of the expertise required to handle the most major English-language publication (Brousseau, The Theory of Didactical Situations in Mathematics, Kluwer, 1997). So I wrote a small book intended to help bridge the gap. At first I web-published it, but I had no clue how to make the information that it was there widely available. I therefore published it as a slim, cheap, totally accessible book, entitled Invitation to Didactique. The book has its very own website: http://invitationtodidactique.com . And I'm not a bit proud, of course not.
_______________________________________________