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| Historical & Critical
Pedagogies:
Seymour Papert
 People laughed at Seymour Papert in the sixties when he talked about
children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing
creativity. The idea of an inexpensive personal computer was then science
fiction. But Papert was conducting serious research in his capacity as a
professor at MIT. This research led to many firsts. It was in his laboratory
that children first had the chance to use the computer to write and to make
graphics. The Logo programming language was created there, as were the first
children's toys with built-in computation.
Today Papert is considered the world's foremost expert
on how technology can provide new ways to learn. He has carried out educational
projects on every continent, some of them in remote villages in developing
countries. He is a participant in developing the most influential cutting-edge
opportunities for children to participate in the digital world. He serves
on the advisory boards for MaMaMedia Inc. (whose founder, Idit Harel, was
once a doctoral student of his at MIT) and of the LEGO Mindstorms product
line (which was named after Papert's seminal book Mindstorms: Children, Computers
and Powerful Ideas).
Vision as Headlight The alternative
to giving far more attention to envisioning the future is to squander resources
on vainly trying to use new technologies to solve the problems of school-as-it-is
instead of seeking radically new opportunities to develop school-as-it can-be.
The conversation about technology in schools is trapped in the wrong subject.
The talk is all about "does the technology work" as a fix for the old. It
ought to be about developing and choosing between visions of how this immensely
powerful technology can support the invention of powerful new forms of learning
to serve levels of expectation higher than anything imagined in the past.
Consider an analogy. In the 1950s, the USA, hoping to be
the best at transatlantic travel, was developing a new ocean-liner. The SS
United States brought "success" by adding a few miles per hour to the speed
record for Atlantic crossing. But in the very same year the first commercial
jet-plane took to the sky and the record became irrelevant. Will current
attempts to make our schools the best of their kind only succeed in making
them the best of an obsolete kind?
Vision as Driving Force Better
test scores, Internet in every classroom, more teachers. These are undoubtedly
useful things, but they are not made of the same stuff as Martin Luther
King’s "I Have a Dream" speech; Abraham Lincoln’s words: "Of the
people, by the people, for the people"; Henry Ford’s vision of a car
everyone could afford to own; or Louis Pasteur’s vision of medicine
based on the revolutionary idea that germs cause disease. These are visions
that inspired people to perform great deeds.
The "Vision" Vision of Education
Vision is the key to how policy-makers and educators can participate in forging
an education to match the needs and opportunities of the new century. But
vision is also the key to what this education should be about. The primary
commitment of education should be about vision. Every citizen should enter
the world with: A proud vision of self as a powerful life-long learner, A
vibrant vision of a worth-while life ahead, An optimistic vision of a society
to be proud of, and The skills and the ethic needed to follow these visions.
The "Vision" Vision of School
School is a place where students learn largely by working
on projects that come from their own interests -- their own visions of a
place where they want to be, a thing they want to make or a subject they
want to explore. The contribution of technology is that it makes possible
projects that are both very difficult and very engaging.
It is a place where teachers do not provide information.
The teacher helps the student find information and learn skills -- including
some that neither knew before. They are always learning together. The teacher
brings wisdom, perspective and maturity to the learning. The student brings
freshness and enthusiasm. All the time they are all meeting new ideas and
building new skills that they need for their projects. Some of what they
learn belongs to the disciplines school has always recognized: reading, writing,
mathematics, science and history. Some belongs to new disciplines or cut
across disciplines. Most importantly, students and teachers are learning
the art and skill and discipline of pursuing a vision through the frustrating
and hard times of struggle and the rewarding times of getting closer to the
goal.
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Ray Kurzweil
 Ray Kurzweil's recent book "The Age of Spiritual Machines"
looks far into the future, when electronic devices may think, act, and even
feel emotions the way humans do. The technologist and renowned futurist's
vision ranges from human evolution and the Cambrian Explosion, when the number
of life forms on earth exploded, to not-yet-invented one-inch computer cubes
far more powerful than the human brain. The underlying theme: It's all
exponential, from the development of new technologies to the growth of economies
to the life spans of humans. "Well see 1,000 times more technological progress
in the 21st century than we saw in the 20th," said Kurzweil. "It's remarkable
how people fail to internalize the implications of this."
Awesome Period. When it comes
to implications, Kurzweil knows where of he speaks. A renowned MIT computer
scientist who also has a degree in literature, Kurzweil has started half
a dozen companies and played a crucial role in the development of cutting-edge
technologies in speech recognition and artificial intelligence, among other
fields.
His message these days is that we are witnessing an awesome
period during which technological growth accelerates in everything from
biotechnology to telecommunications to disk storage space. As a result, the
entire world will change right before our eyes in our lifetime, and decidedly
for the better.
Paradigm Shift. Kurzweil predicts
that at PC Expo in 2009 or 2019, attendees will wear tiny computers, and
images of slides and presentations will be beamed directly onto their retinas.
And after 2019, Kurzweil says life expectancy of humans in advanced countries
will increase by an entire year or more each year because of rapid-fire advances
in science that will treat currently intractable diseases.
This might sound far-fetched. But, says Kurzweil, all of
this makes more sense when people start to understand that the trajectory
of development curves in most aspects of the world are exponential -- but
the human condition forces us to view these curves as linear. "One has a
different view of the future if you view it exponentially, instead of in
linear terms," said Kurzweil.
Ultimately, computers will become so powerful that they
will dwarf the mental capabilities of mankind and even begin to take on human
characteristics such as spontanteity and impulsive discoveries. These same
computers will create communication systems between people that are far more
complex than voice or written transmissions, where massive amounts of knowledge
in the form of neural network patterns can be transferred from one wired
human brain to another.
Furthermore, Kurzweil hopes that these technology advances
will filter out to the rest of the world and enable the planet to finally
fulfill the most basic needs of all its inhabitants. In that optimistic view
he serves as the foil to fellow technologist Bill Joy, who published a
controversial essay in April warning of the dangers of machines that think
too much and too well. "I'm optimistic we'll make it through the next century,
but I'm hopeful we'll make it through less painfully than the last."
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Jean Piaget
 Through this research, Piaget reached a profound conclusion, mainly
that teaching needed to focus on how children were reasoning rather than
focusing on how well they might recall facts for a test.
Although criticized in the United States for making abrupt
assumptions (i.e., there are age zones where changes suddenly occur), Jean
Piaget has had an influential impact on the education of children. From his
studies of the development of cognitive abilities, Piaget distinguished four
stages to the mental growth of children. In the sensorimotor stage, occurring
from birth to age 2, the child is concerned with gaining motor control and
learning about physical objects. In the preoperational stage, from ages 2
to 7, the child is preoccupied with verbal skills. At this point the child
can name objects and reason intuitively. In the concrete operational stage,
from ages 7 to 12, the child begins to deal with abstract concepts such as
numbers and relationships. Finally, in the formal operational stage, ages
12 to 15, the child begins to reason logically and systematically.
His researches in developmental psychology and genetic
epistemology had one unique goal: how does knowledge grow? His answer is
that the growth of knowledge is a progressive construction of logically embedded
structures superseding one another by a process of inclusion of lower less
powerful logical means into higher and more powerful ones up to adulthood.
Therefore, children's logic and modes of thinking are initially entirely
different from those of adults.
Piaget's oeuvre is known all over the world and is still
an inspiration in fields like psychology, sociology, education, epistemology,
economics and law as witnessed in the annual catalogues of the Jean Piaget
Archives. He was awarded numerous prizes and honorary degrees all over the
world.
"The child can grasp a certain
operation only if he is capable,
at the same time, of correlating operations
by modifying them
in different well-determined ways for
instance, by inverting them."
Jean Piaget |
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Comenius
 Although generally known by the Latinized form of his name:
Comenius, he was born Jan Amos Komensky on 28 March 1592, in Moravia, now
part of the Czech Republic. In 1628 Comenius settled in Leszno, Poland, where
he wrote his first books calling for the reform of the education system:
The great didactic, The school of infancy, and The gate to languages unlocked.
These books earned him a reputation in other countries and he was invited
first to England, and then to Sweden and Hungary to reform school systems.
Comenius is best known for his contributions to teaching
techniques. Persuaded that education is not limited to the action of school
and family but is part of general social life, he believed that teachers
should understand how a child’s mind develops and learns. He was convinced
that all children, without regard to gender or social class, should attend
school and receive the same education so as to understand and accept the
civilization in which they live. Comenius was among the first to teach classical
languages by use of parallel passages of ancient and modern texts; and his
Visible world in pictures (1658) is believed to be the first illustrated
textbook for children.
To use the words of Jean Piaget, "Comenius was the first
to conceive the full-scale science of education". His educational objective
can be summed up in the phrase on the title page of The great didactic, "teaching
thoroughly all things to all men". He is also considered to be the first
educator to have put forward the concept of international education. His
ideas on education for everyone and for all peoples, and on the international
organization of public education make him a forerunner of many modern
institutions and trends of thought. Comenius’s efforts on behalf of
universal education earned him the title of "Teacher of Nations." |
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Aristotle
 Aristotle, was born in 384 B.C. in Stagira, in Thrace, at
the northern end of the Aegean, near Macedonia. Aristotle's father was the
family physician of King Philip of Macedonia. At the age of eighteen, Aristotle
came to Athens to study at Plato's Academy, and stayed there twenty years
until Plato's death in 348 B.C.
Five years after Plato's death, Aristotle took a position
as tutor to King Philip of Macedonia's son Alexander. It is not clear what
impact Aristotle's lessons had, but over the next thirteen years Alexander
organized Greece as a federation of city states, conquered Persia, the Middle
East, Egypt, southern Afghanistan, some of Central Asia and the Punjab in
India. He founded Greek cities in many places, the greatest being Alexandria
in Egypt, which in fact became the most important center of Greek science
later on, and without which all of Greek learning might have been lost.
Aristotle Founds the Lyceum Aristotle
came back to Athens in 335 B.C., and spent the next twelve years running
his own version of an academy, which was called the Lyceum, named after the
place in Athens where it was located, an old temple of Apollo. (French high
schools are named lycee after Aristotle's establishment.) Aristotle's preferred
mode of operation was to spend a lot of time walking around talking with
his colleagues, then write down his arguments. The Aristotelians are often
called the Peripatetics: people who walk around.
Aristotle wrote extensively on all subjects: politics,
metaphysics, ethics, logic and science. He didn't care for Plato's rather
communal Utopia, in which the children raised by everybody, because for one
thing he feared the children would be raised by nobody. His ideal society
was one run by cultured and educated people.
Aristotle's Achievements Aristotle's
philosophy laid out an approach to the investigation of all natural phenomena,
to determine form by detailed, systematic work, and thus arrive at final
causes. His logical method of argument gave a framework for putting knowledge
together, and deducing new results. He created what amounted to a fully-fledged
professional scientific enterprise, on a scale comparable to a modern university
science department. It must be admitted that some of his work - unfortunately,
some of the physics - was not up to his usual high standards. He evidently
found falling stones a lot less interesting than living creatures. Yet the
sheer scale of his enterprise, unmatched in antiquity and for centuries to
come, gave an authority to all his writings.
It is perhaps worth reiterating the difference between
Plato and Aristotle, who agreed with each other that the world is the product
of rational design, that the philosopher investigates the form and the universal,
and that the only true knowledge is that which is irrefutable. The essential
difference between them was that Plato felt mathematical reasoning could
arrive at the truth with little outside help, but Aristotle believed detailed
empirical investigations of nature were essential if progress was to be made
in understanding the natural world.
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