An article titled A Calculating Web Site Could Ignite a New Campus 'Math War' was posted to the math department mailing list and it got a bit of response. The author seems to suggest that WolframAlpha is going to change the way that we teach math because it can solve calculus problems and other types of math problems.
From the article:
“I think this is going to reignite a math war,” said Maria H. Andersen, a mathematics instructor at Muskegon Community College, referring to past debates over the role of graphing calculators in math education.
...
"I still think that anyone who is not a little scared by the changes that WolframAlpha brings hasn’t thought about it enough yet,"
I would strongly disagree with this statement even though I think that WolframAlpha is an amazing tool. If you have not seen WolframAlpha you should check it out. It is not a search engine but acts similar to one. It can solve equations and analyze data and has data-mined massive amounts of information. Try "integral sin x dx" and you will see what this web site can do for calculus.
Does this significantly change the way we teach? My answer is "no more than other tools that are out there." I think that we have not correctly adapted to the use of the internet in learning since I perceive that students are leaving high school and do not know how to write and research properly (it could be my "old fogy-ism" kicking in).
I do not think that WolframAlpha is going to change the way that students arrive at a computational answer any more than a CAS (Computer Algebra System) does and it will have less impact than graphing calculators. Perhaps the authors worry that now we have a CAS (WolframAlpha is based on Mathematica) which is freely available. We have to be aware that students have access to this tool, but we had to adapt to the way Google changed the way students do mathematics and we will have to adapt to the use of smart phones as they become ubiquitous. This is nothing new and it is a good thing that this tool increases access.
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