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  • Situating Constructionism
  • Some Poetic and Social Criteria for Education Design
  • SUNDAY INTERVIEW
  • Technology in Schools: Local fix or Global Transformation?
  • Technology Works Enterprises Proposal
  • THE CHALLENGES OF IDC: What have we learned from our past? A conversation with Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, and Alan Kay
  • The Future of School
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  • Tomorrow’s Classrooms?
  • Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right but Three Rights Do Make a Left
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  • About Seymour Papert
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  • Technology in Schools: Local fix or Global Transformation?
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  • Let’s Tie the Digital Knot
  • Misconceptions about Logo
  • Multimedia
The Daily Papert

Daily words & wisdom of Dr. Seymour Papert

  • “Now I Know Why We Have Nouns and Verbs”
  • 1994 Keynote at National School Boards Conference
  • A Critique of Technocentrism in Thinking About the School of the Future
  • About
  • An Evaluative Study of Modern Technology in Education
  • An Evaluative Study of Modern Technology in Education
  • An Exploration in the Space of Mathematics Educations
  • Bode Miller
  • Child Power: Keys to the New Learning of the Digital Century
  • Computer as Condom
  • Computer as Material: Messing About with Time
  • Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking
  • Computers in the Classroom: Agents of Change
  • Constructionism vs. Instructionism
  • Constructionism: A New Opportunity for Elementary Science Education
  • Diversity in Learning: A Vision for the New Millennium
  • Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning
  • Educational Computing: How Are We Doing?
  • Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete
  • Event Programming in Logo
  • Ghost in the Machine: Seymour Papert on How Computers Fundamentally Change the Way Kids Learn
  • Hard Fun
  • Ian’s Truck
  • Introduction to Embodiments of Mind by Warren S. McCulloch
  • It Takes a Whole State to Raise its Schools
  • Keynote address – Kids and Computer – What’s a Parent to Do? – MIT, September 1991
  • Keynote address – 1992 New Jersey Educational Computing Conference
  • Keynote address – New Jersey Educational Computing Conference 1990
  • Learning by the Skin of His Teeth
  • LogoWriter Tape 1 (1986)
  • LogoWriter Tape 2 (1986)
  • Looking at Technology Through School-Colored Spectacles
  • MIT Logo Memo Archive
  • My Learning Disability
  • Obsolete Skill Set: The 3 Rs — Literacy and Letteracy in the Media Ages
  • Paper for the President’s Commission for a National Agenda for the 80s
  • Papert Excerpts from an MIT Media Lab Interactive Videodisc (1986)
  • Papert on Logo (c. 1986)
  • Papert On Logo: “New MicroWorlds – Tape 2, Teaching (c. 1986)
  • Papert on Piaget
  • Papert’s Principle
  • Perestroika and Epistemological Politics
  • Preface to The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer
  • Professor Papert Discusses One Laptop Per Child Project
  • Redefining Childhood: The Computer Presence as an Experiment in Developmental Psychology
  • Redefining Childhood: The Computer Presence as an Experiment in Developmental Psychology
  • School’s Out?
  • Semi-annual Constructionism Conference Archives
  • Seymour Papert – Bates College
  • Seymour Papert 2002 Interview
  • Seymour Papert Obituary (1928 – 2016)
  • Seymour Papert Obituary Collection
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 1 – Grammar (1986)
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 2 – Names and Variables (1986)
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 3 – Images of Recursion (1986)
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 4 – Digging Deeper (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 1 – Resonances (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 2 – Teaching (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 3 – Thinking (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 4 – Styles (1986)
  • Seymour Papert One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Interview
  • Seymour Papert’s Valedictory Speech Upon Being Named LEGO Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab
  • Situating Constructionism
  • Some Poetic and Social Criteria for Education Design
  • SUNDAY INTERVIEW
  • Technology in Schools: Local fix or Global Transformation?
  • Technology Works Enterprises Proposal
  • THE CHALLENGES OF IDC: What have we learned from our past? A conversation with Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, and Alan Kay
  • The Future of School
  • The Future of School
  • The Gears of My Childhood
  • The Learning State
  • The Lessons of Logo
  • The Lessons of Logo
  • The Parent Trap
  • The Wonderful Discovery of Nothing
  • Tomorrow’s Classrooms?
  • Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right but Three Rights Do Make a Left
  • Vision for Education: The Caperton-Papert Platform
  • What is Logo? And Who Needs It?
  • Where’s the Elephant?
  • Why School Reform Is Impossible
  • About Seymour Papert
  • Print Archives
  • Multimedia
  • Ways to Help
  • Technology in Schools: Local fix or Global Transformation?
  • Logo as Trojan Horse: Rethinking Logo Philosophy in the Context of a Real School Experience
  • Seymour Papert on ABC Radio – Sunday Profile
  • Seymour Papert’s American Prospect Speech
  • Seymour Papert on Online Learning and Universities
  • Seymour Papert’s CUE Keynote (May 2000)
  • Let’s Tie the Digital Knot
  • Misconceptions about Logo
  • Multimedia

April 20, 2011

1970s, Computers, Constructionism, Epistemology, Learning, Logo, Mathematics, Project-based learning, School Reform, Science, Teaching, uncategorized / By gary

We describe four major milestones in our development:

1.    In the late sixties we recognized that while computers have tremendous potential for use in education, the technology of that time was marginally effective and too expensive. We consequently adopted a strategy of preparing for a future which has now arrived
2.    For the first half of the present decade we withdrew into an “ivory tower” and developed methods for using a technology which seemed futuristic to most of our colleagues engaged more directly in the day-to-day struggle to introduce computers into schools.
3.    We are now standing at the third milestone. We recognize that the new technology has matured even slightly faster than we anticipated and will diffuse into schools during the next five years. We are almost alone among workers on educational technology to have concentrated on the intellectual content of how the new generation of computer technology can be used. We have to prove to the world that the methods we have developed are feasible, accessible to schools, cost effective and educationally meaningful. An experiment and demonstration to this purpose is the pivotal theme of this proposal
4.    The fourth milestone will be large-scale dissemination. While this is logically contingent on the success of our proposed evaluative experiments, we argue that it would be foolish not to prepare materials for dissemination in parallel with conducting the experiments. Reasons for this include:

a.    The experiment itself will be more convincing if it uses teaching materials which could in principle be disseminated “as is.”
b.    Time is of the essence. New technologies will diffuse into the schools and in the absence of available well-tried methods, untried ones will become established. And if this happens society will have to pay for one more expensive case of that bind which paradoxically places the major cost of innovation in the undoing of the old rather than the construction of the new.

Papert, S. (1975-76) An Evaluative Study of Modern Technology in Education.
Versions of this piece were published as “MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Memo No. 371,” (June, 1976), and as “LOGO Memo No. 26.” This piece was based on a proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) submitted in 1975.

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