February 10, 2011
DON’T: get hung up monitoring your kids’ every mouse click DO: begin to share their joyful experience of discovery Papert, S. (1995) The Parent Trap. Time Magazine. November 13, 1995. p. 34.
Computers
February 9, 2011
“The central issue of change in education is the tension between technicalizing and not technicalizing, and here the teacher occupies the fulcrum position.” “My paradoxical argument is that technology can support megachange in education as far-reaching as what we have seen in medicine, but it will do this through a process directly opposite to what
February 8, 2011
“It is not surprising that people rooted in schools’ concept of how learning should take place resist such restructuring. What is surprising is the logical distortion they resort to in order to persuade themselves that there are powerful objective reasons that make the transformation impossible.” Papert, S. (1996). Computers in the Classroom: Agents of Change.
February 7, 2011
On the NCTM Standards….. “I think they [the Standards] are going in the right direction but they are incredibly conservative, from my point of view. But again, I’d make reservation that if one has to work within the framework for schools as they are and curriculum as it is, maybe there isn’t very much room
February 1, 2011
“My thesis could be summarized as: What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate. Because it can take on a thousand forms and can serve a thousand functions, it can appeal to a thousand tastes.” Papert, S. (1981). Mindstorms:
January 31, 2011
“The phrase, “technology and education” usually means inventing new gadgets to teach the same old stuff in a thinly disguised version of the same old way. Moreover, if the gadgets are computers, the same old teaching becomes incredibly more expensive and biased towards its dumbest parts, namely the kind of rote learning in which measurable
January 28, 2011
“…Only inertia and prejudice, not economics or lack of good educational ideas stand in the way of providing every child in the world with the kinds of experience of which we have tried to give you some glimpses. If every child were to be given access to a computer, computers would be cheap enough for
January 27, 2011
“We emphasize that it is possible to create activities that connect many different students’ interests to various curricular areas, and to connect “separate” disciplines to each other. Our goal was, and continues to be, to create learning situations in which connections are allowed to develop freely and to move in any direction, albeit many or
January 26, 2011
“NCTM [National Council of Teachers of Mathematics] has not yet understood the role of computers. NCTM still belongs to maybe the 20th century, if not long before. I think they call it totally wrong. I think that the reason why there is a conflict between creative thinking, and basic mathematics is that they try to
January 25, 2011
It is this freedom of the teacher to decide and, indeed, the freedom of the children to decide, that is most horrifying to the bureaucrats who stand at the head of current education systems. They are worried about how to verify that the teachers are really doing their job properly, how to enforce accountability and