“We need chutzpah to face down those people who say “ Hey who are we to say technology should dictate what children learn, that technology should dictate the curriculum. No! Technology should be the tool for implementing the curriculum. It’s other people who dictate it. Who do you think you are to say what children […]
“Indeed, I would argue that anything that could be implemented in a school context without extensive use of digital technologies could not be fully true to the progressive ideal that children should be able to acquire knowledge by using it in activities in which they have a personal interest.” Papert, S. (1998) “Whose Finger is
“Information technology is the wrong name, and leads to its misuse. The fact that you can get a lot of information out of the Net is NOT merely what it’s about.” Moore, A. (1998) Seymour Papert quoted in archived article, Targets Hit, Targets Missed — Seymour Papert, chronicling his speech at the October 1998 Camden
“But to “see” real connections we also need a spirit of playful, exploratory inquiry and skill in the unnamed art of making connections. And most of all, we need to have a taste for making connections, to retain the joy in connecting that is innate in all of us – though so often attenuated in
“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.
“This is not the first Conference where I’ve come in and the first four people I spoke to complain how boring things are in the exhibit hall. I haven’t been there myself, but I’ve been to others. And they’re not boring in the sense that one goes in there and one sees a lot of
“Isn’t it time for us to grow up? And as we grow up, we should stop seeing ourselves as specialists of computers in education, because that casts us in the role of a kind of service profession. Accepting the role allows that other people are the ones to decide the big goals of education, what
“Logo is much like a natural language such as English. Baby talk allows the child an easy way to grab onto and use pieces of the language. But nowhere in the world is a language restricted to baby talk. The child continues to be immersed in the full richness of language as used by philosophers
“So there’s not much more you can do to improve things. Where you can make a big step forward and I’m seeing this as my mission to try to be with people and get a handle on people ready to make that jump and say “We’re not trying to improve that thing, we’re trying to
“What is our fight really about? My reference to the Soviet Union comes from recognizing events there, not only as the most significant process of radical change in the world today, but also as one whose central issues are closely related to those that will dominate any deep change in education. What has happened in