Bridging the Digital Generation Gap

Bridging the Digital Generation Gap – A 1996 talk by Seymour Papert at the San Francisco Exploratorium

Description: On October 23rd, 1996, Seymour Papart presented a lecture at the Exploratorium’s McBean Theater entitled, “Bridging the Digital Generation Gap.” Introduction by Exploratorium Director Goery Delacote.

Duration: TRT 01:25:25

Master: Hi8 videotape

Place: Exploratorium, Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA.

Notes: Dr. Seymour Papert is one of the world’s leading experts in helping children learn to work with computers and in how computers fundamentally revolutionize learning and education. He is the LEGO Chair for Learning Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is also cofounder of the Artificial Intelligence and Media Laboratories. Papert invented the Logo computer ,language, the first effort to give children control over the new technology. His lecture will offer advice for every parent, from the technologically perplexed to the ultra sophisticated computer user, on how best to use computers to enrich family life and learning, addressing such issues as· constructive uses of video games, the poor quality of children’s ‘ software and how it often encourages rote, learning, the Internet’s importance in classroom.

© Exploratorium, www,exploratorium.edu

Seymour Papert:	A perfect starting point is this webcast of this discussion, and even without knowing that, I meant to start off by giving an example of how the existence of the internet and the web could contribute to the very essential task, as I see it, of raising the level of discussion about computers, children, and learning.
	I do think, and I’m going to try and touch on this from a number of different angles, that in our society, the discussion of these issues is deplorably limited. I do hope that the fact that all over the world, people can listen into this little debate and can find a way to put on record how silly they think some of the things I’m saying, or do it better, that this is an important change in the way that public debate on these subjects can take place. Maybe on other subjects too, but our focus is on this one.
	As my own contribution to that, in the same sort of spirit, is this webpage, which is associated with the book. It’s called ConnectedFamily.com. You see it up there, www.connectedfamily.com. The intention of this website is to provide a forum for people, particularly parents, but also kids and also teachers and anyone else interested in entering into a discussion of the ideas that we have.
	Let me give you some little examples of what we’ve got on the website and how things change. For example, there was a review, this flower, for reasons that I’ll tell you in a moment, has been taken as a emblem of the website. Each petal of the flower, no they’re not petals … Each one of those ray flowers, but in this sort of recognized difference, represents a topic inside the web, inside of the page. For example, if we click on reviews, the flower remains there so we can go back, but we will now get an alternative reader review or review the book.
	Reader review, what we have here, there are posted reviews. That New York Times up there is an example of the first review that appeared in the press of the book. It’s placed on the site in full, and also placed on the site is a number of comments that people made in response to this review, so that when you read the review, you don’t have to just read the review and say, “I’m going to read this book all night.” You can read the review and say, “That sounds stupid,” or, “That sounds wonderful,” or whatever you think, and contribute to the discussion.
	Here’s an example of somebody who had something to say after reading the review about his own kid using computers. We don’t have time to read it all. That comes up immediately. Immediately, there’s a live discussion. There’s a mechanism there so that you can just online, add your own contribution to the discussion. Also, there’s sound and … Let’s see, where do we have … Some of this book tour. This is supposed to be a book tour. I do want you to buy the book and read it and tell your friends to. I welcome more as an opportunity to be able to talk to a bunch of interested people because again, as I said before and I’m going to amplify in a moment more, substantively, I think there’s a deplorable lack of critical attention being paid to these discussions.
	Our previous events, we can show their videos clips. Let’s take one, live phone calls, pick something and just let’s, whatever you know that comes in. Those are previous books of mine. This is live across the web, I take it, right now.
	[inaudible 00:04:53]
	Okay, that’s enough. The sound is terrible, but actually if you are sitting with your own computer, it would not be terrific, but it would be better than it is there.
	I’m just trying to emphasize that we can try and do try to draw people into a discussion about computers and issues surrounding them.
	Then the question is, what are we going to talk about? It’s all very well having mechanisms, there’s too much of that in the world today, or providing frameworks for talk and not talking, or talking under conditions like talk shows where there’s a lot of words but there’s no engagement with deep ideas. I think the big question is what are the deep ideas in this area, what are the things that we ought to be talking about that are not being discussed in the depth that I think they deserve.
	My purpose in the rest of the time will be to try to focus on a number of issues. You’ll see the certain amount of negativity in it, in all the discussion about presidential debates and campaigning and whatnot. I’m not sure whether negative campaigning is a good thing or not a good thing in general, but right now, I do think in this area, we have to do some.
	I’m going to start by talking about three hypothetical characters that structure a lot of the discussion in my new book, The Connected Family. The three characters, you know them, they’re the cybertopians. The cybertopian says everything’s going to be wonderful and marvelous because we’ve got computers. Try and pin them down about how, it’s not all clear. You read Bill Gates’ book and you hear about how the room will switch on the light when you come in and play the music you like. Maybe that’s good and I’m enough of a gadgeteer to think I’d like to have those things, but this isn’t transforming life. Those are cybertopians.
	More relevant maybe are the cyber critics. The cyber critic is a more interesting creature. Cyber critic has been making a lot of noise recently. For example, Clifford Stoll, what’s it called, Silicon Snake World, the title says it all. Clifford Stoll had a whole page almost of oped opinion in the New York Times, that seems to be mobilized to give authenticity, some sort of recognition to the cyber critics. There have been a number of books.
	Typically, the cyber critic does two things. One is, goes into schools or homes to see what’s being done with computers and says, “It’s not much.” Concludes that computers can’t contribute much to learning. Now, it’s a very weird kind of argument. I’d like to put it in perspective in a couple of different ways. One, fairly superficial but I think it’s important to hold that in mind.
	Imagine that you are sitting watching the first flight of the Wright Brother’s flying machine, and you’ve heard that aviation is going to transform transportation, it’s going to transform life, industry, commerce, the whole world. You see this little plane hop, what was it, 22 feet. Not much, is it? You can judge it. You had to think in terms of, you had to see it imaginatively in terms of its perspective, what would it imply rather than what was it doing.
	Computers and learning are not quite at that point. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe they’re about the 1930s when the DC3 was made and the first airliner that was made with some integrity and technological imagination, a really good little plane. Hardly yet transformative, yet from the DC3 to the 747, imagination was the difference. I think we are somewhere around DC3 times. It’s not transforming education or learning, but it’s gone far enough for us to see the general lines of how it might and how it will.
	Our serious discussion can’t be, has it already transformed education? Is what is being done with it now transforming learning? Rather, in what is being done now, can you see the mainlines, the big ideas of how it might eventually transform, or might not. The discussion has to be pitched in terms of where it’s going. That discussion is not happening, not on any serious, serious scale.
	The lack of discussion is even more clearly shown through the third kind of character, who is the cyber ostrich. The cyber ostrich is the one with the head in the sand, maybe not saying it’s terribly good or terribly bad, but usually saying it’s a good thing. The typical cyber ostrich is, here are two kinds. The school administrator who says, “We’re going to modernize our school, let’s have a room full of computers.” It’s cyber ostrich because yeah, computers in a lab, in a school, that’s a good thing, but to think that that’s typical of the contributions a computer’s going to make to schooling, is really hiding your head in the sand.
	Similarly, the parent who buys a piece of software which is advertised as, this will teach your kid the elements of math and prepare the kid for school. It’s cyber ostrich because this computer, in principle, has much deeper implications for children than preparing them a little for school. As a matter, I don’t think it actually does prepare them for school, but that’s a different debate.
	What does it do? What it does do, I’d like to illustrate by telling a little story and asking you to. A little story, this is a learning story. One of the themes of my last two books is that the concept is a concept of a learning story, that our knowledge about learning is not always something that can be best captured by a statement of a general principle. There are general principles, but a lot of human knowledge, for example our knowledge about, let’s say, love and relationship. This is best expressed in writers and novelists who have written about love stories. We develop our sensitivity in these areas by reading love stories and by talking to one another about our own relationships and those of our friends,
	Similarly, some of the best moral teachings, the Bible is undoubtedly one of the best examples, but other religions have used it as well. There are many parables that capture a moral principle, and through these parables, the writers of, especially the New Testament, have captured important moral issues and sensitized them to us.
	I think similarly with learning, and I try to do this. I think that thinking in terms of learning stories and telling one another learning stories and writing and reading them, is a way of deepening and making more intimate the discussion of learning as an important part of our lives, of our personal intimate lives, all of us. That’s going to come tying up, why I called this book The Connected Family, it’s to do with the life of the family. Learning is an essential part of the life of the family.
	Here’s one of my learning stories. Actually, where can we get that? We’ve got that here, actually. One of the stories in the book is, let’s say, Ian’s truck. Sam, I think we lost your picture. There’s one of my other grandsons, Sam’s cousin Ian. This is a story about Ian. It was an important event for me.
	When Ian was three, he went over to a shelf and he took a video tape and put it in the VCR and spent the next 30 minutes engaged in a deep immersion in construction machines. I see from the smiles that a lot of you know that tape, it’s a wonderful tape. All kids are interested in these construction machines. When I was three, I was also interested in construction machines, but there was no way in which I could do anything remotely like what Ian did at that time. What many kids, all kids today, you take it for granted that a kid can by his or her own volition, decide, “I want to spend the next 30 minutes immersed in construction machines, or snakes, or earthquakes,” or whatever. I see in that shift, a radical change in the relationship of children to knowledge.
	The baby, in what I’m going to present a stage one of a three stave evolution of relationship to knowledge, the baby from day one begins to explore the world. A world of things and people and words, feelings. This world is explored very thoroughly by that baby that grabs everything, puts it in its mouth, breaks it, throws it, messes it. It’s a very limited world that’s explored so thoroughly.
	Little by little, the baby becomes aware of things in a further world that can’t be reached. Construction machines, elephants. For example, in a story that I used in my previous booked, The Children’s Machine, about a visitor at preschool. A little child came running up to me after I was introduced by the teacher as having been born in Africa, which I was, this little girl, Jenny, said, “Do you know how giraffe’s sleep?” I didn’t know how giraffe’s sleep.
	I think the interesting thing was that Jenny, this example, I got into conversation with her and this is what I learned, that she asked the question, why. She had recently got a puppy, and she saw that the puppy slept like this, as she put it, cuddling its head. She noticed, she also cuddled her head when she slept. She saw this giraffe with a long neck, and she wondered, poor giraffe, how can it cuddle its head? How does it sleep? What can a kid who sees, here’s a picture of a giraffe, what can this kid do to find out?
	By chance, you might have a tape on a giraffe, but changes are no. We’re one step behind the Ian incident. We’re just beginning to be at a point where that child could, in principle, get into the computer and get at a much bigger range of knowledge.
	I’m going to show you an example of an attempt to do that. This is stuff that’s not yet developed, it’s just experimental and it’s a website that’s not yet fully opened. You have to use some methods, DC3, and you’ve got to be thinking 747. All the same, look at the direction that it’s pointing.
	This is Mama Media, which is a website that will be launched soon. You can get into it and play around with it while it’s in construction. Its goal is to provide a better place for kids to romp around and get information. It wants to give a better way of looking for information than using Yahoo, for example. If you put giraffe into Yahoo, you get a vast list of references, most of which are of no interest to a child. Here, the sandwich analogy is meant to provide different topics. We’ll go to the nature sandwich, and we’ll pick out animals. Among animals, we’re going to pick out large mammals.
	I want you to imagine that one step further and it’s not with text. Text should be there too, because want kids to be … There’s animation and there’s icons and there’s ways of getting at the information without reading much. Although by the way, Ian couldn’t read when he was three, so they say, although he could identify which tape he wanted by looking at it’s title. He could recognize in a general way the shape of the word, and that’s a better way to get into … He’s using it for a purpose.
	Now if we get down to giraffe’s here, we didn’t find out how they sleep, and this is pointing to places on the web where there is stuff about giraffes. What we learned about giraffes here is this amazing fact. Where’s the amazing fact? All right, giraffes sleep for five minutes at a time. That’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s not an answer to the question, but it gets you thinking. It might even tell you how giraffes sleep because if you sleep five minutes at a time, you’re not going to lie down. Giraffes sleep standing up. They can lie down. Like horses, who can sleep standing.
	Why? Once you start asking why, you tease the answer. These are defenseless animals. Their only defense against them is the quick getaway. If you want to get away fast, you better not be lying down under a lot of covers, which you’d have to shake off in order to get out of bed and get dressed. Much better to be there poised for the getaway. That’s how these kinds of animals sleep.
	A connection is made between thinking about the life of the giraffe, about its sleeping, about ecologies, about all sorts of stuff. There are big connections. This then, I say, this kind of search is getting to be more like the way the baby explores the immediate world. What this is providing for that child is an extension of the immediate world that can be explored.
	Of course, there always were extensions, but harder to get at. Going back to Jenny and what would happen to her, she is shifting from that stage one exploratory, passionately directed personal kind of learning, she is shifting into a different kind of learning. More dependent on adults, more verbal, and ultimately it’s going to culminate in school, where you’re going to give up learning in that sense of personal exploration, and give yourself over to being taught. That’s a huge difference, learning and being taught. I’ll come back to that. There’s a big change anyway.
	At school, it is true, and this is important. You learn, you acquire the tools that are going to get you out of that restriction. At school, you learn to read. Then you learn to do research, you learn to use a library. If you happen to be in that small minority of whom everybody here is a member, and so unfortunately audiences like this don’t really fully appreciate the problem because you all survived that experience, that in fact, snuffs out the natural curiosity and learning desire of the majority of children.
	Those who survive it become adults who go back to stage one kind of learning. As adults, whether you’re scientists, business people, administrators, politicians, journalists, museum directors, whatever we are, we learn what we need to know, when we need to know it because it’s related to our interests. We don’t learn it because it is inscribed in somebody’s curriculum that on the seven of May of eighth year, you are to learn how to add fractions, or whatever. It’s a radical difference in approach.
	We can escape from that into stage three if we’re lucky. Go back to the fundamental contribution of the media, technology is to bypass stage two. That is, we can imagine a world in which there’s a smooth transition, in fact no transition, just an expansion of the stage one mode of learning into the stage three. Without having to cross that precarious bridge, from which most people fall into the precipice below, without exposing our children to that danger, we can move straight into, we can continuously expand our ways.
	That is the vision that I want to present to you, tentatively, anyway, of a much deeper transformation of childhood and learning and the concept of school and everything else that is reflected in a little bit of improvement in med school, getting your kid ready to get into the right school by giving them some ridiculous …
	I want to say that just by the way, though it’s not my main theme here, that it’s possible, although I can’t prove this, but I find it very plausible that by giving children the software that’s being pawned off as educational software, we’re actually doing harm as well as not doing much good, because we’re looking at it in such a narrow way, you’re not doing much good. I think that there are, I’d like to recognize too styles of learning. There’s a gross over simplification, of course there are many styles of learning, and nothing’s dichotomized.
	Conceptually, one can think of two mainstream ideas. One is that stage one and stage three kind of learning, and that’s learning by doing, experiencing. All philosophers have learned. John Dewey, Jean Pierre Shea, Montessori, Vygotsky, despite all their differences, everybody who has looked seriously at learning from a fundamental point of view has come to the conclusion that it would be better to have a more experiential way of learning, and that there’s something fundamentally wrong with school’s way.
	However, school’s way, I say, was necessary because we did not have the technological foundation to do the other way, for a lot of areas of knowledge. Let me amplify that, I’ll just use another learning story. Parable. The parable is this. There are a lot of people, not a lot of people, it’s a universally accepted idea in the education world, and in our culture, that some people are mathematically minded and can learn mathematics, and other people are not mathematically minded and either can’t learn mathematics because they’re just dumb, or a more modern version that people like Howard Gardner have been propagating, that they’re multiple intent. It’s not because they’re dumb, it’s because they don’t have that kind of intelligence, they have a different kind of intelligence.
	Still, the assumption is that a lot of people just can’t make it in what we call mathematics and they’re not mathematically minded. I’d like to consider the following thought experiment. Why do we think that some kids are not mathematically. It’s obvious. Go and look at the kids, look at the math class, look at kids graduating from school, and most of them know very little mathematics. You see.
	Let’s look at the French class in American schools. Let’s see what happens there. We’ll see the same thing though. Most kids don’t learn much French in the French class. Obviously, we should conclude they’re not Frenchly minded. They don’t have French aptitude. Surely, nobody would think that. You laugh at it. Why? Because you know that if those kids had grown up in France, they would speak French perfectly well.
	It’s not the kid, it’s the school. It’s the learning conditions that causes those kids not to be mathematically minded. I’m sorry, not to be Frenchly. Why don’t we believe the same thing about mathematics? I don’t say this proves that there could be such a place as math land, where what stands to learning math like France stands to learning French, but at least it opens that question as a valid area of discussion. A valid area of discussion that is totally ignored by our cyber ostriches who dominate the education establishment, who take as self evident these assumptions like there’s such a thing as mathematical aptitude.
	I’m going to give an example of what it might be like to have math land. I’m going to give you two examples. One, I don’t add implement. Two, I’ve done experiments in implementing. The first is, the way I’d really like to solve the mathematics education problem, I’d like to get about 10 or 20,000,000 people who love mathematics and love kids, and have got nothing else to do except we’ll scatter them around the world, and they’ll talk to all the kids and play with them, and after a while, all the kids will grow up loving mathematics.
	I’m sure that would work, and it’s a wonderful way, but I don’t know how to find the 10 or 20 or 30,000,000 people it would need. We’ll look for something else. For something else is, what the computer can create. In ways that the computer is a mathematical speaking being, if you learn to treat it as such. You can program this thing, talk to it in its native language, develop mathematical concepts that way. We’ve done some experiments of that sort.
	One of them, which I think focuses on an issue that is close to the concerns of a lot of parents, starts with the question, “What about these video games?” Everybody sees kids passionately playing these games, and everybody says, “If only we could mobilize that energy to something important.” So they say, “We want the kids to learn multiplication tables, they want to play games, so let’s disguise multiplication tables as games.” Kids aren’t duped. They already see through that. It just adds to the sense of double talk in the education world. Besides, it’s dishonest.
	It seems to me that when I open the magazines and I read the ads, “This software is such fun, your kid won’t know that she’s learning.” I really want to throw up, because the message is that learning is not fun. The message is learning is some horrible experience, bitter tasting, we’d better sugar coat the pill. No, no, no. If learning feels like that, it’s because school made it like that. Let’s change the way learning happens. Let’s not sugar coat the pill, let’s not lie to kids. I think truth in learning as as important as truth in anything else.
	Then, to add horror to horrors, I find the same parents who buy this deceptive software in order to deceive their kids, then get all upset because if the kids get into the internet, they might be deceived by other people and fall into dangerous bad company. It’s just all shocking and wrong, and I think that one of the themes of this book, the chapter they call values, and I’m trying to inject into the discussion of computers and education, something that’s universally ignored in the literature of technology and learning, and that is values. What does it mean? What’s important? What about truth, what about honesty, what about respect?
	These are just as important as the so called cognitive and informational aspects of learning. Yet, go and read in the journals, read the journals, spend a day in the library and see if you can find one word, read it in these learner journals about values, about any of these issues, you won’t. There’s something fundamentally wrong there. We need to change the basis of discussion. I’m not saying, notice, I believe what I believe about the way it should be done, but I’d like to repeat that my main message is not that I’m right about these issues, my main message is talk about these issues. Bring them out into the open, let’s have debate about them. Let’s not just continue doing things because we’ve always doe them.
	Okay, so what about these video games. There’s another way. The one way is, which I don’t like, is let’s embed, let’s turn the game into an instructional device. The game will instruct the kid … I don’t like a name for that, people don’t like isms, but I don’t want you to like this one. I’ll call it instructionism. Instructionism is the doctrine, not that instruction isn’t sometimes, of course instruction is sometimes necessary, but instructionism, that’s what education’s about, it’s about instruction. If something’s wrong with the education, do better instruction and it will improve.
	I think, wrong. Less instruction may be better, but less instruction and instruction in more certain very specific things that I’m going to bring out under the heading of the alternative to instructionism, which is constructionism. By constructionism, I mean an idea that’s illustrated by, say, “Can’t we get the kids to make their own video games?”
	Now, you say, how could they do that? You’d have to program the computer, they’d have to know all sorts of stuff about project management, about all sorts. You can do it. A series of my graduate students at MIT, including [Adita Rel 00:34:38], who’s responsible for creating Mama Media, and Yasmin [Kefai 00:34:44] and some other’s I’ll mention a moment, have developed a paradigm in which kids will, and this is developed working with inner city nine, 10, 11 year old kids, in inner city schools-Bad schools, by the way. Not good schools at all. In which the kids there, the school’s prepared to let the kids spend an hour a day, each with an own computer, working on a project that lasts for the whole year.
	There’s a big difference between a project that lasts for a whole year and what happens when you spend three minutes on a math problem and get on to the next one, three minutes and the next. Lasts throughout a year, you start waking up in the morning with an idea. You go to sleep thinking about it. It creeps into a conversation. You get connected with it. You get a different relationship with it, and you get a better quality of thinking and a better quality of retention. It becomes part of you. It’s a whole different kind of experience, and it’s the experience that everyone outside of school … Is the only kind that counts.
	We all know that that’s the way you’d really do things and get things done. It’s only in school, no, the United States Senate is a bit like that, where everybody’s on 20 committees and go on, go and do a vote and come running back. Generally, in the real world, we don’t work like that. These kids can make video games. They can learn to program the computer as they make the video game. They can run into a lot of other sources, they need a lot of other knowledge.
	For example, you want to make one of these Nintendo like games, a character runs along and then something happens, the character’s got to jump. It’s an interesting question, what’s a jump? Is a jump like that or a jump like that? You suddenly find yourself engaged with an extremely powerful idea, that kind of what a mathematician call a trajectory. That’s not a visible curve, but there’s a curve there, there’s a shape, it has geometric properties. The one you might want is actually called a parabola. You might need to know a lot about this to make a good jump.
	You’re engaging with mathematical knowledge, which you need at the time you need it and not at the time that it’s included in the curriculum. Where’d you get it? Where the way you can’t get it is to hope that some teacher can answer every question of the sort that’s raised by 30 kids out there. Hopeless. It’s too demanding on the teacher. We’ve got to find other ways.
	I’ll give you two examples of other ways. One is, we’ve seen this into this web, search for information, but also search for people. My student Michelle Evard has created in one of the schools where this kind of project is being done, a network, an internal local area network in which is set up so that a kid who’s got a problem, they can throw the problem into the network. There are a lot of other kids, including some who did a similar project last year or two years ago, or some who haven’t done such a project but would like to, and some who are doing it but are at the other end of this classroom, you can throw this and then some kid picks it up and gives you advice.
	We’re drawing on the collective knowledge of all those kids. There she is. There’s an example of how we break away from the role of the teacher as the disseminator of knowledge, of handing out bit by bit by bit by bit, from which follows the whole concept of, if a teacher’s got to hand it out, you’d better systematize it and organize it, and then you’d better have a curriculum that puts it in order, and you’d better segregate the kids into ages. Oh gosh, I forgot, I really meant to say, all of you who are between 20 and 25 sit there and those between 25 and 30 sit here. You’d laugh at me, you wouldn’t do it.
	It’s only in school where they think that there’s an advantage in segregating kids from the others who know more and could give them knowledge, and from those who know less and could challenge them to think about problems, but everybody learns by teaching. In any natural situation, you would throw people of different levels of competence and sophistication together so that they were together as an act of community. It’s said, of course, it’s bad for socialization.
	Just think of what kind of socialization school does. You’re age seven and you spend that year learning how to deal with seven year olds. In typical school fashion, you move on next year to learning how to deal with eight year olds, and as far as school’s concerned, you’ll never see a seven year old again in your life. Then when you get on the next year to nine. This isn’t socialization, it’s typical school stuff where you learn knowledge as to pass the exam and get onto the next thing and learn that to pass the exam and get onto the next thing.
	It’s not necessary. Good learning happens and good socialization always happened in extended families where people between age zero and age 90 all interacted with one another, and no terrible consequences. They didn’t become antisocial, they were much better socialized than people are today when we don’t have this mixture.
	The arguments are absurd. This, bouncing back to my original point, that just think about it, just get into discussion with people and talk to them about it. Just listen with a critical eye to the equality of the arguments. Not to whether you agree or disagree, just quality. What kind of arguments do they give you.
	We see these kids make these video games, and the course of doing some highly interesting project that they live with, that they love, that they become enthusiastic about, that they can mold into their own form. They meet and exercise all sorts of ideas and pieces of knowledge.
	That’s constructionism. What does this mean in real practice? How do we get kids to do this? I think practically speaking, if parents come to me and say, “What should I do with my kids? What software should I give my kids?” My answer is, that’s the wrong question. As soon as you ask it like that, you are separating the kids from yourself. You’re doing what school does with the grades. A better question would be, what kind of software would help us, would allow me and the kids to do something together? The kind of software that can do that is what I’d call constructionist software, software that allows you to do some exploration, carry out a project, make something.
	In my book, I use an example of a kid who’s grandmother went on a Caribbean holiday and came back having been interested in sea turtles, and the kid decides to make a multimedia show for the grandparent about sea turtles. That’s a wonderful thing. The parents start off and the kid does most of the work, but the parents show how to get started on this. It’s a project, the software that can do that, is a different sort of thing from software go teach the kid.
	There’s quite a lot of constructionist software. For making that sort of multimedia show, I prefer the latest developments in the logo tradition. Micro World’s is the latest version, but there are others. There’s Hyperstudio and there’s lots of software’s that allow you to build things. Then I see here is the creator of theatrics, and a piece of software that actually is in the CDROM that comes with my book called Hollywood, which enables kids to be a film producer, make a film. That’s building something.
	Notice that none of these things are teaching the kid anything. This assumption that the software should teach the kid or the computer should teach the kid is another example of this wrong formulation of the question. The pencil does not teach the kid anything, but the pencil makes a radical difference to how the kid learns. The computer doesn’t have to teach the kid, it can be the medium that allows deeper and better and more extensive learning.
	That’s a [inaudible 00:44:36]. Can we get up the … Gosh, all those things there. What I would like to get up is my make believe castle. I’m going to stop with a piece of software that is also on that CDROM that comes with this book, which I’m choosing. I’d like to just give a sense of what I think it is like. Again, this is DC3, it’s not 747. Okay. Get the castle, see.
	It’s like a lot of other software. Here, we can go up there, we can get characters. Let’s get the dragon, and drag him down there, and we can make him run by clicking on the green … Where did he go. Okay. Over there, we’ve got behaviors. Let’s get the turning thing. Oh, it’s not there on this. Get the banana peel, whatever. There are a lot of actions that aren’t on the …
	I wanted to give you a glimpse of … You’ve got raw materials. You’ve got characters and actions which you can out together very freely to make your own. Sometimes, they create problems of a logical sort, they create situation’s hard to get out of. Okay, let’s stop.
	I just wanted to touch on one other question, sorry. What I envision is, starting at age two or three or four with things like that, where the computers are building blocks, that you build like you build out of Lego or clay. You build interesting things. You move seamlessly from there into more verbal programming where you’ll type instructions. You move from there into very serious programming. You can make a video game. You will eventually become really fluent in using the computer, so that it becomes not something that you know about, but something that you use in the course of all your activities and all your learning and all your doing.
	I just wanted to mention one point at the last, one other example of bad thinking. This example of bad thinking is about the argument that we often hear, for example, if you’d read, and I’ve got this on my website too, the proceedings of a congressional hearing last October on instructional technology. At these hearings, the argument at a certain point got into this. People were granting that if every kid had a computer, it would do a great thing for learning, but they said, “It’s hopelessly too expensive, we can’t afford it.”
	I’m not, from the moment, we’re going to talk about one thing at a time. I’m assuming that you’ll accept that if every kid had a computer, that would be a good thing. We can discuss that separately. What I want to point to is how bad the argumentation is about the economic side of it. I do this argument. I say, if you compare the computer with a pencil, it’s incredible expensive. If you write down the cost of giving every child a computer, you’ll see a lot of zeros and may that scares you. If you’d had any inkling of real mathematical training, you’d have said, the important question is not the absolute numbers or the comparison with a pencil, the important question is what does this cost relative, what’s the marginal cost? What does this add to what we’re already spending on education?
	Giving every kid a computer would add 1%. In support of that, I do calculations like, even if you went and bought the computers that are now being retailed in lots of a million, I bet the manufacturers would give it to you for $500 a computer. $500, those computers would last at least five years. I know where schools where there are 1985 model Apple 2’s that are still being used. It’ll last 10 years, last a long time. Let’s be conservative and say five years.
	$100 a year. That’s a little more than a 1% of the cost of education. That economic argument is bad. A guy giving evidence who turned out to be the chairman of the president’s committee on technology and education, first of all berated me for misleading Congress into thinking that we could have computers as inexpensive and gave me the following arguments.
	First of all, it’s absurd to say $500 because in industry, they’re spending more like $2000 or $3000 per computer. It’s absurd to say five to 10 years life of the computer because in industry, they find that after one and a half years, they have to upgrade the computer. It’s absurd to count the cost of the computer because the cost of maintenance is more than the cost of buying the computer, the cost of software and so on.
	Let’s just go over those arguments quickly one by one. First of all, why do we have to upgrade the computer after one and a half years? Because industry does a stupid thing and has gotten to the stupid dads between the computer manufacturers and the software makers where they increase the power of the computer, then they make more powerful software that requires more powerful computers, and people are spinning their wheels and spending money. Maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe it’s better for the kids to have next year’s super Pentiums. To say that that’s the reason for not giving them any computer is like saying it’s better to go barefoot than to have a little Chevy because we can’t afford to give everybody a new Cadillac every year.
	It really is like that. It’s an absurd argument to say because industry is wasting its money on expensive computers, giving a kid less than that. Maintenance, I think, and we’ve seen this, I’ve worked with schools and kids and teachers from African countries where there are no computer maintained. There are no people who are charging $160 an hour to come and fix the computer, which is the bill I got last time I called one of these people.
	There aren’t any of those people. The computers are maintained by the kids and the teachers. They all learned how to maintain them. 95% of the things that those expensive repairmen do, a kid of nine or eight who’d had a year or two of experience with computers can easily do.
	The point is, if you assume that kids are kept in ignorance, so that they can’t repair the computers, then it’s impossible to put the computers into schools because the kids don’t know how to repair the computers, so you have to have expensive people. It’s a circular argument. If you allow that the kids will learn to maintain these computers and install them, and write software for them, it takes whole different complexion.
	That’s where I want to stop. I want to invite you to debate with me now, get on the web, look at our website. Come into it, add your point of view. Let’s turn this discussion, let’s get serious about talking about these things. Let’s not let the cyber ostriches get away with it so easily. Let’s not let people use obscene arguments that putting an internet terminal in every school is somewhere comparable to the JFK goal of putting a man on the moon. It’s about as comparable to that as climbing a tree is a step towards putting a man towards getting to the moon.
	Thank you very much, and I’d like to have questions.
Speaker 2:	The floor is open for discussion.
Seymour Papert:	Yes?
Speaker 3:	Fascinating discussion. One of the things that, a trap that seems as a parent doesn’t really want to go into the trap. There’s a fear that your child will not learn. You assume that what they’re being taught maybe is going to produce some learning. You’re torn between letting the child fail or letting the child self direct their own education. The idea that there is a certain thing that they’re supposed to know by the time they’re in fifth grade or sixth grade. How do we escape that idea that the child needs to be taught?
Seymour Papert:	I think in one of the themes of my Connected Family book is exactly that. I put it in this way, that parents are worried about computers and the kid. What they ought to be worried about is not about computers, but about learning. Parents have to take questions about learning more seriously. They have to inform themselves about learning. They have to learn to trust themselves and make their own judgement about whether learning is happening and about good learning and bad learning.
	To share learning with the kids. This is the way they solve that problem. There’s no way to solve … What you say, you’re talking about a problem that arises for a parent who is too afraid to formulate a personal judgement about what’s good and what’s bad, learning. I think that the family of the future absolutely depends, and there’s no alternative, no if and’s and buts, the family of the future depends on parents becoming more sophisticated, taking more seriously the nature of learning and thinking more about it.
	In fact, learning ought to be an important part of what we teach at school. It’s much more important than long division. Our society has to become as a society, more sophisticated in its thinking about learning. There’s no easy formula, you have to read books about, it you have to think about it.
Speaker 3:	You need to teach your child how to learn.
Seymour Papert:	No. Children are born learning. They’re born excellent learners. The baby learns to talk, learns to find their way around the house, learns to find their way around their parents-
Speaker 3:	But they don’t learn how to read by themselves, necessarily. Although there are associations of written text of what they want.
Seymour Papert:	Sam, do you mind if I use you as an example? There’s my grandsons. I think Sam got into learning to use the alphabetic language, and please correct me if this isn’t true, this is my impression. Sam was using a program called Kid Picks, and he was making a lot of drawings with Kid Picks. By the way, at a certain time, maybe you might ask him what. At a certain time, he decided that he really wanted to draw more with real drawing instruments, with crayon and paper. He did much more of that than of Kid Picks.
	That’s an interesting development. I’ve seen it very often. That’s a secondary point. He wanted to save his Kid Picks drawings. The way Kid Picks is done, the only way you can save them is by typing a name. To begin with, he have to ask an adult to come and type the name for him. This is boring, and the adults aren’t necessarily there when you want them. He learned to type names. I think that was the first time he really was using this thing called alphabetic language. He was using it for a purpose.
	I think the reason why kids don’t learn the alphabetic language is that it has no role in their lives. I write books and memos and papers and you all do things like that. Written language is an important thing for us. For the child’s life, spoken language is an important thing. Written language is some curiosity that doesn’t actually play a role except maybe getting praise from adults.
	I think those computer situations begin to give the alphabetic language, and I’m saying alphabetic language rather than writing so you don’t jump on me because they’re using a keyboard and not a pen. It can get a meaning. Maybe they want to send an email to grandparents. I think that the computer presence opens up many more channels for the user of the written language.
	The reason why kids don’t learn to read is not because they have to be taught in order to learn to read. In fact, I don’t think any kids are actually taught. Good readers are very seldom taught. Parents read with them, and they catch on and they start reading. There are well documented examples of children from illiterate families who learn to read. I think they learn, they’re not taught. They certainly can learn if you put them in a context where that learning is important to them.
	Yes?
Speaker 4:	I’m curious about your impression about learning to learn the alphabet through using a computer versus having your child on your lap reading [inaudible 00:59:08].
Seymour Papert:	I don’t think we have to make that choice. You don’t have to make-Are you saying what’s my opinion about the alternative?
Speaker 4:	Can you just compare them, or [inaudible 00:59:19].
Seymour Papert:	I think that the computer adds and extra component of doing. The kid on your lap, you’re reading to the kid, it’s relatively passive in relation to the writer. I don’t want to say it’s really passive, the kid’s really thinking about that story, relating to it and you, but the child isn’t actually using that written language. With the computer keyboard there, the child is using the written language. That’s a big extra component. Don’t have to make a difference then. You don’t have to make a choice.
Speaker 2:	Seymour, you’re receiving a message from above. A request from the internet, if you could repeat the questions.
Seymour Papert:	Oh, okay. Sure. I’ll repeat the questions. Yes?
Speaker 5:	I am a bit interested in how you see the child on the computer interacting. Do you mean when you say one computer per child, we have one computer in the school environment, and then he or she also will have one computer in the home environment. Ultimately, I guess everyone has to carry their own computer in their backpack. [inaudible 01:00:36]
Seymour Papert:	One of my example students, Danny Hillis who later founded a company called Thinking Machines and all sorts of wonderful things, was once asked at some meeting, this was way back in the 70s, whether he thought one day every house would have a computer, and he said, “Wrong question. One day, every doorknob will have a computer,” and people laughed at him.
	I noticed this morning that I used a magnetic card to open the door of my hotel room. Every doorknob in hotels has a computer. I think it’s just mean spirited to worry. Everybody’s got to have lots of computers. I think the day will come very soon when we can make a computer size of a book, not bigger, not heavier, in fact lighter, and with a screen that gives a quality as good as the printed page. From that point on, which I don’t think anybody will ever make books anymore, except for sentimental reasons like, it’s nice to have your favorite poetry in a leather bound book and you love the smell and the touch.
	For pragmatic books to convey information or even mystery stories or relaxation, all these things, why would you make this thing out of permanent print on page? There will be computers in every pocket. However, another way of answering the question is, I don’t think that it’s my job or anybody’s job to design the future. What I’m saying is that the arguments against that we can’t afford giving every kid a computer, are BS. Exactly how you do it where the computers are and what color they are is a kind of detail which will have to be worked out in many diverse experiments, I think.
Speaker 5:	I was going in another direction. Where you see the student interacting with it, is it a wristwatch, the student of tomorrow has to have it on in order to interact, or is it a school environment, or a home environment? How do you see this? Is there any relief from being on the web?
Seymour Papert:	The question was, is there any relief from being on the web and how do we see the actual relationship between the kid and the computer. Is it like a wristwatch, which you wear all the time. I hope there’s relief. I hope we can turn it off. I hope we can sit under the tree and listen to the bees buzz and look at the blue sky and not be interrupted by the web or anything else. I’m sure, I think the world will be a sadder place if we don’t maintain those values too. I think whenever we want it, it should be there.
	Yes?
Speaker 6:	What if you forget your pocket computer thing and it ends up being in the wash?
Seymour Papert:	What’s that?
Speaker 6:	What if you forget your pocket computer in the washing machine?
Seymour Papert:	When do you forget your computer?
Speaker 6:	What if.
Seymour Papert:	I think I’m sure to do that. I seem to forget everything else sometimes. It’s too bad, they won’t be very expensive and I’ll have two. Yes, it is true. Maybe we can make them so that they’re smart enough so that they will squeal. Yes?
Speaker 7:	I have a concern. I just recently actually started working for a large computer company, and this is new to me. I didn’t grow up with the media until I was 10. We didn’t have radio or television, I lived overseas. I find it very amusing when the system goes down or electricity stops and everybody walks around like deer in the headlights, or zombies because they don’t know what to do.
	This concerns me a little bit with children becoming so connected to an electrical system, that there becomes a dependence on it and a lack of … For example when I grew up, the make your own make believe castle was the abandoned lot next to us that wasn’t going to go away. How would you recommend that a dependence is not instilled in a child, that they can take what they’re learning and seek out and explore in a different tactile world?
Seymour Papert:	Yes. The question is, what about dependence, the kid becoming dependent on the computer, which might not work, might be a power failure, whatever. I think that, in a good educational setting, a good family setting, nobody’s totally dependent. There are many things you can do. However, I also think that I’m dependent on this and if I break it, I can’t see. A few centuries ago with the eyes that I have, I would’ve been severely handicapped. I borrowed somebody’s watch, I didn’t have a watch, but I found somebody else who had a watch, so I would dependent on watches and don’t get too upset because there are a lot of them around, I can borrow somebody’s.
	I think the computer industry is to blame for making them so fragile. To make a point, when I was working with some Africans in a project, I made a pedal computer, which you could pedal like old fashioned sewing machines. One could imagine a wind up computer. You can buy a wind up, I noticed the other day, a wind up cellular phone, was that what it was, or was it a wind up radio. Anyway. Human power, winding a key, pedaling a little, provides plenty of power. We don’t have to depend on that stuff.
	There are lots of was. I don’t think that’s a fundamental problem. Those are solvable problems. If the industry was more oriented towards personal uses of the computer, they would have solved those problems long ago. They’re not and they haven’t, but I think that will change. Yes?
Speaker 8:	I think I agree 100% on everything you’ve said, but I think the problem I face as a parent and maybe there’s some teachers here are facing, is that society really doesn’t want what your describing. What it wants is a way to filter out the people, and make an elite group and make a bunch of peasants, and the bunch of peasants are supposed to serve the needs of the elite group. That’s the way society is structured.
	What we want to do as parents and as teachers is bring as many people into the elite group as we can. As with what you like to do, but the elite group is saying to you, “We’re not going to pay for it until you show us what good it’s going to do us.” How are we going to get over this political barrier? That’s the only thing in the way is the political barrier.
Seymour Papert:	Right. The questions is, how do we get get over the political barrier of dealing with a society that really doesn’t want everybody to be well educated critical thinkers and so on. It’s a political question. The only way we can deal with it is to bring it out in the open, and that’s what I’m doing. What else we can do. Let these elite people say that, that’s what they want. Let our presidential candidates, both of them, say that they’re not prepared to change the school system because of that reason. We can force it out in the open, that’s politics. I think that’s what we can do and have to do.
	Frankly, I think that the force that will do it is the next generation of kids who are growing up with computers and with a larger expectations from the schools. There’s a lot of talk about schools should be more demanding of children. I think what we’re beginning to see is that children are demanding more from the schools, and they’re coming into the schools with better experiences of what good learning is like, and with lots of knowledge they can bring into the, put onto the table of what’s going on in the school. This is a pressure. I think kid power is the force that will really produce real change.
	I don’t think we’ll ever persuade the old bureaucrats. Even in my generation, maybe, I doubt it. I think kid power, I think there’s a generation of kids and a generation of new teachers who will grow up with a different paradigm. The others will die out pretty soon.
	I think really, the point is you write, there’s a political issue, we should treat it as a political issue and we should force the discussion of it out into the open, which is my theme that I keep on saying over and over again.
	Yes?
Speaker 9:	This is a problem on question for that. I was a teacher a few years ago. One of the big issues we faced was lack of funding and bureaucratic issues that were based on standardized testing as a means of allocating resources. A lot of trouble I had trying to do constructionist learning was that then my kids weren’t ready for the standardized tests and they weren’t doing well. I didn’t spend months and months preparing them for that measurement.
	How do you shift the paradigm of measuring what is learning?
Seymour Papert:	The questions is, what about standardized tests. As she said, it’s a follow onto the previous question. My answer’s a follow on the previous question. It’s a political question. I’d like to add a little extra twist to that. I was present at a conference of teachers at which in a round table discussion, teachers were asked to express themselves. It was rather touchy feely. They were asked to express, what did they think about testing. As the discussion bore on, one after another started coming out with saying they felt profoundly dishonest and profoundly contaminated, compromised, by the policy of testing, because not one of the teachers in that group, it wasn’t a particularly, it was just a group of teachers who came to this meeting for totally different reasons.
	Not one of them believed in the end that these tests are a good basis for judging. They felt that they were forced by the school to pretend that, and by the parents. They were forced when a parent came to discuss progress of the kid, to put the emphasis on test scores because they thought the parent wanted, it was the easiest way, and so on. They felt inside themselves, dirty in doing this.
	I think this is another politics, that as members of the society, we should not allow this to be done to our teachers. I think taking off the pressures that make teachers be dishonest is part of the same issues of honesty and learning I was raising before. It’s a political issue, and it’s an issue of social consciousness and we’ve just got to raise it.
	Again, I think that kid power’s going to do it. I think kids are less and less duped. They’re more and more asserting themselves and more and more refusing to sit still in schools to learn useless stuff, to pretend to accept, which the school is just losing it’s legitimation in the eyes of children. There’s no question about that. People who think they’re going to cure that by pushing school back to where it was in some earlier epo, are just wrong. Every bit of evidence goes against that.
	The real reason is that school is lagging behind as society changes, and you’re not going to cure that by making school lag even further behind.
	Yes?
Speaker 10:	It seems to be though that the whole testing thing is an attempt, perhaps wrongheaded, at to measure what’s going on. Is there some objective that’s being met by teaching in schools? I think that becomes the default, as sort of a least common denominator option. If we don’t have those kinds of standardized tests, how can we evaluate? I don’t think anyone would question that some teachers are going to do a better job than others, or some facilitators or some environments, whatever you want to call that. How are we going to evaluate-
Seymour Papert:	The question is, tests surely are an attempt to evaluate how well it’s working, and if you don’t have them. That question, everything depends whether you think those tests are working. If the tests are not really evaluating anything, it’s no justification of them to say that their intention was to evaluate. I think we all know from our experience of handling tests when we were, everybody knows this that you got that stuff into your head two weeks or two hours before the test, and you forgot it two weeks later.
	We all know that these tests are a hopeless instrument for really evaluating true intellectual development. Since they don’t work, it’s no justification to say what their intention was. We also have alternative instruments have been developed. A portfolio of work. A kid who’s written something, done a history research project, a science research project, present a portfolio. You can see. When you see a successful learner, you know it. There’s never any doubt about it.
	The problem of difficulty in testing is purely illusory and purely based on the fact that we want a bureaucratized kind of testing. In my other book, the Children’s Machine, I spell out an analogy between our approach to education and the Soviet command economy. It’s very similar. Our command economy, there’s this curriculum. The measurement idea is also … I tell this story, a true story about in Soviet days, a certain factory was given its objective. Its plan was to produce so many tons of nails. The director [inaudible 01:15:42] a brilliant idea. He made nails this long. He could produce twice the tonnage of nails.
	That, the nails formed a big pile of rusty metal that nobody used. Made no difference, he got promoted because he had successful fulfilled his plan. This is what our testing is often like, and we know it. Everybody knows it. That we continue doing it is a weird example of our sheep-like quality. No, it’s not. Its the same reason was the Soviet Union, that bureaucracy, once established, has its own momentum and is very difficult to displace.
	Eventually, a bureaucracy is out of touch with the society it belongs to will collapse as that one collapsed. If we’re pessimistic about the possibility of change in our education system, think back what we thought about the possibility of change in the Soviet Union. Just 10 years ago or 15 years ago, almost everybody thought it was impossible.
Speaker 2:	We may take the last question.
Speaker 11:	Can you talk a little bit about children’s learning modalities and how?
Speaker 2:	That’s a big question.
Seymour Papert:	What do you mean by modality?
Speaker 11:	You gave an example that there are some children that can’t learn mathematics.
Seymour Papert:	No I didn’t.
Speaker 11:	My understanding was that you didn’t say that there are children that can’t learn mathematics, you were saying that society views, there are children.
Seymour Papert:	Yes.
Moderator:	It is society’s view that there are children who don’t know mathematics. It can be observed that mathematics is easier for some children when they are exposed to it to grasp the concept than for other children. For some children to learn by jumping up and down and they learn how to count that way, whereas other children need to sit in perfect silence. The difference between individual’s tendency of how they learn, what conditions enable them to be motivated to learn, what drives them to learn?
Seymour Papert:	Let me turn the question around. The question is, what about differences between children’s learning styles, they’re learning different ways. Let me just go back to my learning stories and love stories. What are the conditions of people falling in love with one another? There’s no general rule, they do, it happens. It happens differently to everybody. Nobody goes around saying, “Let’s classify people’s different modalities and styles of falling in love and set up some system that will choose the ideal mate for them.” Maybe you think we ought to do that, but we don’t.
	I think the same reasoning applies to the learning style. I’m totally against and see no substance in any idea that by some kind of testing, we’re going to determine the individual child’s learning style and then teach them. The point about constructionist learning where you give this building kid and kids can do it, that the individual kid can do it in different ways. We need to respect the way that that kid does it, enter into the spirit of the way that the kid we’re looking at is learning and try to help that kid learn better without us putting ourselves in the position where we’re going to decide what’s the appropriate style for that.
	Everybody is different and everybody learns differently, everybody loves differently, everybody feels differently, talks differently, and so on.
Moderator:	I may stop you short, you will vote for Ralph Nader, no? What you have said, reminds me a story that [inaudible 01:19:40], the head of [inaudible 01:19:41] told me the other day, he said, when Moses brought back this piece of software from Mount Sinai, it was of a much bigger value. All the natural resources that he may have found or not found in the Holy land, I think you would agree with that.
Seymour Papert:	I would.
Moderator:	I want to thank you very much and [inaudible 01:20:05]. We want to applaud all the players. I also want to announce that there will be a signature in the store, the different books that you have mentioned, the most written one and the other one are available in the store. It’s just some time to sign it. Therefore if don’t want to become a cyber ostrich, go and buy the book and you will get a signature for free. Thank you.

Link to correctable transcription.