While PME44 has been postponed to 2021, PME wants to offer the members an opportunity for discussions and to stay in touch with each other. For this purpose, the PME44 organisers will host a Virtual Meeting via Zoom at the time of the originally planned conference (July 21–22, 2020).
The meeting will consist of pre-recoded presentations and live online discussions. We will publish video presentations before the conference so that people living in different time zones can all watch them at the time that is most convenient for them. The live discussions will take place between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Thailand time (11 a.m. to 2 p.m. UTC), which seemed like a time window that would best serve our members around the World.
We are still exploring if we can safely open the event for anyone to join. At least all PME members and recent PME members will have access to the virtual meeting.
The program of the virtual meeting will have a Plenary, four Research Report (RR) presentations, two Working Groups (WG), and the PME Annual General Meeting.
Our invited plenary speaker is Professor Marcelo Borba from the State University of São Paulo, Brazil. He will talk about the very timely issue of distant learning using technology. His title is “Future of mathematics education post-covid-19: Digital technology, critical education and epistemology”.
All other presentations are volunteers among those who submitted their research proposal to PME 44. We sent an invitation to all authors of the RR papers accepted to PME 44 to present their paper in the virtual meeting. As only four volunteers responded positively, we accepted them all. For WG, we invited modified proposals for the virtual meeting from those who had submitted a WG proposal for PME 44. The PME 44 International Program Committee accepted the two submitted WG proposals.
The program of the meeting is but a bleak shadow of the richness of PME conferences. Yet, we feel very excited about this new type of PME activity and hope to see many of you online in July!
