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  • SUNDAY INTERVIEW
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The Daily Papert

Daily words & wisdom of Dr. Seymour Papert

  • “Now I Know Why We Have Nouns and Verbs”
  • 1994 Keynote at National School Boards Conference
  • A Critique of Technocentrism in Thinking About the School of the Future
  • About
  • An Evaluative Study of Modern Technology in Education
  • An Evaluative Study of Modern Technology in Education
  • An Exploration in the Space of Mathematics Educations
  • Bode Miller
  • Child Power: Keys to the New Learning of the Digital Century
  • Computer as Condom
  • Computer as Material: Messing About with Time
  • Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking
  • Computers in the Classroom: Agents of Change
  • Constructionism vs. Instructionism
  • Constructionism: A New Opportunity for Elementary Science Education
  • Diversity in Learning: A Vision for the New Millennium
  • Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning
  • Educational Computing: How Are We Doing?
  • Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete
  • Event Programming in Logo
  • Ghost in the Machine: Seymour Papert on How Computers Fundamentally Change the Way Kids Learn
  • Hard Fun
  • Ian’s Truck
  • Introduction to Embodiments of Mind by Warren S. McCulloch
  • It Takes a Whole State to Raise its Schools
  • Keynote address – Kids and Computer – What’s a Parent to Do? – MIT, September 1991
  • Keynote address – 1992 New Jersey Educational Computing Conference
  • Keynote address – New Jersey Educational Computing Conference 1990
  • Learning by the Skin of His Teeth
  • LogoWriter Tape 1 (1986)
  • LogoWriter Tape 2 (1986)
  • Looking at Technology Through School-Colored Spectacles
  • MIT Logo Memo Archive
  • My Learning Disability
  • Obsolete Skill Set: The 3 Rs — Literacy and Letteracy in the Media Ages
  • Paper for the President’s Commission for a National Agenda for the 80s
  • Papert Excerpts from an MIT Media Lab Interactive Videodisc (1986)
  • Papert on Logo (c. 1986)
  • Papert On Logo: “New MicroWorlds – Tape 2, Teaching (c. 1986)
  • Papert on Piaget
  • Papert’s Principle
  • Perestroika and Epistemological Politics
  • Preface to The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer
  • Professor Papert Discusses One Laptop Per Child Project
  • Redefining Childhood: The Computer Presence as an Experiment in Developmental Psychology
  • Redefining Childhood: The Computer Presence as an Experiment in Developmental Psychology
  • School’s Out?
  • Semi-annual Constructionism Conference Archives
  • Seymour Papert – Bates College
  • Seymour Papert 2002 Interview
  • Seymour Papert Obituary (1928 – 2016)
  • Seymour Papert Obituary Collection
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 1 – Grammar (1986)
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 2 – Names and Variables (1986)
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 3 – Images of Recursion (1986)
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 4 – Digging Deeper (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 1 – Resonances (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 2 – Teaching (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 3 – Thinking (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 4 – Styles (1986)
  • Seymour Papert One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Interview
  • Seymour Papert’s Valedictory Speech Upon Being Named LEGO Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab
  • Situating Constructionism
  • Some Poetic and Social Criteria for Education Design
  • SUNDAY INTERVIEW
  • Technology in Schools: Local fix or Global Transformation?
  • Technology Works Enterprises Proposal
  • THE CHALLENGES OF IDC: What have we learned from our past? A conversation with Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, and Alan Kay
  • The Future of School
  • The Future of School
  • The Gears of My Childhood
  • The Learning State
  • The Lessons of Logo
  • The Lessons of Logo
  • The Parent Trap
  • The Wonderful Discovery of Nothing
  • Tomorrow’s Classrooms?
  • Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right but Three Rights Do Make a Left
  • Vision for Education: The Caperton-Papert Platform
  • What is Logo? And Who Needs It?
  • Where’s the Elephant?
  • Why School Reform Is Impossible
  • About Seymour Papert
  • Print Archives
  • Multimedia
  • Ways to Help
  • Technology in Schools: Local fix or Global Transformation?
  • Logo as Trojan Horse: Rethinking Logo Philosophy in the Context of a Real School Experience
  • Seymour Papert on ABC Radio – Sunday Profile
  • Seymour Papert’s American Prospect Speech
  • Seymour Papert on Online Learning and Universities
  • Seymour Papert’s CUE Keynote (May 2000)
  • Let’s Tie the Digital Knot
  • Misconceptions about Logo
  • Multimedia

May 15, 2012

1990s, Computers, Constructionism, Epistemology, Learning, Logo, Project-based learning, Robotics, School Reform, Teaching / By gary

“Building and playing with castles of sand, families of dolls, houses of Lego, and collections of cards provide images of activities which are well rooted in contemporary cultures and which plausibly enter into learning processes that go beyond specific narrow skills. I do not believe that anyone fully understands what gives these activities their quality of “learning-richness.” But this does not prevent one from taking them as models in benefiting from the presence of new technologies to expand the scope of activities with that quality.

The chapters in this book offer many constructions of new learning-rich activities with an attempt to reach that quality. A conceptually simple case is the addition of new elements to LEGO construction kits and to the Logo microworlds, so that children can build more “active” models. For example, sensors, miniaturized computers that can run Logo programs, and motor controllers allow a child (in principle) to build a LEGO house with a programmable temperature control system; or to construct forms of artificial life and mobile models capable of seeking environmental conditions such as light or heat or of following or avoiding one another. Experiments carried out so far still fall a little short of this idealized description, and, moreover, have been mounted systematically only in the artificial contexts of schools or science centers. But it is perfectly plausible that further refinement of the components (combined, be it noted for further discussion below, with suitable marketing) might result in such “cybernetic” activities (as we choose to call them), thus becoming as much part of the lives of young children as playing with toys and dolls, or other more passive construction kits. It is also plausible that if this were to happen, certain concepts and ways of thinking presently regarded as far beyond children’s ken would enter into what they know “spontaneously” (in the sense in which Piaget talks about children’s spontaneous geometry or logic or whatever), while other concepts–which children do learn at school but reluctantly and not very well–would be learned with the gusto one sees in Nintendo games.

This vision advances the definition of constructionism and serves as an ideal case against which results that have been actually achieved can be judged. In particular, it illustrates the sense of the opposition I like to formulate as constructionism vs. instructionism when discussing directions for innovation and enhancement in education.”

Papert, S. and Harel, I. (1991) “Situating Constructionism” in Constructionism. NY: Ablex Publishing Corporation.

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