Though some studies describe attempts to integrate Facebook in education, little is known how to use it in mathematics education. This article describes an attempt to populate Facebook with mathematicians from the past, as well as strategies to involve friends with the mathematics of the mathematicians. The experiment shows that Facebook can attract friends to content knowledge, beginning with social talk, and transiting gradually and smoothly to mathematics content knowledge through cultural discourse. The experiment implies that Facebook, representing social networks (...) not intended from the beginning for education, can be adopted successfully for mathematics education. (shrink)

This research attempts to describe the identity development of students/teachers who used a virtual social network –Facebook to work with historical mathematics and mathematicians in the frame of a second degree course. Fifteen participants aged from 24 to 53 years old participated in the course in which they were required to attend mathematical Facebook sites involved with math history. The research findings arrived at using the grounded theory approach indicate that working with historical mathematicians and talking and discussing their work (...) in virtual social networks, students/ teachers developed their identity in four aspects: the educational aspect, the cultural aspect, the personality aspect, and the ethnic aspect. These identity aspects were developed due to the different conditions of the learning environment, together with the actions/ interactions of the participants. Specifically, working with the history of mathematics in virtual social networks made the participants aware of the advantages of integrating technology in learning and teaching, the advantages of integrating history in the learning and teaching of mathematics and science, and the possibility to move their culture to one that is involved more in science and mathematics. In addition, working with the history of mathematics in virtual social networks made the participants proud of their heritage and as a result they increased their self esteem. (shrink)

Values, moral values and democratic values are attracting the attention of education researchers in general and mathematics education researchers in particular. Little research has studied pre-service teachers’ perceptions of values in the classroom, their perceptions of the relationship between the different variables of values in the classroom, as well as their relationship with the democratic society. The present research attempts to do so. Twenty-two graduate pre-service teachers who participated in ‘New trends in mathematics education’ course discussed how to cultivated values (...) in the mathematics classroom. Moreover, they answered survey questions related to the cultivation of values in this classroom. We used a combination of deductive and inductive content analysis to characterize the pre-service teachers’ texts. The research results indicate that the pre-service teachers perceived values as encouraging students’ activity in the mathematics classroom. In addition, the pre-service teachers perceived values as encouraging specific categories of values needed as skills for the citizen in a democratic society, as creativity, critical thinking and metacognition. (shrink)