June 27, 2012
“It is self-indulgent of us as teachers to say that we can spend 3 hours a week with a student and give them wonderful experiences. What about the billion other children on the planet? What about the rest of the hours for that child? Our task is to identify powerful ideas that have been dis-empowered. [...]
May 18, 2012
“On the Cost of Computation in Schools A final word about the cost of doing all this. Turtles. music boxes. computer controlled motors and the like are less expensive than teletypes. Displays are slightly more expensive but becoming rapidly cheaper. So if. computers are being used in a school, there is no good economic argument [...]
May 10, 2012 (Rare Discoveries Week)
“So I think the number one task has to be to really create spearheads, nuclei of change where we can really demonstrate that something really different can be done – something not improvement, but radically different.” Papert, S. (2000) Keynote Address at CUE Conference. Palm Springs, CA. In May 2000, Seymour Papert delivered a barn-burner [...]
May 8, 2012 (Rare Discoveries Week)
“So there are other ways, through this computer system that have opened up, that enable somebody to get knowledge when you need it. Now this leads to, not only to a radically different idea of what kind of knowledge it is, because there’s nothing numerical and nothing about fractions in the description of the parabola [...]
May 3, 2012
“Discussing laptops with local teachers reminded of my encounter in Thailand with Mr. Condom. His real name is Meechai, but he proudly accepts the nickname given in honor of his work teaching villagers in remote areas to use condoms. Statistics show that he has contributed significantly to keeping birth rate and sexually transmitted diseases under [...]
April 26, 2012
“When I met Piaget my passion for understanding mathematics came together with my desire to know how the mind works and to create a theory of intelligence. Plaget fascinated me because he managed in the same breath to say something both about the nature of mathematics and issues fundamental to philosophy and at the same [...]
April 19, 2012
“Why then should computers in schools be confined to computing the sum of the squares of the first twenty odd numbers and similar so-called ‘problem-solving’ uses? Why not use them to produce some action? There is no better reason than the intellectual timidity of the computers in education movement, which seems remarkably reluctant to use [...]
April 16, 2012
“I give talks about this sort of thing to educators and at the end they say, “Well exactly how is the computer going to help me teach fourth-grade math?” And that’s exactly the wrong question — there’s not going to be a “fourth-grade.” There’s not going to be a separate math class. There’s not going [...]
April 11, 2012
“Being a mathematician is no more definable as “knowing” a set of of mathematical facts than being a poet is definable as knowing a set of linguistic facts. Some modern math ed reformers will give this statement a too easy assent with the comment: Yes, they must understand, not merely know. But this misses the [...]
April 9, 2012
“You can lead a kid to Euclid, but you can’t make him think.” Papert, S. (1996) The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. Atlanta: Longstreet Press. Page 187. Tweet This Post
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