The Weekly Digest for The Daily Papert (March 14-17, 2011) March 14, 2011 “If you need to know whether drug X reduces blood-pressure, you may fairly safely draw a negative conclusion from a “treatment model” experiment in which hospitalized patients were given X and no change in blood-pressure was observed. On the other hand, you […]
March 18, 2011 – Weekly Digest Read More »
“The girl who said to her teacher “I want to do that” and the first grader who said to the third grader “show me how to do that” are just two out of hundreds of documented examples of children refusing the “infantalization” inherent in most contemporary schooling. These children refused to do what children are
“I am talking about a revolution in ideas that is no more reducible to technologies than physics and molecular biology are reducible to the technological tools used in the laboratories or poetry to the printing press. In my vision, technology has two roles. One is heuristic: The computer presence has catalyzed the emergence of ideas.
“For the reformists, the computer will not abolish schools but will serve them. The computer is seen as an engine that can be harnessed to existing structures in order to solve, in local and incremental measures, the problems that face schools as they exist today. The reformist is no more inclined than the revolutionary to
“If you need to know whether drug X reduces blood-pressure, you may fairly safely draw a negative conclusion from a “treatment model” experiment in which hospitalized patients were given X and no change in blood-pressure was observed. On the other hand, you would not deduce that drug Y does not increase fertility from the simple
March 7, 2011 “School is a place where students learn largely by working on projects that come from their own interests — their own visions of a place where they want to be, a thing they want to make or a subject they want to explore. The contribution of technology is that it makes possible
March 11, 2011 – Weekly Digest Read More »
“Many children who have trouble understanding mathematics also have a hopelessly deficient model of what mathematical understanding is like. Particularly bad are models which expect understanding to come in a flash, all at once, ready made. This binary model is expressed by the fact that the child will admit the existence of only two states
“But there is a world of difference between what computers can do and what society will choose to do with them”. Papert, S. (1981) Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas. NY: Basic Books. Page 5. Quote contributed by Dr. Eleonora Badilla Saxe of the University of Costa Rica.
“For many children traditional school is a very dangerous place because you can be humiliated, embarrassed – scared of being found out that you don’t know how to do something. Whereas with the Turtle, you can play with it by yourself. It’s okay that you don’t understand it because you found out that you didn’t
Note: This is a future vision for education, not a report on the present… “School is a place where students learn largely by working on projects that come from their own interests — their own visions of a place where they want to be, a thing they want to make or a subject they want