ABSTRACT
The context for learners has changed. Most obviously, the advent of information technology has changed physical aspects of the learning environment through the increasing presence of computers and the new possibilities that are offered by educational software, multi-media and electronic communication. Less tangibly, but possibly more powerfully and irrevocably, the new technologies appear to occupy a different niche in the system of human activities and discourses and to have changed the relationships between culture, science and technologies-the patterns of their respective evolutionary paths. They present a challenge to traditional conceptions of cognition, of epistemology and the very purpose of education. Nowhere is this challenge more evident than in the field of mathematics.
