Culturally Aware Mathematics Education Technology

Education and learning take place in a situation that is heavily influenced by the culture of the learners’ context because this context affects a learner’s cognitive processes in learning. Hence, to improve the conditions for learning, e-learning environments and their contents have to be presented and interact with the learner in a culturally appropriate way. Therefore, an e-learning system for cross-cultural usage has to adapt to the students’ diverse cultural background. For the enculturation of the European platform for mathematics learning, ActiveMath, a number of dimensions had to be adapted culturally: presentation of system and learning material, terminology, selection and sequencing of learning objects, interaction, and learning scenarios. The chapter describes ActiveMath’ enculturation: the empirical basis, computational model, and computational techniques for the cultural adaptation. Topics: culturally-aware systems, groups’ cultural specificities, culture and e-Learning, computational model and perspective Solutions: adaptive systems, ontology engineering, semantic web techniques, knowledge representation techniques, user modelling techniques, system architecture 1 Motivation and Theoretical Background One of the grand challenges in European TEL research focuses on technologies for learning that will be designed for culturally diverse and crossand intercultural settings. Enculturation is not only important for tutoring systems that teach cultural relationship, geography, culture, and behaving appropriately in other countries, etc. such as the cultural training system Alelo but also for mathematics learning environments. At first, mathematics education may seem to be an unlikely field for enculturation. However, • mathematics education often follows the terminology (notions) of a particular book dominant in the region’s education or of a field that applies mathematics, e.g., electrical engineering • in the region’s or field’s mathematics education more often than not specific notations is used 1http://www.alelo.com/