“In 1971 Channel 5, a local Boston TV station, produced a program on children in new learning situations and included a segment on Logo. Here is that segment. My one regret is that Seymour was not talking with a child during the filming. By the way I am indebted to youTube and one of its […]
“I think that it is shameful that the education world has allowed the computer industry to impose its idea of what a computer should be and how it should be used.” Papert, Seymour. (1997) From Relearning Education in the Age of Technology – an interview by Steven Koenig. U.S. Society and Values – U.S.I.A. Electronic
“Ten years before T.H.E. Journal was launched [1972], Logo was designed as a programming language that could be accessible to children. The spirit of the enterprise was like the way the Wright brothers approached aviation: I thought of giving children the power to program computers as a tiny first step in a complex process whose
“I believe in “Kid Power.” Our education systems underestimate kids. It INFANTALIZES them by assuming they are incompetent. An eight-year old is capable of doing 90% of tech support and a 12 year old 100%. And this is not exploiting the children: it is giving them a powerful learning experience.” Papert, Seymour. (2006) Seymour Papert
“I’m going to pick on one little corner of school, namely mathematics. I am a mathematician, so it is easy for me to talk about math, but what I have said applies to everything. Now in mathematics the dominating feature is the content. I recently did a little research on what discussion there is in
“Q: But there are statistics to show that in most cases technology in schools doesn’t work. A: The statisticians ask a silly question and get a silly answer. Of course “technology doesn’t work.” Technology doesn’t do anything. People do. Statistics that lump together technology implementations across the board — averaging the good with the bad
September 22, 2012 Read More »
“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
“Seymour Papert: I’m introducing a word for that, when I was at school they made us learn Latin, why? Not because we were going to speak Latin but because by learning Latin you would learn to think in a rigorous way. We’d laugh at that. I’d think we’d laugh much too soon. Because the justification
“Another way in which computers can be either integrated into or isolated from the learning process has to do less with the computer as an instrument than with computing as a set of ideas. The issue appears very clearly when one contrasts what has come to be called “computer literacy” with the sense of the
“Despite many examples of such excellent work, the isolation of the computer presence must be seen as a kind of immune response of school to a foreign body; whether or not the participants were aware that this is what they were doing, it is clear that the logic of the process was to bring the