The December 2007 International Statistical Review (ISR) is devoted to a suite of nine educationally-focussed papers which are of interest to practitioners academics and educationalists. The common theme in the papers is how to give students experience commensurate with the practice of professional statisticians – how to solve problems. The papers are visionary and exciting and suggest several ways to both improve a student’s learning experience and help university teachers to develop their pedagogy in statistics. The papers advocate new and innovative uses of open source software and dynamic interactive documents for teaching the practice of statistics.
There are also two papers that question the headlong rush into so-called e-learning that many of us have joined over the last 10 years. Is computer-aided statistical instruction multi-mediocre techno-trash and/or what is the utility of e-learning in statistics? There are many thought provoking questions and ideas in all the papers in this issue of ISR: many of them resonate with parallel activities in mathematics and I would urge teachers of mathematics to at least browse this unique collection of papers.
