The Children's Machine Chapters One and Two

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Preface: vii-xii

• The most important skill determining a person’s life pattern has already become the ability to learn new skills, to take in new concepts, to assess new situations, to deal with the unexpected.
• What is true for individuals is even more true for nations. The competitive strength of a nation in the modern world is directly proportional to its learning capacity; that is a combination of the learning capacities of the individuals and the institutions of the society.
• Major Focus: How does the relationship between children and computers effect learning?

Chapter One. Yearners and Schoolers Pages1-21 

• Little fundamental change in the way school functions. I found it interesting that Papert chose to capitalize school in this sentence. School as institution.
• Page 3: Schoolers=Traditionalist Yerners= Radical change elements. Large numbers of teachers manage to create within the walls of their own classrooms oases of learning profoundly at odds with the educational philosophy at hand.
• Page 4: Video games; Empowering children to test out ideas about working within prefixed rules and structures…have proved capable of teaching students about the possibilities and drawback of a newly presented system in ways many adults would envy.   (Ah hah! Safe trial and error!)
• Page 9: Would a Knowledge Machine into the School Environment compromise the primacy on which we view reading and writing?
• Reading and writing were developed for communication and record keeping. Would it be possible to add to the dimension of digitally recorded speech and interaction where by the whole kinesthetic realm is explored digitally as well as perhaps returning to the primacy and skill of verbal oratory and story telling. Would it be a combination of moving forwards and backwards at the same time?
• Page 10: Paulo Frente enjoins us not to dissociate “reading the word” from “reading the world”. Becoming literate means thinking differently than one did previously, seeing the world differently, and this subjects that there are many kinds of literacy.

Chapter Two: Personal Thinking Pages 22-34 

• Page 33 It was Piaget who coined the oft-quote line that play is child’s work. But no one in the environment was looking at the other half of this pity aphorism: the idea that work (at least serious intellectual work) might be adults play. We thought of children as “little scientists” but we did not think about the complement of viewing scientists as “big children”

•  Piaget said to understand is to invent.

Papert on Piaget. Times 100 Most Important People of the Century. htttp://www.time.com/time /time100/scientist/profile/piaget.html  

• Piaget began to suspect that behind their cute and seemingly illogical utterances were thought processes that had their own kind of order and their own special logic. Einstein called it a discovery "so simple that only a genius could have thought of it."
• Piaget was launched on a path that would lead to his doctorate in zoology and a lifelong conviction that the way to understand anything is to understand how it evolves.
• "Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them something too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves."
• Piaget never thought of himself as a child psychologist. His real interest was epistemology — the theory of knowledge — which, like physics, was considered a branch of philosophy until Piaget came along and made it a science.

The History of Mr. Papert by Martin Boyle originally appeared in The Logo Exchange http://www.stager.org/ omaet2004/papertbio.html 

• So, in some ways Wolfram and Papert share the same mathematical bent and need to challenge what is known. And that they both have a deep sense of perseveration on topics that engage them to the lack of other things.

Images of the Learning Society (Chapter 8) Papert, Seymour. (1981) Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas. NY: Basic Books.  

• The vision I have presented  is of a particular computer culture, a mathematic one, that is, one that helps us not only to learn but to learn about learning. I have shown how this culture can humanize learning by permitting more personal, less alienating relationships with knowledge  Will this context be school? In this book we have considered how mathematics might be learned in settings that resemble the Brazilian samba school, in settings that are real, socially cohesive, and where experts and novices are all learning. The samba school, although not "exportable" to an alien culture, represents a set of attributes a learning environment should and could have. Learning is not separate from reality. The samba school has a purpose, and learning is integrated in the school for this purpose. Novice is not separated from expert, and the experts are also learning.
• Ultimately the difference has to do with how the two entities are related to the surrounding culture. The samba school has rich connections with a popular culture. The knowledge being learned there is continuous with that culture.
• Powerful new social forms must have their roots in the culture, not be the creatures of bureaucrats. Thus we are brought back to seeing the necessity for the educator to be an anthropologist. Educational innovators must be aware that in order to be successful they must be sensitive to what is happening in the surrounding culture and use dynamic cultural trends as a medium to carry their educational interventions.
• There are problems with the image of samba schools as the locus of education. I am sure that a computational samba school will catch on somewhere. But the first one will almost certainly happen in a community of a particular kind, probably one with a high density of middle-income engineers. This will allow the computer samba school to put down "cultural roots," but it will, of course, also leave its mark on the culture of the samba school. For people interested in education in general, it will be important to trace the life histories of these efforts: How will they affect the intellectual development of their school-age participants? Will we see reversals of Piagetian stages? Will they develop pressures to withdraw from traditional schools? How will local schools try to adapt to the new pressure on them? But as an educational utopian I want something else. I want to know what kind of computer culture can grow in communities where there is not already a rich technophilic soil. I want to know and I want to help make it happen.
• Let me say once more, the potential obstacle is not economic and it is not that computers are not going to be objects in people's everyday lives. They eventually will. They are already entering most workplaces and will eventually go into most homes just as TV sets now do, and in many cases initially for the same reasons. The obstacle to the growth of  popular computer cultures is cultural, for example, the mismatch between the computer culture embedded in the machines of today and the cultures of the homes they will go into. And if the problem is cultural the remedy must be cultural.
• The research challenge is clear. We need to advance the art of meshing computers with cultures so that they can serve to unite, hopefully without homogenizing, the fragmented subcultures that coexist counterproductively in contemporary society. For example, the gulf must be bridged between the technical-scientific and humanistic cultures. And I think that the key to constructing this bridge will be learning how to recast powerful ideas in computational form, ideas that are as important to the poet as to the engineer. In my vision the computer acts as a transitional object to mediate relationships that are ultimately between person and person.
• " Today we hear a lot of talk about how "computers are coming" and a lot of talk about how they will change education. Most of the talk falls into two categories, one apparently "revolutionary" and the other "reformist.". My own philosophy is revolutionary rather than reformist in its concept of change. But the revolution I envision is of ideas, not of technology. It consists of new understandings of specific subject domains and in new understandings of the process of learning itself. It consists of a new and much more ambitious setting of the sights of educational aspiration.
• In my vision, technology has two roles. One is heuristic: The computer presence has catalyzed the emergence of ideas. The other is instrumental: The computer will carry ideas into a new age.