April 8, 2014

“Children get the knowledge they need, when they need it, from networks of friends, hot lines and, when they are old enough, magazines and the Internet. A first step toward building a new relationship with kids is to join them in their exploration of new ways to learn. In addition to giving us their trust, […]

March 5, 2014

“The essence of Piaget was how much learning occurs without being planned or organized by teachers or schools. His whole point was that children develop intellectually without being taught!” “Papert misses ‘Big Ideas’ of the good old days in AI” MIT News. July 10, 2012. Retrieved on March 3, 2014 from http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/papert.html. The Daily Papert […]

August 24, 2012

“The word educology reminds us that we need a theory of education. One might say theories already exist. There is educational psychology; there is a theory of instruction; there are courses on the theory of how to administrate schools. But these are not theories of education as a whole. They are theories of small aspects […]

May 15, 2012

“Building and playing with castles of sand, families of dolls, houses of Lego, and collections of cards provide images of activities which are well rooted in contemporary cultures and which plausibly enter into learning processes that go beyond specific narrow skills. I do not believe that anyone fully understands what gives these activities their quality […]

May 1, 2012

“The computer can be a partner in a great diversity of relationships. The computer is an expressive medium that different people can make their own in their own way. But people who want to approach the computer in a “non-canonical” style are rarely given the opportunity to do so. They are discouraged by the dominant […]

April 4, 2012

“I find an interesting toe-hold for the problem in which I called the playful facet–the element of tease inherent in the idea that it would be particularly oxymoronic to convey the idea of constructionism through a definition since, after all, constructionism boils down to demanding that everything be understood by being constructed. The joke is […]

April 3, 2012

“My goal in life which has been my major activity over the last 10 years, has been to find ways children can use this technology as a constructive medium to do things that no child could do before, to do things at a level of complexity that was not previously accessible to children.” Papert, S. […]

March 23, 2012

On many occasions over several years, Dr. Papert and I would discuss the need to build bridges to the wider (non-computer-using) community of progressive educators. We discussed the idea of hosting a grand summit at which the educators we admire outside of the “edtech” world could spend sufficient time experiencing how the computer could enhance, […]

March 8, 2012

“But insofar as it can be seen as an aspect of education, it is about something far more specific than constructivism in the usual sense of the word. The principle of getting things done, of making things — and of making them work – is important enough, and different enough from any prevalent ideas about […]

January 17, 2012

“One of my central mathetic tenets is that the construction that takes place “in the head” often happens especially felicitously when it is supported by construction of a more public son “in the world” – a sand castle or a cake, a LEGO house or a corporation, a computer program, a poem, or a theory […]