[Its.an.education.project] untangling constructionism

[Andreas.Trawoeger at wgkk.at]

Hi Walter!

"Walter Bender" <walter.bender at gmail.com> schrieb am 02.05.2008 13:21:29:

> The key point behind Sugar in my mind has been simply that we want a
> learning environment that will skew the odds that the teachers and
> children will engage in a culture of learning that involves both
> personal expression and a culture of critique. It was never intended
> that "learn through doing" be the only way of learning and certainly
> is not anti-teacher.
> 
> The one point that Seymour and I argued about quite a bit was the role
> of collaboration. Tools such as Microworlds tend to be solo
> activities--although there can be a culture of sharing around the
> activity. With Sugar, we strive to add additional affordances for
> communication and sharing so that it would, again, be more likely that
> children and their mentors would interact.
> 
> As Bernie points out, the connection to FOSS is a cultural one more
> than a technical one.

My personal favourite is Celesin Freinet. Who bought his kids a printing 
press and thought them typesetting to enable them to print their own 
school books and newspapers.

Kids can be wonderful in teaching each other. But you have to mix age 
groups (the older have to teach the younger) and really encourage them to 
do so.

In normal classes kids are discouraged to interact with each other and if 
it's done it is normally called chatting or cheating. Additionally there 
is also almost no interaction between kids of different age groups.

This is an enormous loss, because quite often a person that had exactly 
the same problem a short while ago can be much more helpful than the best 
expert.

Couple of weeks ago I saw a girl aged about twelve teaching a younger girl 
how to enable Bluetooth on her mobile phone to be able to exchange 
ringtones for free. 

It was wonderful to watch them and I hope we will help fostering such a 
culture of sharing and teaching each other.


cu andreas

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