Speaker: V. Frederick Rickey, Bowling Green State University
Title: Student Evaluation of the Quality of History of Mathematics Web Pages
Abstract: The World Wide Web is a valuable resource for students in history of mathematics courses. The various ways of using the internet and the web will be briefly described, with attention to the most serious problem that faces the instructor: How do you teach students to make judgments about the quality of the information that they find on the web? My attempt at a solution is to have students look at web sites which contain errors (Did Euler speak ''Swiss,'' did Felix Klein really lecture at Harvard in 1885-87, and does the catenary really have an asymptote?) and to then use other sources to correct the errors. The key is to introduce a sense of skepticism about whatever they read. The exercises for the students are available at http://www.bgsu.edu/~vrickey/math311/web-quality.html