Seymour Papert
Well, I think people who talk about digital thinking mean many different things. Yeah. If sometimes for example, my friend Nicholas Negroponte, when he talks about digital thinking, he rarely means what you think by think big. Think bold, think of a world where everything’s changing. It’s not a special thinking about.
Digits all about computers. It’s a mind that’s open to change and to dynamic global ways of thinking. And of course there were people always who thought like that. Thailand is a, in the 19th century, Thailand made a big transition in its way of thinking education. It’s relation to the, to, to the western world.
And the I think that Khun Paron Israsena Na Ayudhya, he didn’t have any digital computers, but in Nicholas’s sense, he was a digital thinker. But then of course, sometimes when people say digital thinking, they mean that you’re thinking in a very precise, literal minded analytic kind of way. Not imaginatively and not in a fluid way.
Now, about that kind of thinking. Obviously if that’s all you know how to do, this would be a bad thing, and if children only know how to think in this precise, analytic way that would be a bad thing. But I believe that children should have. The skill to think in different ways. And we should be able to think very imaginatively and in big intuitions, we should also be able to think very precisely and formally and accurately. And we should be able to switch between these and mix and match them. So in this sense of digital thinking, it’s a bad thing if that’s all you know how to do.
It’s a good thing if it’s something extra. That you know how to do in addition to the other kind.