[Its.an.education.project] untangling constructionism

[Walter Bender]

Have you read Marvin Minksy's essays?  He is touching on many of these themes:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Marvin_Minsky_essays

-walter

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 8:44 AM,  <Andreas.Trawoeger at wgkk.at> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>