Zekeriya Karadag

Visual Mathematics and Cyberlearning

This first book in the series will describe the Net Generation as visual learners who thrive when surrounded with new technologies and whose needs can be met with the technological innovations. These new learners seek novel ways of studying, such as collaborating with peers, multitasking, as well as use of multimedia, the Internet, and other Information and Communication Technologies. Here we present mathematics as a contemporary subject that is engaging, exciting and enlightening in new ways. For example, in the distributed environment of cyber space, mathematics learners play games, watch presentations on YouTube, create Java applets of mathematics simulations and exchange thoughts over the Instant Messaging tool. How should mathematics education resonate with these learners and technological novelties that excite them?

Visual Mathematics and Cyberlearning in View of Affordance and Activity Theories

How do new digital tools and environments affect mathematics learning of students who belong to the Net Generation? In order to explore the complexity of the use of multimedia and Internet to make mathematics teaching and learning more visual and cyber-oriented, our chapter reflects on an add-on value of the new developments in research and practice as discussed by contributing authors of the book. This meta-conceptual analysis of the variety of perspectives on visual mathematics and cyberlearning presented in different chapters of the volume is conducted through the lenses of the Activity Theory and Affordance Theory thus allowing for comprehensive connections of affordances of computational tools to the new structures of activity system in the digital era that make mathematics learning collaborative and self-directed, and increase opportunities of democratization, emergence of mathematical discourse, and multimodalities of embodied interactions.