This blog comment is related to Olga Caprotti's blog entry "Mission Accomplished."

We are in the business of advancing the use of information technology in education. At times I feel that this is a Mission Impossible.

I am right now taking part in the ICME 11 conference, the most important international meeting of mathematics educators. ICME conferences meet every four years. This time the meeting is taking place in Monterrey, Mexico. Together with Olga Caprotti I organized a workshop entitled eLearning Mathematics and participated in the activities of the meeting in general.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM) explains the abbreviation RTFM as “Read the Fucking Manual” and lists almost 40 equivalent expressions like GLOG for “Go Look on Google.” The multitude of such abbreviations simply tells us that people do not have the patience to learn before starting to use computers. I almost never read the booklets entitled “Read This First” when opening a package and starting to use a new computer or other similar device. I assume that it will be self explanatory, and that I will be able to use these devices right out of the box.

I met with Johan Thorbiörnson (KTH, Stockholm) today. We discussed the problem of defining eContent Quality.

I think that it not possible to give any clear specification of what is good and what is not good. The field is changing so rapidly. New ideas on how to use the web, and new devices come up with such a phase that even the best eContent today may become obsolete tomorrow.

That eContent is good which is being used and which leads to results. Search engines and tracking tools help us to find out the winners in this competition.

On Monday I made an experiment with my new iPod Touch. I took a WebALT calculus quiz using my iPod. Results were extraordinary: I failed the quiz, but was amazed of the features of the web browser in an iPod Touch (http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/). iPod has the same browsing functionalities as the iPhone, so the following comments apply also to iPhones.

to be completed

General Description

Documentation

Examples

Software

References