The Conservation of Piaget: The Computer as Grist to the Constructivist Mill
The Conservation of Piaget: The Computer as Grist to the Constructivist Mill is an overlooked academic paper written by Seymour Papert in 1988. It represents one of Dr. Papert’s few published works of psychology and clarifies some misconceptions of Piaget while introducing perspectives from women’s studies. Papert, S. (1988). The Conservation of Piaget: The Computer as […]
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 […]
April 23, 2012
“Jean Piaget’s very strong idea that all learning takes place by discovery is emasculated by its translation into the common practice known in schools as ‘discovery learning.’” Papert, S. (2000). What’s the big idea? Steps toward a pedagogy of Idea Power. IBM Systems Journal, vol. 39, no. 3-4. Tweet This Post
March 1, 2012
“This neat picture of successive stages has aroused such strong positive and negative reactions that the ensuing debates have obscured Piaget’s really important contribution: His description of different ways of knowing is far more important than quibbling about whether they neatly follow one another chronologically. And what is especially important is the description of the […]
February 28, 2012
“Geraldine Doogue: What I’m curious about then is out of this fascinating time working with Jean Piaget – who developed that whole notion of the stages of development for children – how would digital technology fit in to what you learned then? Because you’re a great advocate for digital technology being used to help children […]
January 16, 2012
“I left Geneva enormously inspired by Piaget’s image of the child, particularly by his idea that children learn so much without being taught. But I was also enormously frustrated by how little he could tell us about how to create conditions for more knowledge to be acquired by children through this marvelous process of “Piagetian […]
November 21, 2011
“Some of my colleagues are disappointed that School manages to so dilute the ideas or so circumscribe their impact that they can be “integrated” into an essentially unchanged system. I have learned to see things differently through my Piaget-trained eyes. At the core of Piaget’s theory of development is the process he calls assimilation: when […]
October 6, 2011
“After World War I Piaget moved to Zurich to attend Carl Jung’s lectures on experimental psychology, and then to Paris to study logic and abnormal psychology. Working with Théodore Simon in Alfred Binet’s child psychology lab, he noticed that Parisian children of the same age made similar errors on true-false intelligence tests. Fascinated by their […]
October 5, 2011
“This praise for the concrete is not to be confused with a strategy of using it as a stepping-stone to the abstract. That would leave the abstract ensconced as the ultimate form of knowing. I want to say something more controversial and more subtle in helping to demote abstract thinking from being seen as “the […]
June 14, 2011
“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 […]
