“It’s astonishing – no other word would do – that everywhere where there is knowledge work, you expect to see a computer on every desk and yet our schools still boast of the fact that we’ve finally achieved a computer in every classroom. Wow, it is astonishing.” Papert, S. (2004). Will Going Digital Improve or …
“Ten years before T.H.E. Journal was launched [1972], Logo was designed as a programming language that could be accessible to children. The spirit of the enterprise was like the way the Wright brothers approached aviation: I thought of giving children the power to program computers as a tiny first step in a complex process whose …
“And at the same time that this massive penetration of the technology is taking place, there is a social movement afoot with great relevance for the politics of education. There is an increasing disillusion with traditional education. Some people express this by extreme action, actually withdrawing their children from schools and choosing to educate them …
“I am convinced that the way children learn will improve dramatically and often find myself fighting fiercely with those who say computers have little to offer in this area or will do actual harm by immersing children in artificial worlds at the expense of spending time with nature. Yet when I visit a school, ninety-nine …
“To skeptics who might ridicule seeing learning as the most important issue in a deeply troubled world, I will only say that none of the world’s troubles will be resolved unless people, especially those of the next generation, learn to think in better ways than those who brought the troubles about. Having said this I …
“I’m going to pick on one little corner of school, namely mathematics. I am a mathematician, so it is easy for me to talk about math, but what I have said applies to everything. Now in mathematics the dominating feature is the content. I recently did a little research on what discussion there is in …
“But throwing out entrenched, misleading ideas and providing children with open access to computers is not enough in itself. We also need a whole new set of concepts and paradigms for studying the learning process in this burgeoning computer age. What I am saying about computers is no doubt true about other materials and other …
“Q: But there are statistics to show that in most cases technology in schools doesn’t work. A: The statisticians ask a silly question and get a silly answer. Of course “technology doesn’t work.” Technology doesn’t do anything. People do. Statistics that lump together technology implementations across the board — averaging the good with the bad …
There won’t be schools in the future…. I think the computer will blow up the school. That is, the school defined as something where there are classes, teachers running exams, people structured in groups by age, following a curriculum-all of that. The whole system is based on a set of structural concepts that are incompatible …
“So, I think the first impact of paper on education is that we’ve created a form of school and of learning that means that people with certain kinds of personalities, certain structures, neurological structures, take to it well and succeed, and some of them take to it less well and don’t succeed, and some of …