Papert Matters
I attended Gary Stager’s session entitled Papert Matters: Thinking About Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. If you’re not familiar with the work of Seymour Papert I can’t do it justice in a blog post. He’s worked with Piaget, was instrumental in the creation of Logo, LEGO Mindstorms, and was a founding member of the MIT Media Lab. His thoughts on learning and teaching go well beyond math or technology education.
Gary’s session was delivered in his usual entertaining and at times acerbic style. As usual, he was spot on in what he said. Below are some of my take aways from the session.
The Differences between Constructivism and Constructionism
- constructivism describes the process of constructing knowledge inside the head of the learner.
- constructionism is through active creation of something tangible/shareable outside of your head
Eight Big Ideas Behind Constructionism
- we learn by doing
- use technology as a building material
- hard is fun –fun and enjoying doesn’t mean “easy”
- learning to learn –you have to take charge of your own learning “Many students get the idea that the only way to learn is by being taught”
- taking time “To do anything important you have to learn to manage time for yourself”
- “you can’t get it right without getting it wrong. Nothing important works the first time. The only way to get it right is to look carefully at what happened when it went wrong. To succeed you need the freedom to goof on the way”
- teachers must be models. We need to let kids see us struggle to learn.
- learn how to learn with computers
