Proceedings of the tenth international conference Models in developing mathematics education: September 11 - 17, 2009, Dresden, Saxony, Germany

This volume contains the papers presented at the International Conference on “Models in Developing Mathematics Education” held from September 11-17, 2009 at The University of Applied Sciences, Dresden, Germany. The Conference was organized jointly by The University of Applied Sciences and The Mathematics Education into the 21st Century Project - a non-commercial international educational project founded in 1986. The Mathematics Education into the 21st Century Project is dedicated to the improvement of mathematics education world-wide through the publication and dissemination of innovative ideas. Many prominent mathematics educators have supported and contributed to the project, including the late Hans Freudental, Andrejs Dunkels and Hilary Shuard, as well as Bruce Meserve and Marilyn Suydam, Alan Osborne and Margaret Kasten, Mogens Niss, Tibor Nemetz, Ubi D’Ambrosio, Brian Wilson, Tatsuro Miwa, Henry Pollack, Werner Blum, Roberto Baldino, Waclaw Zawadowski, and many others throughout the world. Information on our project and its future work can be found on Our Project Home Page http://math.unipa.it/~grim/21project.htm It has been our pleasure to edit all of the papers for these Proceedings. Not all papers are about research in mathematics education, a number of them report on innovative experiences in the classroom and on new technology. We believe that “mathematics education” is fundamentally a “practicum” and in order to be “successful” all new materials, new ideas and new research must be tested and implemented in the classroom, the real “chalk face” of our discipline, and of our profession as mathematics educators. These Proceedings begin with a Plenary Paper and then the contributions of the Principal Authors in alphabetical name order. We sincerely thank all of the contributors for their time and creative effort. It is clear from the variety and quality of the papers that the conference has attracted many innovative mathematics educators from around the world. These Proceedings will therefore be useful in reviewing past work and looking ahead to the future

Inside the sequence universe: the amazing life of data and the people who look after them

This thesis provides an ethnographic exploration of two large nucleotide sequence databases, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Bank, UK and GenBank, US. It describes and analyses their complex bioinformatic environments as well as their material-discursive environments – the objects, narratives and practices that recursively constitute these databases. In doing so, it unravels a rich bioinformational ecology – the “sequence universe”. Here, mosquitoes have mumps, the louse is “huge” and self-styled information plumbers patch-up high-throughput data pipelines while data curators battle the indiscriminate coming-to-life caused by metagenomics. Given the intensification of data production, the biosciences have reached a point where concerns have squarely turned to fundamental questions about how to know within and between all that data. This thesis assembles a database imaginary, recovering inventive terms of scholarly engagement with bioinformational databases and data, terms that remain critical without necessarily reverting to a database logic. Science studies and related disciplines, investigating illustrious projects like the UK Biobank, have developed a sustained critique of the perceived conflation of bodies and data. This thesis argues that these accounts forego an engagement with the database sui generis, as a situated arrangement of people, things, routines and spaces. It shows that databases have histories and continue established practices of collecting and curating. At the same time, it maps entanglements of the databases with experiments and discovery thereby demonstrates the vibrancy of data. Focusing on the question of what happens at these databases, the thesis follows data curators and programmers but also database records and the entities documented by them, such as uncultured bacteria. It contextualises ethnographic findings within the literature on the sociology and philosophy of science and technology while also making references to works of art and literature in order to bring into relief the boundary-defying scope of the issues raised