Introduction

Abstract

Since the time of the publication of the first Handbook, technological developments have advanced with tremendous pace, and have had a significant impact on nearly every aspect of human life, at least as far as the “developed” countries are concerned. One would have expected a corresponding technological impact on the practice of education in general, and of mathematics education in particular. Whether this is the case or not will be apparent from the contributing chapters in this Section. But one thing is clear from even a cursory review of the relevant literature. In the past ten years or so, there has been ample research into the impact of technology on mathematics education, resulting in a proliferation of research literature in the area. Moreover, because of the rapid advancement of technology, the relevance of the publications has a very short “half-life”, resulting in an ever-moving body of literature of the field. And it is this moving body of literature that makes this task of trying to document the state of the field in a section of the Handbook so daunting, as pointed out by some of the authors in this Section when they tried to summarize the literature even within the sub-domain that is their responsibility. For this reason, the topics dealt with in this Section are selective rather than exhaustive.