David Williamson Shaffer: Celebrating Seymour
Filed at 9:00 am on April 8, 2008 in Civic Engagement, Credibility, Games, Identity, Digital Divide
Seymour Papert was honored in a special session at the American Education Research Association, and his work provides a powerful example for the digital future—and the Macarthur Digital Media and Learning initiative.
Many of the readers of this blog have probably heard of Seymour Papert‘s work—and many more may have used the LOGO computer programming language he invented with colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Artifical Intelligence Lab in the 1970s. Some readers may also know that Seymour was in an accident 15 months ago that left him in a coma for several months, and that he is still in a long process of recovery.
Seymour’s work was honored at a special invited session at the recent American Education Research Association’s Annual meeting, and it was quite striking to see how many of the themes that run through the Macarthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative—and through this blog—are reflected, prefigured, and even shaped by Seymour’s ideas, writings, and research.
Obviously one key idea, which Seymour wrote about in Mindstorms and which shows up in many of the discussions of digital media and learning today, is that new technologies make it possible to think about learning new things, and about learning in new ways.
In Mindstorms, for example, Seymour wrote about how traditional physics curricula teach statics before dynamics, because the equations for static situations (a block resting on a table, for example) are simpler than the equations for dynamic situations (like a rocket landing on the moon). But, he argued, our experience of physics in the world—and therefore our intuition about physics—is of dynamics. With a computer, even young children can model dynamic situations, and thus mathematize, investigate, and understand them in powerful ways. New technologies suggest that we should, Seymour wrote, reverse the usual order in which we teach physics.
In a similar way, Jim Gee writes about how computer games let players do more than they have mastered, learning by doing first and understanding later (what he calls ”performance before competence”). My own work on epistemic games suggests that players can and should learn professional thinking at a young age, rather than waiting until college or graduate school. Jim Kaput and Jeremy Roschelle have made a similar argument about learning calculus in elementary school; Henry Jenkins and Nichole Pinkard write about young people becoming producers rather than consumers of media because digital technologies make it possible for them to “publish” work in ways that were not possible before.
What was particularly striking about the retrospective session on Seymour’s work, though, was how he saw the impact of new technologies as part of a much larger re-envisioning of education itself.
Much of the conversation about education today looks at how to make what we are already doing “better” without asking the critical question: Is this what we should be doing?
Thirty years ago in Mindstorms, Seymour wrote:
We are in the process of digging ourselves into an anachronism by preserving practices that have no rational basis beyond their historical roots in an earlier period of technological and theoretical development.
One of the things that has always impressed me about the Macarthur initiative—in this blog and by the work and conversations it represents—is a willingness to heed Seymour’s warning. A willingness to look at new educational possibilities and imperatives, rather than just trying to do the same old things a little faster, better, cheaper, or even more widely and equitably. To ask:
“What do kids really need in the digital age?”
not
“How can we teach better with computers?”
I’m not suggesting, of course, that all of the work in the initiative is shaped by Seymour’s ideas. But I do think that as a nascent field, we benefit from Seymour’s example in our work every time we strive for the education of the possible—every time we go back to first principles and ask:
What should we be doing in the first place?
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series of reflections on the AERA conference from members of the Epistemic Games Group at the University of Wisconsin. See the series index post here.
Next: David Hatfield: Games, Diversity, and Democracy > >
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