livingbytruth March 26, 2011
Hi Andrius and readers of my open letters at http://dadamac.posterous.com and LearningFromEachOther
Andrius
There are many interesting ideas and topics in your email copied below. As I was reading it my mind responded to so much - much more that I can possibly write here. I've highlighted areas I found of particular interest and will just give some observations related to them. Maybe we will discuss further some other time.
I've been interested in ICT in education since way back when "micro-computers" were just coming into existence (I was Pamela Fiddy then, not McLean) - this means that I was a fan of Papert's work on logo when it was happening. I was an early experimenter with his ideas - and friends of mine were involved in making the various "floor turtles" that brought the whole thing to life in ways beyond representations on the screen.
I recognise and admire his work with computers in education as being very innovative. I also observed in various schools just how much of his ideas had actually filtered through into classroom practice. This means when I respond to what is written about his work I respond across the full spectrum - ranging from great appreciation and enthusiasm for his ideas at one extreme to cynicism at the other.
However when I read about Papert and that he developed "constructionist learning" I have very mixed feeling. I know he was innovative regarding computer use in education (those of us who were around at the time of Mindstorms used to hang on his every word), but I don't have the same feeling about him as an innovator regarding education in general. The quotes that are ascribed to him regarding education are good, but (from the viewpoint of an infant and junior teacher trained in the 1970s) the educational theory seems to me to be nothing special - good, but not particularly original - it just reminds me of what we were taught to do.
The quotes you give tie in with the essays that we wrote at college on such topics as "The child is the agent of his own learning" (that title seems permanently lodged in my brain). "Constructionist learning" ties in with our tutors' insistence that we should never give children second-hand experience of anything that we could conceivably have offered as a first-hand experience.
When I started to teach we weren't directed by the national curriculum, and, although we were "in loco parentis" we weren't constrained by a risk-averse "health and safety gone mad" culture. We had all kinds of freedoms to take unexpected opportunities to learn. For instance I remember when the firemen came unexpectedly to test the fire-hydrant outside our school. I quickly took my class out to see what was happening. The firemen were great and let us watch and ask questions. It was a sunny day and so they made special "showers of rain" for us with the hose so that we could see rainbows. It was one more shared experience that the children and I could draw on in our subsequent thinking and talking and making sense of our world. Isn't that the kind of thins the "constructivists" are talking about - or am I missing something?
I admit I haven't read that much about "constructivism" - but from what I have read, I can't see what is so special and new about it (though I'm ready to be shown). I'm not meaning to belittle Papert, but it seems to me that there is a wrong emphasis. I think of other great teachers too, and wonder if they are being equally recognised. I think fro instance of Zoltan Dienes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zolt%C3%A1n_P%C3%A1l_Dienes who was a wonderful teacher - in theory and in practice. I remember a day of watching him teach and the key thing that I learned from him. "Never teach a generalisation". He believed we should give enough experience of specific examples so that the children could then generate their own generalisation - from which they could subsequently confidently generate their own additional specific examples. (This process can't be hurried - sometimes it can take months - and it is wonderful to watch the "aha!" moment when a generalisation dawns).
Regarding OLPC - I don't often join in the OLPC debate (partly because I do respect some of the people involved and some of the good work that has come out of the project) but, with you Andrius, I will share my frustration at the way that some OLPC people seem to suggest they are the only people in the world to see the benefit of enabling children to learn by doing.
End of my rant.
I love the ideas of Kestas Augutis - all new to me - thank you. You never cease to impress me with the range of interesting people that you know
I'm interested too in your sequences, hierarchies and networks - not just for personal learning and/or bodies of knowledge, but also in connection with how we structure knowledge online.
You and I definitely share an interest in thinking and learning. The short title of my final dissertation at college was "Think child!" - I explored what that meant in the context of various aspects of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_Taxonomy
When I did my OU degree that "Think child!" dissertation and my practical work as a teacher were both at the core of all my studies - which related to decision making, the ordering of information, systems, computers, artificial intelligence, and so on. That was followed by my theoretical and practical investigations of the role of computers in primary education.
Much later of course, in Minciu Sodas, you gave me the opportunity to investigate ideas about teachers and learners and ICT - the changing roles - emerging systems of education in the 21st century. That interest (theoretical and practical) is still lurking and developing in my practical work with dadamac and my experiments at dadamac.net, posterous and elsewhere.
Your email ends "Who would like to learn about learning? along with me?"
Maybe it would be good to explore further with each other our overlapping interests in learning about learning.
Pamela
From: Andrius Kulikauskas <ms@ms.lt>
Date: 2011/3/25
Subject: [livingbytruth] Seymour Papert and learning to learn/think
To: learningfromeachother <learningfromeachother@yahoogroups.com>, mathfuture@googlegroups.com, livingbytruth@yahoogroups.com
I wrote this for another group. Perhaps it will spark ideas. Andrius
Kulikauskas
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Seymour Papert's work is popular in Lithuania. I'm glad that you've
inspired me to learn more how remarkable he is. Still, I think we're
just in the early days of "constructionist" learning, as he called it.
I'm curious why you focus on teaching kids rather than adults to
learn/think. I feel as if there are two camps:
* People who want to teach children. They consider it the optimal age
to teach because it keeps children out of trouble, gives them something
to do, and most adults aren't teachable, especially if they haven't been
taught as children, or they aren't competent or interested to teach or
encourage their children.
* People who want to teach adults. They consider it the optimal age
because adults can learn from each other as (possible) equals (or
unequals), the learning can be voluntary, and it can develop a shared
culture. Whereas children often don't need to be taught, they can learn
many things haphazardly, almost automatically, and they are ultimately
influenced by adults who are interested (or not) in learning.
I'm strongly in the second camp, mostly because I like to learn myself
and I want to share what I'm learning, but from Minciu Sodas I know
dedicated people in the first camp, like Edward Cherlin (advocate of
OLPC and Sugar).
Papert, a mathematician, worked with developmental psychologist Jean
Piaget from 1958 to 1963
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(learning_theory)
Piaget did many original experiments that made clear how children of
different ages rely on internal models for judging, for example, which
container holds more water, (say, the taller one), and that these models
grow more sophisticated in predictable ways. "Individual learners
construct mental models to understand the world around them". See
Norman Anderson's information integration theory for a rigorous critique
of Piaget's ideas and results (notably his belief that children can't
integrate concepts), pg. 202, "A Functional Theory of Cognition".
Papert developed "constructionist" learning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionist_learning
"learning can happen most effectively when people are active in making
tangible objects in the real world"
* "learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge"
* "learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner
experiences as constructing a meaningful product"
which is related to John Dewey and "experiential education", where
experience is central, there is interaction (internal needs/goals of a
person) and continuity (from experience to experience).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiential_education
Papert was a proponent of bringing IT to the classrooms. He developed
the Logo programming language (for writing simple programs to manipulate
a Turtle on a screen, drawing pictures, thereby learn math, etc.) He
wrote "Mindstorms: Children Computers and Powerful Ideas" (1980). Lego
Mindstorms were named after the book. His Epistemology and Learning
Research Group was a forerunner of the MIT Media Lab. He influenced
Alan Kay, who led the team that developed Smalltalk at Xerox PARC, in
part for constructionist learning, and who later created Squeak. Papert
was hurt badly in an accident in 2006.
"Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on
acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use
what one already knows". "Papert's principle" described in Marvin
Minsky's "Society of the Mind":
http://www.papert.org/articles/PapertsPrinciple.html
Edith Ackermann's paper seems like a good comparison of Piaget's and
Papert's views:
http://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget%20_%20Papert.pdf
In 1997, I moved to Lithuania and met Kestas Augutis, a hermit living in
a swamp, but teaching kids computers (DOS, 286s, 386s) at the local
school. The "Mindstorms" book had been translated into Lithuania, and
the Logo language was and is popular:
http://www.logo.lt http://www.jkm.lt/LOGO/2011/
Kestas had noteworthy visions of education, including that every child
should write three books:
* an encyclopedia, organized as a network
* a thesaurus, organized as a hierarchy
* a chronicle, organized as a sequence
These three books would be the outcome of the child's education, would
show that they were ready for the world, and would be what they would
build on throughout their life. He also thought every child should help
build a house, as he did with his father. Kestas died in 1998 at the
age of 43.
I liked his "three books" idea and, for my first project, I tried to
write software for organizing thoughts in those three ways. Then I
learned about TheBrain and MindManager and realized that there was a
need for an import/export format (or modeling language) for getting
collections of thoughts in and out of such tools. That led to Mindset
http://www.ms.lt/mindset.html in 2001. (I was told by HP Bristol Labs
that it was 10 years too early, but now in the age of Twitter, it might
be timely.)
I made a list of examples to check whether information gets organized in
sequences, hierarchies and networks, and surprisingly, I found out that
it never does! Instead, it gets organized in pairs of these
structures. For example, a sequence of historical events quickly
becomes unwieldy and so it is reorganized into a hierarchy and becomes a
"chronicle". I observed six types:
* chronicle: sequence -> hierarchy
* evolution: hierarchy -> sequence
* catalog: hierarchy -> network
* atlas: network -> hierarchy
* canon: sequence -> network
* tour: network -> sequence
See: http://www.worknets.org/papers/organizingthoughts.html
Is that a good start? Perhaps you can add some key ideas?
I'm very active in trying to understand how we figure things out,
http://www.selflearners.net/ways/
which is a key but neglected part of learning and thinking. It seems
that we are still in very early days to teach people how to learn and
think.
Children are likely operating on an implicit approach that is better
than anything we might explicitly teach them about learning. Compare
their natural language acquisition skills and our educational methods
for teaching language (or vision or faith or ...?)
I'm trying to do this from scratch. For example, what's worth
teaching? Last year I decided that what's worth teaching is right and
wrong. Reading, writing (if they are worthwhile) help us care about
others. Mathematics (if it is worthwhile) builds models which are to
some extent valid, and at some point invalid, and perhaps that helps us
appreciate the relationship of system and spirit. I still don't know.
Who knows? I'm working on my math ideas here:
http://www.gospelmath.com/Math/DeepIdeas
Who dares to teach children? I prefer to experiment on myself.
Who would like to learn about learning? along with me?
Andrius
Andrius Kulikauskas
http://www.selflearners.net
ms@ms.lt
(773) 306-3807
@selflearners
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