[Maths-Education] Being outdated

[Dave Pratt]

I think your description of the reviewer is entirely appropriate, indeed
more appropriate than his/her criticism.

If we are really in the game of building a body knowledge, we must reflect
that aspiration by situating our contributions into an argument that may
strwtch back some time. Even in ICT contexts, I find the seminal work (and
enduring - no work later than 1999 can claim to be enduring! goes back well
beyond 1999. The alternative is that we are all victims of fashion -
something which no-one has ever accused me of!

Dave



Dr. Dave Pratt
Director of Centre for New Technologies Research in Education (CeNTRE)
Institute of Education
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL

+44 (0)24 7652 3813
dave.pratt@warwick.ac.uk <mailto:dave.pratt@warwick.ac.uk>
http://fcis1.wie.warwick.ac.uk/~dave_pratt/


-----Original Message-----
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maths-education@nottingham.ac.uk
Sent: 30 April 2003 09:04
To: maths-education@nottingham.ac.uk
Subject: [Maths-Education] Being outdated
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I would like to hear people's views about what constitutes datedness in
research.  I have just been shown a review of someone else's paper in
which
citations from 1999 are criticised for being 'out of date' for no other
reason than they are 'not recent'.

Do we really believe that, as a field of academic study, we are creating
new knowledge so rapidly that citations from 1999 are necessarily out of
date????  What I suspect is happening is that there is pressure to cite
the
most recent person who said something, rather than someone who said the
same thing a few years before.  Unless the more recent citation is
research-based and contains something new, rather than something old but
in
a new context, I cannot see why people should not refer to older sources.

On one level, there is little new in our literature anyway, we just re-run
and re-run ancient arguments about the nature of the individual, society,
knowledge, truth and so on using different words, different points of view
perhaps.    In trying to identify what might be genuinely new, rather than
newly-described, I think work which focuses on certain groups (girls,
boys,
ethnic groups etc.) and what might be common or different about their
experience is useful, but even that has some central work which is older
than 1999.

I would be interested to know what pre-1999 references people find central
to their work and would be annoyed to give up on the whim of a reviewer
with the chronological sensitivity of a mature goldfish.

My current sensible vote is for Boaler 1997, but I could also suggest
Dewey, Bruner, Hume, Vico, Aristotle.....

And what is genuinely new?  Let's argue.

Anne W.



*****************************************************************


Dr Anne Watson
Tutor for Admissions and Fellow of Linacre College
Lecturer in Mathematics Education,
Department of Educational Studies,
University of Oxford
15 Norham Gardens
Oxford OX2 6PY

phone:	44-(0)1865-274052
fax:		44-(0)1865-274027


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