From the Web to the Mathematics Classroom: Investigating Internet Phenomena as Educational Resources in Mathematics

Twenty-first-century learners access and share information and knowledge differently from previous generations. This difference depends greatly on the technological changes that nurtured the birth of websites hosting user-generated content, including digital objects that span across a variety of themes and purposes. Some objects are created and shared with explicit educational aims, and others populate the Web for mere recreation. Among recreational user-generated digital objects, some reveal unplanned educational potentialities in many fields, as is the case of mathematical memes, and aggregate interest-driven online communities that become informal learning environments. Despite these educational potentialities, these objects are immersed in the culture that generated them, and therefore, they are not yet ready to become traditional educational resources. To profit from them for mathematics education, we need knowledge about how to investigate and transform them into usable resources for teaching mathematics. This chapter focuses on recreational user-generated digital objects with mathematical content with a two-fold purpose: to show that these objects are worth exploring as examples of out-of-school mathematics that can inspire the design of new teaching materials, and to provide a theoretical understanding and a consistent method for the investigation. This understanding may guide further researchers interested in exploring Internet phenomena in general with an educational purpose, in the broader research perspective of addressing the technical and cultural discontinuity between informal out-of-school learning contexts and traditional school-based ones.