Papert wrote the following in the second issue of Wired Magazine back in 1993! “I see then a pattern of intellectual development that I shall oversimplify by casting it in three distinct phases. The first phase is one of universally successful learning. All children show a passion for interactive exploration of their immediate world. The […]
“Literacy refers not just to being able to read, but to having taken in a whole culture around reading, a culture which usually comes through reading. With multimedia, the role of the written word may become much less important. In the future I suspect we will be less likely to associate people who are educated
“By asking questions such as: “What’s the best way to teach science,” there’s an implication that there’s a single entity that can make that decision. It’s not like that, maybe never was.” Moore, A. (1998) Seymour Papert quoted in archived article, Targets Hit, Targets Missed — Seymour Papert, chronicling his speech at the October 1998
“It [education] is analogous to a market-driven economy. Like Darwinian evolution, numerous interplays allow many results to organically emerge. How do we intervene in this divergent, organic, apparently chaotic system? As in a “free market” the government doesn’t tell us how many nails to produce, but it does intervene in the economy; the FDA doesn’t
“Games never advertise as being easy; rather, how difficult. Kid never say schools is too hard; they say it’s boring. Yet we still insist on “making it easier.” Game designers know that if games aren’t hard, they will go out business. Well, curriculum designers must make it easy to get through, to encourage more curriculum
“Information technology is the wrong name, and leads to its misuse. The fact that you can get a lot of information out of the Net is NOT merely what it’s about. Most digital technologies — processors and chips, for example — are not about information at all. They are constructional medium…we make things from them.
“As long as schools confine the technology to simply improving what they are doing rather than really changing the system, nothing very significant will happen” Papert, Seymour. (1998). “Technology in schools: to support the system or render it obsolete?” accessed (2004) at The Milken Family Foundation website.
Papert has been criticized for taking video games seriously–and for soliciting a $3 million grant from Nintendo to develop learning tools that look and feel more like video games than schoolbooks. The three-year project ended last year, but Papert makes no apologies for it. “Change in education isn’t just going to come from ivory-tower academics,”
“Any adult who thinks one of these games is easy need only sit down and try to master one,” he writes. “Most are hard, with complex information–as well as technique–to be mastered.” Video games empower children “to test out ideas about working within prefixed rules and structures in a way few other toys are capable
“I was observing a child working with a C.A.I. program for multiplication. There was something strange going on. I had seen the child do several multiplications quickly and accurately. Then I saw him give a series of wrong answers to easier problems. It took me a while to realize that the child had become bored