Seymour Papert 1983

If you haven't been exposed to Papert - check out some of his old videos from the 70s and 80s. [this video] - One really powerful idea he had was ensuring that we stay "somatic" with our computer instruction - playing with abstract concepts in a physical way. Watch the video - he explains it better than I can. [link] - One from the 1970s - perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems like some of these computers they're using don't even have monitors, just control the turtle. [link] - I also like this discussion - it reminds me that school is a prison for children, unless I work to elevate it beyond that. I just kind of watch these periodically to remind me of the wonder that computing was back then.

[link] [link] > I think you have it backwards. It's the new vision of computers (walled gardens, all the interesting logic hidden away in data centers, content consumption appliances instead of real computers) that is pale and sickly. Yes, these new trends are worrisome. But it's not the first time! I firmly believe that we'd all be better off if THIS guy had been the one to introduce computers to the common man: [link] [this video] To this day, Microsoft is putting computers in schools--but not LOGO, not free software, not unix, not lisp, not crates of disposable m68ks and bread boards... Nope, they are putting products in front of new generations eyeballs. Data can trump anecdotes, and it should when a culture believes they are doing the right thing but things are still going poorly and nobody understands why--at those times, by all means, collect some data and analyze it! But when "everybody knows" we're doing something wrong, and things are going poorly, then for the love of god use some common sense and stop doing it! The whole planet got 0wned by MS before many of us here were born--certainly before most of us were competent. So this is what we've got, this is where we are. Big picture: Where do we go from here? Immediate situation: don't become part of a new generation of MS fanboys. We don't need that.

There's a somewhat relevant concept in Seymour Papert's book Mindstorms. Papert talks about "body-syntonicity" where the act of drawing a circle on the computer screen with LOGO can be seen as bridging children’s sense and knowledge about their own bodies to something abstract. Young children would often pretend to be the LOGO turtle, acting out commands on the floor, during stages of planning a LOGO program, or while debugging LOGO code. It has also been a strategy for teachers to introduce programming and procedural ways of thinking. This video shows this in action (with some followup comments from Papert): [this video]