“The word educology reminds us that we need a theory of education. One might say theories already exist. There is educational psychology; there is a theory of instruction; there are courses on the theory of how to administrate schools. But these are not theories of education as a whole. They are theories of small aspects of what happens in the educational process. By focusing on these small aspects, these trees and shrubs, we have gotten lost in the jungle.… I will take an example from my own work. People have asked, “What is the effect of Logo on learning mathematics — or on planning skills or whatever?” Some experimenters have come up with very positive answers, some with negative ones. But they are barking up the wrong tree. They are following the methodology of studying the effect of something by varying one thing while keeping everything else constant.

Such methods do quite well for studying the effect of a drug or a treatment for plants. But in the case of Logo, one sees its absurdity in the fact that the whole point of Logo is to make everything else change. One does not introduce Logo into a classroom and then do everything else as if it were not there. Such an approach completely misses the point. Logo is an instrument designed to help change the way you talk about and think about mathematics and writing and the relationship between them, the way you talk about learning, and even the relationships among the people in the school — between the children and the teacher, and among the children themselves.

The traditional methodology for studying innovation in education may have been adequate at a time when only small changes were possible, when in fact one did change an aspect of the mathematics curriculum and keep everything else the same. But we need a different methodology altogether when we envision radical changes in education.”

Papert, S. (1990). A Critique of Technocentrism in Thinking About the School of the Future. M.I.T. Media Lab Epistemology and Learning Memo. Cambridge, M.I.T. Media Lab.

THE DAILY PAPERT NEEDS YOUR HELP!
There are a dozen or so hours of rarely or never-before-seen speeches by Seymour Papert in audio and video form that we need to have transcribed. An hour of video transcription costs $60-$100. Please consider chipping in anything you can.

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“These children are engaged in something that traditional school seldom offers: serious projects that involve working on hard technical problems for many hours a day, every day for several weeks. In the course of doing so, they come into contact with a wide range of technical, scientific and mathematical knowledge, some of which may be in the usual school curriculum, some not. All come out at the end having learnt a great deal more about these subjects than anyone learns in a much longer time in a classroom. In addition, they have had some tough experience learning what it is like to manage a complex project.

The scenario fits the ideal of learning that has been advocated for more than a century by proponents of “open”, “progressive”, “child-centred” education. But the scenario is radically different in several ways from the forms of progressive education that have been tested in schools and often found wanting.”

Papert, S. (1998) “Whose Finger is on the Button?” The Independent. London. Thursday 21 May 1998.

THE DAILY PAPERT NEEDS YOUR HELP!
There are a dozen or so hours of rarely or never-before-seen speeches by Seymour Papert in audio and video form that we need to have transcribed. An hour of video transcription costs $60-$100. Please consider chipping in anything you can.

For a $25 contribution, you will be listed on The Daily Papert web site as a GENEROUS TURTLE
For a $50 contribution, you will be listed on The Daily Papert web site as a SUPPORTER
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“We need chutzpah to face down those people who say “ Hey who are we to say technology should dictate what children learn, that technology should dictate the curriculum. No! Technology should be the tool for implementing the curriculum. It’s other people who dictate it. Who do you think you are to say what children should be learning?

Well, I think the boot is on the other foot, so to speak. Because in fact our curriculum or 90% of it is dictated by technology. By an ancient and outmoded technology.  Almost everything we teach in elementary school, especially in the subjects of math and science, and I’m afraid in technology is dictated by what you can do with very primitive methods, with pencil and paper.”

Moore, A. (1998) Seymour Papert quoted in archived article, Targets Hit, Targets Missed — Seymour Papert, chronicling his speech at the October 1998 Camden Technology Conference (now PopTech). The actual video of the event has been lost to the Web.

THE DAILY PAPERT NEEDS YOUR HELP!
There are a dozen or so hours of rarely or never-before-seen speeches by Seymour Papert in audio and video form that we need to have transcribed. An hour of video transcription costs $60-$100. Please consider chipping in anything you can.

For a $25 contribution, you will be listed on The Daily Papert web site as a GENEROUS TURTLE
For a $50 contribution, you will be listed on The Daily Papert web site as a SUPPORTER
For a $100 contribution, you will be listed on The Daily Papert web site as a PRODUCER

Thank you for your support!

“Indeed, I would argue that anything that could be implemented in a school context without extensive use of digital technologies could not be fully true to the progressive ideal that children should be able to acquire knowledge by using it in activities in which they have a personal interest.”

Papert, S. (1998) “Whose Finger is on the Button?” The Independent. London. Thursday 21 May 1998.

THE DAILY PAPERT NEEDS YOUR HELP!
There are a dozen or so hours of rarely or never-before-seen speeches by Seymour Papert in audio and video form that we need to have transcribed. An hour of video transcription costs $60-$100. Please consider chipping in anything you can.

For a $25 contribution, you will be listed on The Daily Papert web site as a GENEROUS TURTLE
For a $50 contribution, you will be listed on The Daily Papert web site as a SUPPORTER
For a $100 contribution, you will be listed on The Daily Papert web site as a PRODUCER

Thank you for your support!

“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.”

Moore, A. (1998) Seymour Papert quoted in archived article, Targets Hit, Targets Missed — Seymour Papert, chronicling his speech at the October 1998 Camden Technology Conference (now PopTech). The actual video of the event has been lost to the Web.

“But to “see” real connections we also need a spirit of playful, exploratory inquiry and skill in the unnamed art of making connections. And most of all, we need to have a taste for making connections, to retain the joy in connecting that is innate in all of us – though so often attenuated in school by habits of dissociated learning.”

Papert, S. (1993) “Where’s the Elephant?” Logo Update. Logo Foundation. Volume 1. Number 1.

“It is self-indulgent of us as teachers to say that we can spend 3 hours a week with a student and give them wonderful experiences. What about the billion other children on the planet? What about the rest of the hours for that child? Our task is to identify powerful ideas that have been dis-empowered. Then re-empower them.”

Seymour Papert delivered this provocative talk at the 2006 Squeakfest Conference. You may listen to it here.

The Daily Papert will have this speech transcribed in the near future.

“This is not the first Conference where I’ve come in and the first four people I spoke to complain how boring things are in the exhibit hall.  I haven’t been there myself, but I’ve been to others.  And they’re not boring in the sense that one goes in there and one sees a lot of ingenious and energetic people who’ve done ingenious and energetic things and in a certain sense there’s nothing new. It’s the same stuff that I remember.  And the reason for this is what I want to talk about.  The reason is that we are losing vision as the people who are making the education of the future, and allowing ourselves to be defined as some sort of servant of the education of the future.  That is, we define ourselves as using technology to improve the way that school as we’ve always known it  and the curriculum as the way its always been, to improve the way this is done.  And there’s a limit to how much it can improve, because it’s an obsolete thing, that should have died a century ago.”

Papert, S. (2000) Keynote Address at CUE Conference. Palm Springs, CA.

In May 2000, Seymour Papert delivered a barn-burner of a keynote address at the California Computer Using Educators Conference in Palm Springs, CA.

The venue was a tent with large fans blowing and planes flying overhead. The organization made no attempt to record the speech professionally, so what you have here is an amateur attempt to capture history with the gear I had with me. The audio quality is often inadequate.

In my humble opinion, this is one of the best “talks” Papert ever gave. Preserving it in some way has been a goal of mine for many years.

“Isn’t it time for us to grow up? And as we grow up, we should stop seeing ourselves as specialists of computers in education, because that casts us in the role of a kind of service profession. Accepting the role allows that other people are the ones to decide the big goals of education, what the curriculum is, how learning happens, what’s a school. And at our conferences we talk about how their decisions can be served by the computers. Well, fine, up to a point. This certainly allows revolutionary actions as long as we are at the stage of crafting Trojan horses to throw into the system. But at some point we have a responsibility to break out of that marginal role and take on our true vocation, which is not one of service but one of leadership. At some point it will be as ridiculous to have a world conference in computers and education as to have a world conference on pencils and education.”

Papert. S. (1990, July). Perestroika and Epistemological Politics. Speech presented at the World Conference on Computers in Education. Sydney, Australia.

Seymour Papert ended the World Conference on Computers in Education with the statement above twenty-22 years ago. Now that many of us are at ISTE 2012, how should we respond?

“Logo is much like a natural language such as English. Baby talk allows the child an easy way to grab onto and use pieces of the language. But nowhere in the world is a language restricted to baby talk. The child continues to be immersed in the full richness of language as used by philosophers and poets. It is the quality–the rich complexity that opens up as one explores Logo ever more deeply–that makes Logo “good for children” and for adults as well.”

Papert, S. (1984) Misconceptions about Logo. Creative Computing COMPUTING. Vol. 10,  No. 11 . November 1984. Page 229.

Thanks to David Wees for the tip on this article.