Can laptop computers put the “C” (for constructionism) in Learning?
Published in the October 1998 issue of Curriculum Administrator

© 1998 – Gary S. Stager

“…Only inertia and prejudice, not economics or lack of good educational ideas stand in the way of providing every child in the world with the kinds of experience of which we have tried to give you some glimpses. If every child were to be given access to a computer, computers would be cheap enough for every child to be given access to a computer.” - Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon (1971)

The laptop is flexible, portable, personal and powerful
Students and teachers may use the computer whenever and wherever they need to. The laptop is a personal laboratory for intellectual exploration and creative expression. Learning extends beyond the walls and hours of the school.

The laptop helps to professionalize teachers
Teachers equipped with professional tools view themselves more professionally. Computers are much more likely to be integrated into classroom practice when every student has one.

Provocative models of learning will emerge
Teachers need to be reacquainted with the art of learning before they are able to create rich supportive learning environments for their students. The computer allows different ways of thinking, knowing and expressing ones own ideas to emerge. The continuous collection of learning stories serves as a catalyst for rethinking the nature of teaching and learning.

Gets schools out of the computer business
Laptops are a cost-effective alternative to building computer labs, buying special furniture and installing costly wiring. Students keep laptops for an average of three years, a turnover rate rarely achieved by schools. Built-in modems provide students with net access outside of school. The school can focus resources on projection devices, high-quality peripherals and professional development.

Since my work with the world’s first two “laptop schools” in 1990, I’ve helped dozens of similar schools (public and private) around the world make sense of teaching and learning in environments with ubiquitous computing. My own experience and research by others has observed the following outcomes for students and teachers.

Learner Outcomes

• Students take enormous pride in their work.
• Individual and group creativity flourishes.
• Multiple intelligences and ways of knowing are in ample evidence.
• Connections between subject areas become routine.
• Learning is more social.
• Work is more authentic, personal & often transcends the assignment.
• Social interactions tend to me more work-related.
• Students become more naturally collaborative and less competitive.
• Students develop complex cooperative learning strategies.
• Kids gain benefit from learning alongside of teachers.
• Learning does not end when the bell rings or even when the assignment is due.

Teacher Outcomes

• The school’s commitment to laptops convinces teachers that computers are not a fad. Every teacher is responsible for use.
• Teachers reacquaint themselves with the joy and challenge of learning something new.
• Teachers experience new ways of thinking, learning and expressing one’s knowledge.
• Teachers become more collaborative with colleagues and students.
• Authentic opportunities to learn with/from students emerge.
• Sense of professionalism and self-esteem are elevated.
• Thoughtful discussions about the nature of learning and the purpose of school become routine and sometimes passionate.
• Teachers have ability to collaborate with teachers around the world.
• New scheduling, curriculum and assessment structures emerge.

“I believe that every American child ought to be living in the 21st century… This is why I like laptops – you can take them home. I m not very impressed with computers that schools have chained to desks. I m very impressed when kids have their own computers because they are liberated from a failed bureaucracy …

You can’t do any single thing and solve the problem. You have to change the incentives; you’ve got to restructure the interface between human beings. If you start redesigning a learning system rather than an educational bureaucracy, if you have incentives for kids to learn, and if you have 24-hour-a-day, 7-day a week free standing opportunities for learning, you’re going to make a bigger breakthrough than the current bureaucracy. The current bureaucracy is a dying institution.” – U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich (Wired Magazine, August 1995)

When Seymour Papert and Newt Gingrich are on the same side of an issue, it is hard to imagine an opposing view. The fact that computers are smaller, cheaper and more powerful has had a tremendous impact on society. Soon that impact will be realized by schools. Laptop schools are clearly on the right side of history and will benefit from the experience of being ahead of trend.

Much has been said recently about the virtues of anytime anywhere learning. Laptops certainly can deliver on that promise. Integrated productivity packages may be used to write, manipulate data and publish across the curriculum. However, the power of personal computing as a potential force for learning and as a catalyst for school reform transcends the traditional view of using computers to “do work.” I encourage school leaders considering an investment in laptops to dream big dreams and conceive of ways that universal computing can help realize new opportunities for intellectual development and creative expression.

In the post-Simon Cowell years of American Idol, the quality of judging has become tedious, cloying and adoring of the young contestants. There has been little instructive teaching for the kids competing or the audience at home. That’s a shame because American Idol used to feature legendary artists every week as mentors who would perform a quickie masterclass for contestants (and audience) who otherwise would enjoy no such access to expertise. One of my favorite mentors a few years back was Harry Connick, Jr. It was also one of the lowest rated episodes of the season. Despite the relative (un)popularity of Mr. Connick, he taught the kids, played with them and wrote charts suited to their talents. He was a great mentor.

I was thrilled to see Harry back on Idol again this week and he ignited a firestorm when he refused to agree with the incredibly terrible advice being dispensed by an incredibly disingenuous Randy Jackson. You can the details of his awful advice in the well-written article linked below, but suffice to say that Mr. Jackson knows better. He may not have the talent and musical knowledge of Harry Connick, Jr., but he has enjoyed a great deal of success in the music business. If Randy Jackson had been paying for Kree’s studio time as a producer, his advice would have been exactly the same as that of Mr. Connick.

After Wednesday night’s show, an educator colleague of mine posted the following message on Facebook:

1. As Randy Jackson reminds us constantly, “this is a singing competition!” Singers should be able to sing anything.
2. The #1 album today is by Michael Bublé, a guy who sings the Great American Songbook. These classic songs are contemporary hits.

“The point Connick tried to make, which Jackson didn’t want to hear, was that the show’s contestants didn’t know these classic songs well enough to take liberties with their melodies and lyrics. In doing so, they were murdering the music.” – John Stark

Yes siree folks, on Saturday April 27th,  I will be premiering my new one-man show, “Less Us, More Them,” as a newly ordained hipster at TEDxNYED in Brooklyn, NY. (I hear they grow trees there now)

Why am I a hypocrite? Need you ask?

I dislike TED. It’s the playground of overprivileged rich kids sharing a distasteful libertarian philosophy that would make Ayn Rand say, “Wow, you boys are immature.” TED celebrates and accentuates the short attention span of our culture. It confers expertise and celebrity on anyone who can rhyme, speak quickly or has a YouTube video.

Thanks to TED, we can now watch three self-important and self-proclaimed experts in the span of one Kardashians episode!

Disclaimer: Before I say anymore mean things about TED, I must state that the fine women and men who organize TEDxNYED are terrific human beings and educators who stage a world-class event with terrific speakers.

When TED began, it was a small gathering of smart and talented folks. Each attendee was also a presenter. For the swells who can afford to be invited to TED, they undoubtedly enjoy a rich social learning experience. For the rest of us peasants, we’re the reason TED can sell Rolex and BMW commercials. TED is a television show. We get to peep in on the action from our PCs like we’re hiding in the basement  watching naughty videos.

In addition to my sense that too many people believe that TED is the only place to find smart people or ideas, the format of TED Talks disturbs me.

Our society needs more dialogue and a whole lot fewer monologues. The US Senate has become a TED Talk where nothing is accomplished. We cannot solve tough problems by giving speeches. We need collective action, not soaring rhetoric. I would love nothing more than to discuss teaching computer programming with fellow TEDxNYED speaker Douglas Rushkoff or matters of school reform with the other terrific speakers.  Imagine what one might learn from a discussion between the sorts of people who perform TED talks!

Schools that make kids perform TED Talks do so because the format is consistent with a tradition of oral book reports or making PowerPoint presentations on a topic you don’t care about to a bored audience.

There are indeed some excellent TED Talks made by remarkable humans. In fact,  I wrote a blog post recommending several TED Talks to share with kids.

For those of you who can’t attend TEDxNYED in-person, I’m sure that the event will be leaked/streamed/piddled/wee-weed or whatever those crazy kids are doing today on the Internets. Check the http://tedxnyed.com/2013/ for more info!

In the meantime, I humbly offer my last TED Talk.

Coming to a Classroom Near You!

A version of this was published in the August 2001 issue of Curriculum Administrator Magazine

At our annual family dinner to celebrate the end of another grueling school year, each of our children reflected upon the lessons learned and the obstacles overcome during the previous ten months. Our seventh-grade daughter, who will be referred to by the top-secret code name of Miffy, shared with us a new pedagogical strategy and use of educational technology not yet conceived of during my school years.

What was this innovation? Was it project-based learning, multiage collaboration, constructionism, online publishing, modeling and simulation? Nope, it was Disney films.

Yup, that’s right. Disney films (and several others too). The following is a partial list of the films shown this year during class time by my daughter’s teachers.

The ingenious remedy chosen was to
spend much of the last week of school watching a series of instructional
videos called, “Real Life 101.” While hardly as educational as Mulan, these shows turned out to be far more entertaining. The audience was repeatedly reminded, “you
don’t need a college degree for this career, but it wouldn’t hurt! “

The hosts of the series, Maya, Megan, Zooby and Josh (there always seems to be a Josh) introduced exciting career options for the high-tech interconnected global economy of the 21^st century. The career options included the following: Snake handler, projectionist, naval explosive expert, skydive instructor, rafting instructor, diamond cutter, roller coaster technician, exterminator, auctioneer, alligator wrestler and my personal favorite growth industry – rodeo clown!

You can’t make this stuff up! The worksheet that followed the Career Day substitute asked each child to rank these careers in order of preference and write a few sentences explaining their number one choice.

If I wanted my children
to watch television, I’d let them stay home. At least at home
they could watch something educational like “Behind the Music:
The Mamas and the Papas”or learn about Beat poetry from the “Many
Loves of Dobie Gillis. ”  At least then they would have a chance to learn something more than the unfortunate lessons being modeled by their schools.

1. A gee-whiz tale of a teacher doing something obvious once, accompanied by breathless commentary about their personal courage/discovery/innovation/genius and followed by a steam of comments applauding the teacher’s courage/discovery/innovation/genius. Even when the activity is fine, it is often the sort of thing taught to first-semester student teachers.
2. An article discovering an idea that millions of educators have known for decades, but this time with diminished expectations
3. An ad for some test-prep snake oil or handful of magic beans
4. An “app” designed for kids to perform some trivial task, because “it’s so much fun, they won’t know they’re learning.” Thanks to sites like Kickstarter we can now invest in the development of bad software too!
5. A terrible idea detrimental to teachers, students or public education
6. An attempt to redefine a sound progressive education idea in order to justify the status quo

I don’t just click on a random link from a stranger, I follow the directions set by a trusted colleague – often a person in a position of authority. When I ask them, “Did you read that article you posted the link to?” the answer is often, “I just re-read it and you’re right. It’s not good.” Or “I’m not endorsing the content at the end of the link, “I’m just passing it along to my PLN.”

First of all, when you tell me to look at something, that is an endorsement. Second, you are responsible for the quality, veracity and ideological bias of the information you distribute. Third, if you arenot taking responsibility for the information you pass along, your PLN is really just a gossip mill.

If you provide a link accompanied by a message, “Look at the revolutionary work my students/colleagues/I did,” the work should be good and in a reasonable state of completion. If not, warn me before I click. Don’t throw around terms like genius, transformative or revolutionary when you’re linking to a kid burping into Voicethread!! If you do waste my time looking at terrible work, don’t blame me for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.

Just today, two pieces of dreck were shared with me by people I respect.

1) Before a number of my Facebook friends shared this article, I had already read it in the ASCD daily “Smart” Brief. Several colleagues posted or tweeted links to the article because they yearn for schools to be better – more learner-centered, engaging and meaningful.

One means to those ends is project-based learning.  I’ve been studying, teaching and speaking about project-based learning for 31 years. I’m a fan. I too would like to help every teacher on the planet create the context for kids to engage in personally meaningful projects.

However, sharing the article, Busting myths about project-based learning, will NOT improve education or make classrooms more project-based. In fact, this article so completely perverts project-based learning that it spreads ignorance and will make classroom learning worse, not better.

This hideous article uses PBL, which the author lectures us isn’t just about projects (meaningless word soup), as a compliment to direct instruction, worksheets and tricking students into test-prep they won’t mind as much. That’s right. PBL is best friends with standardized testing and worksheets (perhaps on Planet Dummy). There is no need to abandon the terrible practices that squeeze authentic learning out of the school day. We can just pretend to bring relevance to the classroom by appropriating the once-proud term, project-based learning.

Embedding test-prep into projects as the author suggests demonstrates that the author really has no idea what he is talking about. Forcing distractions into a student’s project work robs them of agency and reduces the activity’s learning potential. The author is also pretty slippery in his use of the term, “scaffolding.” Some of the article doesn’t even make grammatical sense.

Use testing stems as formative assessments and quizzes.

The  article was written by a gentleman who leads professional development for the Buck Institute, an organization that touts itself as a champion of project-based learning, as long as those projects work backwards from dubious testing requirements. This article does not represent innovation. It is a Potemkin Village preserving the status quo while allowing educators to delude themselves into feeling they are doing the right thing.

ASCD should be ashamed of themselves for publishing such trash. My colleagues, many with advanced degrees and in positions where they teach project-based learning, should know better!

If you are interested in effective project-based learning, I’m happy to share these five articles with you.

2) Another colleague urged all of their STEM and computer science-interested friends to explore a site raising money to develop “Fun and Creative Computer Science Curriculum.” Whenever you see fun and creative in the title of an education product, run for the hills! The site is a fund-raising venture to get kids interested in computer science. This is something I advocate every day. What could be so bad?

Thinkersmith teaches computer science with passion and creativity. Right now, we have 20 lessons created, but only 3 packaged. Help us finish by summer!

My experience in education suggests that once you package something, it dies. Ok Stager, I know you’re suspicious of the site and the product searching for micro-investors, but watch the video they produced. It has cute kids in it!

So, I watched the video…

Guess what? Thinkersmith teaches computer science with passion and creativity – and best of all? YOU DON’T EVEN NEED A COMPUTER!!!!!!

Fantastic! Computer science instruction without computers! This is like piano lessons with a piano worksheet. Yes siree ladies and gentleman, there will be no computing in this computer science instruction.

A visitor to the site also has no idea who is writing this groundbreaking fake curriculum or their qualifications to waste kids’ time.

Here we take one of the jewels of human ingenuity, computer science, a field impacting every other discipline and rather than make a serious attempt to bring it to children with the time and attention it deserves, chuckleheads create cup stacking activities and simplistic games.

There are any number of new “apps” on the market promising to teach kids about computer science and programming while we should be teaching children to be computer scientists and programmers.

At the root of this anti-intellectualism is a deep-seated belief that teachers are lazy or incompetent. Yet, I have taught thousands of teachers to teach programming to children and in the 1980s, perhaps a million teachers taught programming in some form to children. The software is better. The hardware is more abundant, reliable and accessible. And yet, the best we can do is sing songs, stack cups and color in 2013?

What really makes me want to scream is that the folks cooking up all of these “amazing” ideas seem incapable of using the Google or reading a book. There is a great deal of collected wisdom on teaching computer science to children, created by committed experts and rooted in decades worth of experience.

If you want to learn how to teach computer science to children, ask me, attend my institute, take a course. I’ll gladly provide advice, share resources, recommend expert colleagues and even help debug student programs. If you put forth some effort, I’m happy to match it.

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.
-Sir Joshua Reynolds

Don’t lecture me about the power of social media, the genius of your PLN, the imperative for media literacy or information curation if you are unwilling to edit what you share. I share plenty of terrible articles via Twitter and Facebook, but I always make clear that I am doing so for purposes or warning or parody. The junk is always clearly labeled.

Please filter the impurities out of your social media stream.You have a responsibility to your audience.

Thank you

* Let the hysterical flaming begin! Comments are now open.

Our schools are in the midst of a mass panic not seen since the swine flu epidemic–standardized testing. We are swept up in a wave of “the tests are important,” “parents demand accountability,” and “they make us do it.” This uncritical groupthink will destroy public education unless we wake up, form alliances and tell the public the truth.

Democrats and Republicans alike caught a bad case of testing fever and voted overwhelmingly for No Child Left Behind, perhaps the greatest intrusion of the federal government into local education in history. NCLB will compel states to test their students every year from grades 2-12 in order to rank schools and shut many of them down. Our Proctor-in-Chief, George W. Bush, is extending the joys of standardized testing into Head Start.

Since many administrators and school board members have no idea how many standardized tests they need to administer, NCLB will undoubtedly add additional tests and draconian consequences to a school year already diminished by weeks of testing and test preparation.

Without so much as a public debate on what we would want for our schools, testing mania has been allowed to spread like a plague on our educational process. If some testing is good, more is better. If the youngest students can’t yet hold a pencil or read, of course they can bubble-in answers to math problems for several hours at a time. Head Start should be a reading program. You got a problem with three-year-olds reading? Why then, you must suffer from “the bigotry of low expectations.” The end of recess does not affect obesity. Replacing art and music with scripted curricula won’t lead to increased school violence or discipline problems. Down is up, black is white.

Education Week’s annual report “Technology Counts,” states an alarming trend–schools are not spending enough money on using computers for the purposes of standardized testing! Apparently, the years I’ve spent helping schools use computers to enhance learning have been wasted. It never occurred to me that computers should be used to replace #2 pencils and scan sheets. Tech-based testing reminds me of the old Gaines Burger commercial that asked, “Is your dog getting enough cheese?”

The Education Week “research” is replete with charts and graphs designed to whip child-centered educators into line. EdWeek loves winners and losers nearly as much as the testing industry. Coincidentally, a giant publisher of standardized tests, textbooks and test preparation systems, funded their “study.”

In such a climate of confusion and hysteria, educators feel powerless. Parents trust that you will do the right thing. Misconceptions about high-stakes testing are amplified by an unwillingness to engage the community in conversation.

Getting Active
Inspired by Juanita Doyon’s terrific new book, Not With Our Kids You Don’t: Ten Strategies to Save Our Schools, and a desire to show my kids that you can make a difference, I decided to try my hand at activism.

I designed a flier answering some of the myths about standardized testing and telling parents that California state law allows them to exempt their child from the STAR tests. Two days before testing was to begin I stood in front of my daughter’s high school and passed out 150 fliers in about 10 minutes. I felt a bit creepy, but the kids told me that I was cool (a first).

I have since learned that 46 students opted out of the tests. That’s a one-third hit-rate. Not since the Pet Rock has a marketing effort been so successful with so little effort Think about it–a kid had to take a piece of paper from a stranger, bring it home, convince his parents to write a letter disobeying the wishes of the school and bring the letter back to school the next day. Perhaps the public isn’t as hungry for increased accountability as we have been led to believe?

One parent said she didn’t know her tax money was spent on standardized testing. Can you imagine the public being less engaged in a matter so important?

It is incumbent upon each of us to tell parents what we know and engage the community in serious discussions about schooling. We may find that we have many more allies than there are politicians telling us what’s best for kids.

I created Pencilsdown.org around 2000, long before today’s opt-out movement. It has been inactive for a number of years, but you may find a copy of the opt-out form I distributed back in 2003 here.

The year following my initial opt-out activism,I wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper urging parents to opt-out. Fearing a loss of federal money as a result of not making AYP due to testing resistance, the Torrance Unified School District lied to parents about the legitimacy of the testing process. I responded with a freedom of information request about funding, personnel, policy, costs and time dedicated to STAR testing. This tied the district office in knots for months. If I can find the request, I will share it.

Here is a list of recommended books for parents and educators interested in opposing standardized testing.

Based on a book chapter: Stager, G. S. (1997). Logo and Learning Mathematics-No Room for Squares. Logo: A Retrospective. D. L. Johnson and C. D. Maddux. Philadelphia, The Haworth Press: 153-169.

Abstract
The NCTM Standards state that fifty percent of all mathematics has been invented since World War II. (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989) Few if any of these branches of mathematical inquiry have found their way into the K-12 curriculum. This is most unfortunate since topics such as number theory, chaos, topology, cellular automata and fractal geometry may appeal to students unsuccessful in traditional math classes. These new mathematical topics tend to be more contextual, visual, playful and fascinating than adding columns of numbers or factoring quadratic equations. Logo provides a powerful medium for rich mathematical explorations and problem solving while providing a context in which students may fall in love with the beauty of mathematics. The examples in this paper are intended to spark the imaginations of teachers and explore several mathematical areas ripe for Logo-based investigations.

Introduction
While it may seem obvious to assert that computers are powerful computational devices, their impact on K-12 mathematics education has been minimal. (Suydam, 1990) More than a decade after microcomputers began entering schools, 84% of American tenth graders said they never used a computer in math class.(National Center for Educational Statistics, 1984) Computers provide a vehicle for “messing about” with mathematics in unprecedented learner-centered ways. “Whole language” is possible because we live in a world surrounded by words we can manipulate, analyze and combine in infinite ways. The same constructionist spirit is possible with “whole math” because of the computer. In rich Logo projects the computer becomes an object to think with – a partner in one’s thinking that mediates an ongoing conversation with self.

Many educators equate Logo with old-fashioned turtle graphics or suggest that Logo is for the youngest of children. Neither of these beliefs is true. Although traditional turtle graphics continues to be a rich laboratory in which students construct geometric knowledge, Logo is flexible enough to explore the entire mathematical spectrum. Logo continues to satisfy the claim that it has no threshold and no ceiling. (Harvey, 1982) Best of all, Logo provides a context in which children are motivated to solve problems and express themselves.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics recognizes Logo as a software environment that can assist schools in meeting the goals for the improvement of mathematics education. In fact, Logo is the only computer software specifically named in the document.

The Goals of the NCTM (1984) Standards for All Students

1. learn to value mathematics
2. become confident in their ability to do mathematics
3. become mathematical problem solvers
4. learn to communicate mathematically
5. learn to reason mathematically

The NCTM Standards state that fifty percent of all mathematics has been invented since World War II. (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989) Few if any of these branches of mathematical inquiry have found their way into the K-12 curriculum. This is most unfortunate since topics such as number theory, chaos, topology, cellular automata and fractal geometry may appeal to students unsuccessful in traditional math classes. These new mathematical topics tend to be more contextual, visual, playful and fascinating than adding columns of numbers or factoring quadratic equations. Logo provides a powerful medium for rich mathematical explorations and problem solving while providing a context in which students may fall in love with the beauty of mathematics.

Computer microworlds such as Logo turtle graphics and the topics of constructions and loci provide opportunities for a great deal of student involvement, In particular, the first two contexts serve as excellent vehicles for students to develop, compare and apply algorithms. (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989, p. 159)

The examples in this paper are intended to spark the imaginations of teachers and explore several mathematical areas ripe for Logo-based investigations. The project ideas use MicroWorlds, the latest generation of Logo software designed by Seymour Papert and Logo Computer Systems, Inc. MicroWorlds extends the Logo programming environment through the addition of an improved user interface, multiple turtles, buttons, text boxes, paint tools, multimedia objects, sliders and parallelism.

Parallelism allows the computer to perform more than one function at a time. Most computer-users have never experienced parallelism or the emergent problem solving strategies it affords. MicroWorlds makes this powerful computer science concept concrete and usable by five year-olds. The parallelism of MicroWorlds makes it possible to explore some mathematical and scientific phenomena for the first time. Parallelism also allows more conventional problems to be approached in new ways.

Euclidian Geometry
One source of inspiration for student Logo projects is commercial software. Progressive math educators have found software like The Geometric Supposer and the more robust Geometers’ Sketchpad to be useful tools for exploring Euclidian geometry and performing geometric constructions. I noticed that while teachers may use these tools as extremely flexible blackboards, kids can pull down a menu and request a perpendicular bisector to be drawn without any deeper understanding than if the problem was solved with pencil and paper.

Could middle or high school students design collaboratively their own such tools? If so, they would gain a more intimate understanding of the related math concepts because of the need to “teach” the computer to perform constructions and measurements. Throughout this process, teams of students are asked to brainstorm questions, share what they know and define paths for further inquiry. Students as young as seventh grade have developed their own geometry toolkits in MicroWorlds.

Much of learning mathematics involves naming actions and relationships. Logo programming enhances the construction of mathematical knowledge through the process of defining and debugging Logo procedures. The personal geometry toolkits designed by students are used to construct geometric knowledge and questions worthy of further investigation. As understanding emerges the tool can be enhanced in order to investigate more advanced problems.

At the beginning of this project students are given a few tool procedures to start with. These procedures are designed to:

1. drop a point on the screen (each point is a turtle and in MicroWorlds every turtle knows where it is in space)
2. compute the distance between two points

With these two sets of tool procedures students can create tools necessary for generating geometric constructions, measuring constructions and comparing figures. MicroWorlds’ paint tools may be used to color-in figures and to draw freehand shapes. The procedural nature of Logo allows for higher level functions to be built upon previous procedures. Figures 1a, 1b & 1c are screen shots of one student’s geometry toolkit.

Probability and Chance
Children use MicroWorlds to explore probability via traditional data collection problems involving coin or dice tosses and in projects of their own design. Logo’s easy to use RANDOM function appears in the video games, races, board games and sound effects of many students.

Perhaps the best use of probability I have encountered in a MicroWorlds project is in a project I like to call, “Sim-Middle Ages.” In this project a student satisfied the requirements for the unit on medieval life in a quite imaginative fashion. Her project allows the user to specify the number of plots of land, number of seeds to plant and the number of mouths to feed. MicroWorlds then randomly determines the amount of plague, pestilence, rainfall and rate of taxation to be encountered by the farmer.

On the next page there are two buttons. One button announces if you live or die in the middle ages and the other tells why, based on the user-determined and random variables. You may then go back and adjust any of the values in an attempt to survive. (figures 2a, 2b and 2c)

Things happen in the commercial simulations, but users often don’t understand the causality. In student-created simulations, students use mathematics in a very powerful way. They develop their own algorithms to model historical or scientific phenomena. This type of project can connect mathematics with history, economics, physical science and life science in very powerful ways.

Number Theory
“Number theory, at one time considered the purest of pure mathematics is simply the study of whole numbers, including prime numbers. This abstract field, once a playground for a few mathematicians fascinated by the curious properties of numbers, now has considerable practical value… in fields like cryptography.”(Peterson, 1988) Software environments, such as MicroWorlds, provide a concrete environment in which students may experiment with number theory. “Experimental math” projects benefit from Logo’s ability to control experiments, easily adjust a variable and collect data. Kids control all of the variables in an experiment and can swim around in the beaker with the molecules. Intellectual immersion in large pools of numbers is possible due to computer access. The scientific method comes alive through mathematical experimentation.

A fascinating experimental math problem to explore with students is known as the 3N problem. The problem is also known by several other names, including: Ulam’s conjecture, the Hailstone problem, the Syracuse problem, Kakutani’s problem, Hasse’s algorithm, and the Collatz problem. The 3N problem has a simple set of rules. Put a number in a “machine” (Logo procedure) and if it is even, cut in half – if it is odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1. Then put the new value back through the machine. For example, 5 becomes 16, 16 becomes 8, becomes 4, 4 becomes 2, 2 becomes 1, and 1 becomes 4. Mathematicians have observed that any number placed into the machine will eventually be reduced to a repeating pattern of 4…2…1…

While this is an interesting pattern, what can children explore? Well, it seems that some numbers take a long time to get to 4…2…1… I call each of the numbers that appear before 4, a “generation.” I often expose students to this problem by trying a few starting numbers and leading a discussion. Typing SHOW 3N 1 takes 1 generation to get to 4. Students may then predict that the number 2 will take two generations and they would be correct. They may then hypothesize that the number entered will equal the number of generations required to get to 4. However, 3N 3 takes 5 generations! I then ask, “how can we modify our hypothesis to save face or make it look like we were at least partially right?” Kids then suggest that the higher the number tried, the longer it will take to get to 4…2…1… They may even construct tables of the previous data and make numerous predictions for how the number 4 will behave only to find that 4 takes zero generations (for obvious reason that it is 4).

I then tell the class that they should find a number that takes a long time to get to 4…2…1… I do not specify what I mean by a “long time” in order to let the young mathematicians agree on their own limits. The notion of limits is a powerful mathematical concept which helps focus inquiry and provides the building blocks of calculus. Students often test huge numbers before realizing that they need to be more deliberate in their experimentation. The working definition of “long time” changes as the experiment continues. Eleven generations may seem like a long time until a group of kids test the number 27. Gasps and a chorus of wows can be heard when 27 takes 109 generations. Then I ask the class to tell me some of the characteristics of 27. Students often list some of the following hypotheses:

We then test each of the hypotheses and discard most of them. The cubed number hypothesis is worthy of further investigation. If we test the next cubed number, 4, with SHOW 3N 4 * 4 * 4 we find that it does not take long to get to 4. One student may suggest that only odd perfect cubes take a long time. I then suggest that the other students find a way to disprove this hypothesis by finding either an odd perfect cube that doesn’t take a long time or an even cube that does. Both exist.

to 3n :number
print :number
ifelse even? :number [3n :number / 2] [3n (:number * 3) + 1]
end

to even? :number
output 0 = remainder :number 2
end

A simple tool procedure may be added to count the number of generations for the “researcher.” The more you play with this problem, the more questions emerge. A bit more programming allows you to ask the computer to graph the experimental data or keep track of numbers that take longer than X generations to reach 4…2…1… Running such experiments overnight may lead to other interesting discoveries, like the numbers 54 and 55 each take 110 generations. What can adjacent numbers have in common? 108, 109 and 110 each take 111 generations. Could this pattern have something to do with place value? How could you find out? (see figures 4a & 4b)

The joy in this problem for kids and mathematicians is connected to the sense that every time you think you know something, it may be disproven. This playfulness can motivate students to view mathematics as a living discipline, not as columns of numbers on a worksheet. For many students, problems like 3N provide a first opportunity to think about the behavior of numbers. “For the most part, school math and science becomes the acquisition of facts that have been found by people who call themselves scientists.” (Goldenberg, 1993) Logo and experimental math provides another opportunity to provide children with authentic mathematical experiences.

Fractal Geometry and Chaos Theory
The contemporary fields of fractal geometry and chaos theory are the result of modern computation. Many learners find the visual nature of fractal geometry and the unpredictability of chaos fascinating. Logo’s turtle graphics and recursion make fractal explorations possible. The randomness, procedural nature and parallelism of MicroWorlds brings chaos theory within the reach of students.

Fractals are self-similar shapes with finite area and infinite perimeter. Fractals contain structures nested within one another with each smaller structure a miniature version of the larger form. Many natural forms can be represented as fractions, including ferns, mountains and coastlines.

Chaos theory suggests that systems governed by physical laws can undergo transitions to a highly irregular form of behavior. Although chaotic behavior appears random, it is governed by strict mathematical conditions. Chaos theory causes us to reexamine many of the ways in which we understand the world and predict natural phenomena. Two simple principles can be used to describe Chaos theory:

1. From order (a predictable set of rules), chaos emerges.
2. From a random set of rules, order emerges.

MicroWorlds may be used to explore both chaos and fractal geometry simultaneously. Figure 3shows two similar fractals called the Sierpinski Gasket. The fractal on the left is created by a complex recursive procedure. The fractal on the right is generated by a seemingly random algorithm discovered by Michael Barnsley of Georgia Institute of Technology. The Barnsley Fractal is created by placing three dots on the screen and then randomly choosing one of three points, going half way towards it and putting another dot. This process is repeated infinitely and a Sierpinski Gasket emerges. In fact, if you grab the turtle from the “chaos fractal” and move it somewhere else on the screen, it immediately finds its way back into the “triangle” and never leaves again. The multiple turtles and parallelism of MicroWorlds makes it possible to explore the two different ways of generating a similar fractal simultaneously. Experimental changes can always be made to the procedures and the results may be immediately observed.

Animation
One of the most attractive aspects of MicroWorlds is its ability to create animations. Students are excited by the ease with which they can create even complex animations. MicroWorlds animations require the same mathematical and reasoning skills as turtle graphics. The difference is that the turtle’s pen is up instead of down and the physics of motion comes into play. Multiple turtles and “flip-book” style animation enhance planning and sequencing skills. Even the youngest students use Cartesian coordinates and compass headings routinely when positioning turtles and drawing elaborate pictures.

Perhaps the best part of MicroWorlds animation is that the student-created animation and related mathematics are often employed in the service of interdisciplinary projects. Using animation to navigate a boat down the ancient Nile, simulate planetary orbits, design a video game or energize a book report provides a meaningful context for using and learning mathematics.

Functions and Variables
Logo’s procedural inputs and mathematical reporters give kids concrete practice with variables. Functions/reporters/operations are easy to create in MicroWorlds and can even be the input to another function. For example, the expression SHOW DOUBLE DOUBLE DOUBLE 5 or REPEAT DOUBLE 2 [fd DOUBLE DOUBLE 20 RT DOUBLE 45] are possible by writing a simple procedure, such as:

to double :number
output :number * 2
end

Many teachers are unaware of Logo’s ability to perform calculations (up through trigonometric functions) in the command center or in procedures. SHOW 3 * 17 typed in the command center will display 51 and REPEAT 8 [fd 50 rt 360 / 8] will properly draw an eight-sided regular polygon.

A favorite project I like to conduct with fifth and sixth graders creates a fraction calculator. First we decide to represent fractions as a (Logo) list containing a numerator and a denominator. Then we write procedures to report the numerator and denominator of a fraction. From there, the class can easily collaborate to write a procedure which adds two fractions. Some kids can even make the procedure add fractions with different denominators. From there, all of the standard fraction operations can be written as Logo procedures by groups of children. The next challenge the kids typically tackle is the subtraction of fractions.

One day, a fifth grader, Billy, made an interesting discovery while testing his subtraction “machine.” Billy typed, SHOW SUBTRACT [1 3] [2 3] (meaning 1/3 – 2/3), and -1 3 appeared in the command center. I noticed the negative fraction and mentioned that when I was in school we were taught that fractions had to be positive. Therefore, there is no such thing as a negative fraction.

Billy exclaimed, “Of course there is! The computer gave one to us!” This provoked a discussion about “garbage in – garbage out,” the importance of debugging and the need for conventions agreed upon by mathematicians and scientists. We even discussed the difference between symbols and numbers. Billy listened to this discussion impatiently and announced, “That’s ridiculous because I can give you an example of a negative fraction in real-life.”

Billy said, “I have a birthday cake divided into six slices and eight people arrive at my party. I’m short two sixths of a cake – negative 2/6!” He went on to say, “If the computer can give us a negative fraction and I can provide a real-life example of one, then there must be negative fractions.” The hazy memory of my math education diminished the confidence required to argue with this budding mathematician. Instead, I agreed to do some research.

I looked in mathematics dictionaries, but found more ambiguity than clarity. I also spent several weeks consulting with math teachers. Most of these people either dismissed the question of negative fractions as silly or complained that they lacked the time to adequately deal with Billy’s dilemma. After a bit more time, I ran into a university mathematician at a friend’s birthday party. Roger did not dismiss Billy’s question. Instead he asked for my email address. The next morning the following email message awaited me.

Date: Sun, 06 Nov 1994 09:52:44 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: fractions
To: gstager@pepperdine.edu

Dear Gary,

It was fun to have a chat at Ihor’s party. This morning I got out my all time favorite source of information on things worthwhile, the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. (With its articles by James Clerk Maxwell et al.) It is very clear. Fractions come about by dividing unity into parts, and are thus by definition positive.

Interesting.
Yours,
Roger

Now what should a teacher tell Billy? In the past, you might hope that he forgot the matter. Today, Billy can post his discovery on the Internet and engage in serious conversation – perhaps even research with other mathematicians. Access to computers and software environments like MicroWorlds makes it possible for children to make discoveries that may be of interest to mathematicians and scientists. It is plausible that kids can contribute to the construction of knowledge deemed important by adults.

New Data Structures
MicroWorlds has two new data structures that contribute to mathematical learning. With the click of the mouse, sliders and text boxes can be dropped on the screen. As input devices, sliders are visual controls that adjust variables. Each slider has a name and a range of numbers assigned to it. Like a control on a mixing board the slider can be set to a number in that range. The slider’s value can then be sent to a turtle whose speed or orientation is linked to the value of the slider. The slider can also be used to set the values of variables used in a simulation.

Sliders may also be used as output devices. A procedure can change the value of a slider to indicate an experimental result. If a slider named, counter, is in a MicroWorlds project then the command, SETCOUNTER COUNTER + 1, can be used to display the results of incrementing the counter.

MicroWorlds text boxes also function as both input and output devices. A text box is like a little word processor drawn on the MicroWorlds page to hold text. Text boxes also have names that when evoked report their contents. If a user types the number 7 in a text box named FOO, then typing SHOW FOO * 3 will display 21 in the command center. FD FOO * 10 will move the turtle forward 70 steps. The command, SETFOO 123 will replace the contents of the text box, FOO, with 123. Therefore, text boxes may be used as experimental monitors or calculator displays. Constructing a garden-variety calculator with a text box and MicroWorlds buttons or turtles is deceptively simple, but provides one illustration of how text boxes could be used in a mathematical context.

A basic spreadsheet can be built in MicroWorlds with just one line of Logo code. If three text boxes are named, cell1, cell2 and total, then a button with the instruction, SETTOTAL CELL1 + CELL2, will put the sum of the first two cells in the third. Making the button run many times will cause the “spreadsheet” to perform automatic calculations. A bit more programming will allow you to check for calculation efforts, graph data or cause a turtle to change its behavior based on the result of a calculation. Building a model spreadsheet helps students understand how a commercial spreadsheet works, develop computation skills and add automatic calculation to their Logo toolbox.

Instructional Software Design
Children can use Logo as a design environment for teaching others mathematical concepts. Idit Harel’s award-winning research (Harel, 1991) and the subsequent research by her colleague, Yasmin Kafai (Kafai, 1995), demonstrated that when students were asked to design software (in LogoWriter or MicroWorlds) to teach other kids about “fractions” they gained a deeper understanding of fractions than children who were taught fractions and Logo in a traditional manner. These students also learn a great deal about design, Logo programming, communication, marketing and problem solving. Harel and Kafai have confirmed that children learn best by making connections and when actively engaged in constructing something meaningful. Their research provides additional evidence of Logo’s potential as an environment for the construction of mathematical knowledge.

Conclusion
Increased access to computers and imaginative teachers will open up an infinite world of possibilities for Logo learning. Software environments, such as MicroWorlds provide children with an intellectual laboratory and vehicle for self-expression. MicroWorlds inspires serendipitous connections to powerful mathematical ideas when drawing, creating animations, building mathematical tools or constructing simulations.

Excursions into the worlds of number theory, fractal geometry, chaos and probability rely on MicroWorlds’ ability to act as lab assistant and manager. Paul Goldenberg suggests that it is difficult to test out ideas unless one has a slave stupid enough not to help. (Goldenberg, 1993) The computer plays the role of lab assistant splendidly, yet the student still must do all of the thinking. MicroWorlds makes it possible to manage large bodies of data by running tedious experimental trials millions of times if necessary, collecting data and displaying it in numerical or graphical form. The procedural nature of MicroWorlds makes it possible to make small changes to an experiment without having to start from scratch.

MicroWorlds provides schools with a powerful software package flexible enough to grow with students. In days of tight school budgets it is practical to embrace a software environment with which students can address the demands of numerous subject areas. The sophistication with which students confront intellectual challenges improves along with their fluency in MicroWorlds.

Seymour Papert was horrified at how the simple example of commanding a turtle to draw a house, depicted in Mindstorms, became “official Logo curriculum” in classrooms around the world. However, providing students with a rich “mathland” in which to construct mathematical knowledge has always been one of the goals in the design and implementation of Logo. This paper attempts to provide simple examples of how MicroWorlds may be used to explore a number of mathematical concepts in a constructionist fashion. Those interested in additional ideas should read (Abelson & diSessa, 1981), (Cuoco, 1990), (Clayson, 1988), (Goldenberg & Feurzeig ,1987), (Lewis, 1990) and (Resnick, 1995). More detailed examples and teacher materials related to this paper are available on my World-Wide-Web site at: http://moon.pepperdine.edu/~gstager/home.html.

References

1. Abelson, H., & diSessa, A. (1981). Turtle Geometry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
2. Clayson, J. (1988). Visual Modeling with Logo. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
3. Clements, D.H. (1991). Logo in Mathematics Education: Effects and Efficacy. Stevens Institute of Technology Conference Proceedings – Computer Integration in Pre-College Mathematics Education: Current Status and Future Possibilities, April 24, 1991. Hoboken, NJ: Stevens Institute of Technology/CIESE.
4. Cuoco, A. (1990). Investigations in Algebra. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
5. Goldenberg, E.P. (1993). Linguistics, Science, and Mathematics for Pre-college Students: A Computational Modeling Approach.Revised from Proceedings, NECC ‘89 National Educational Computing Conference, Boston, MA. June 20-22, pp. 87 -93. Newton, MA: Educational Development Center.
6. Goldenberg, E.P. (1989). “Seeing Beauty in Mathematics: Using Fractal Geometry to Build a Spirit of Mathematical Inquiry.” Journal of Mathematical Behavior, Volume 8. pages 169-204.
7. Goldenberg, E.P., & Feurzeig, W. (1987). Exploring Language with Logo Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
8. Harel, I. (1991). Children Designers: Interdisciplinary Constructions for Learning and Knowing Mathematics in a Computer-Rich School. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
9. Harel, I. & Papert, S. (editors) (1991). Constructionism. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
10. Harvey, B. (1982). Why Logo? Byte, Vol. 7, No.8, August 1982, 163-193.
11. Harvey, B. (1985-87). Computer Science Logo Style, Volumes 1-3. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
12. Kafai, Y. (1995) Minds in Play – Computer Design as a Context for Children’s Learning. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates.
13. Lewis, P. (1990). Approaching Precalculus Mathematics Discretely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
14. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. (1989). Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics. Reston, VA: NCTM.
15. Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. (Second Edition, 1993) New York: Basic Books.
16. Peterson, I. (1988). The Mathematical Tourist – Snapshots of Modern Mathematics. NY: W.H. Freeman and Company.
17. Poundstone, W. (1985). The Recursive Universe… Chicago: Contemporary Books.
18. Resnick, M. (1995). Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams – Explorations in Massively Powerful MicroWorlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
19. Silverman, B. (1987). The Phantom Fishtank: An Ecology of Mind. Montreal: Logo Computer Systems, Inc. (book with software for Apple II or MS-DOS)
20. Stager, G. (October, 1988). “A Microful of Monkeys.” The Logo Exchange .
21. Stager, G. (1990). “Developing Scientific Thought in a Logo-based Environment.” Proceedings of the World Conference on Computers in Education. Sydney, Australia: IFIP.
22. Stager, G. (1991). “Becoming a Scientist in a Logo-based Environment.” Proceedings of the Fifth International Logo Conference. San José, Costa Rica: Fundacion Omar Dengo.
23. Suydam, M. N. (1990). Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for Mathematics Education. (ERIC/SMEAC Mathematics Education Digest No. 1, 1990) Columbus, OH: ERIC Clearinghouse for Science, Mathematics and Environmental Education. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED319630 90).

Anyone who knows anything about my teaching knows that I would never spend any time on “career education” with kids I teach. I create the context, conditions and projects   during which children are engaged in engineering. When building and programming robots, the kids are engineers – not contemplating a career for a dozen years later. The kids are smart enough to connect the dots and identify interest in a career related to their talent, interests or present mood, even if that interest is short-lived.

Time is the rarest of currencies in school. Therefore, time should be focused on authentic experiences, not meta experiences.

Affective qualities like collaboration, passion, curiosity, perseverance and teamwork are certainly desirable for teachers and students. However, these traits may be developed while engaged in real pursuits, even within the existing curriculum. All that is required is a meaningful project. This is why I question the use of “meta” activities like ropes courses, ice-breakers or trust-building exercises as a form of professional development or separate curriculum. Professional development resources are also scarce. Therefore, PD should be focused on learning to do or know. The affective skills should be byproducts of meaningful experiences intended to improve teaching.

Adults become better teachers when they enjoy firsthand learning adventures like they desire for their students. You can’t teach 21st Century Learners  if you haven’t learned this century. That is why I created Constructing Modern Knowledge.

Some educators have recognized that schools are too impersonal and that teachers should get to know their students. I could not agree more. However, the prescription is often to create advisory courses or extend homeroom to deal with pastoral care issues. The result is one teacher who gets to “know” students and time is borrowed from other courses where teachers should get to know their students formally and informally in the process of constructing knowledge together.

Sit next to a student engaged in a science experiment and talk with them. Lead vigorous discussions or chat with a kid about the book they’re reading. You don’t need a class period set aside for asking “How was your weekend?” or for building trust. Join a group of students for lunch. Say, “hi,” while passing in the hallway. Dennis Littky tells the story of making Time Magazine because as a school principal he greeted students when they entered school in the morning. Have we lowered our expectations so much that knowing students is some sort of awesome systemic accomplishment? Humane, thoughtful, even casual interaction between teachers and students does not require an NSF grant or special class.

When educators create a productive context for learning, achievement improves, students feel more connected and behavioral problems evaporate. For three years, Seymour Papert, colleagues and I created a learner-centered, project-based alternative learning environment for at-risk learners inside of a troubled prison for teens. When the needs, interests, passions, talents and curiosity of our students were put ahead of a random list of stuff, they were not only capable of demonstrating remarkable competence, but there was not a single discipline incident in ever that required a kid to leave the classroom.

Students can develop self-esteem by engaging in satisfying work. Classroom management is not required when teachers don’t view themselves as managers. Kids can learn “digital citizenship” while learning to program, sharing code and interacting online. They can feel safe at school by forming relationships with each of their teachers. Study skills are best gained within a context of meaningful inquiry.

Learning is the best way to learn. Accept no substitutes!

Click here to register for Constructing Modern Knowledge 2013 today!

Biography

Gary Stager, an internationally recognized educator, speaker and consultant, is the Executive Director of The Constructivist Consortium. Since 1982, Gary has helped learners of all ages on six continents embrace the power of computers as intellectual laboratories and vehicles for self-expression. He led professional development in the world’s first laptop schools (1990), has designed online graduate school programs since the mid-90s, was a collaborator in the MIT Media Lab’s Future of Learning Group and a member of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s Learning Team.

When Jean Piaget wanted to better understand how children learn mathematics, he hired Seymour Papert. When Dr. Papert wanted to create a high-tech alternative learning environment for incarcerated at-risk teens, he hired Gary Stager. This work was the basis for Gary’s doctoral dissertation and documented Papert’s most-recent institutional research project.

Gary’s recent work has included teaching and mentoring some of Australia’s “most troubled” public schools, launching 1:1 computing in a Korean International School beginning in the first grade, media appearances in Peru and serving as a school S.T.E.M. Director. He was a Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University and Senior Editor of District Administration Magazine. His advocacy on behalf of creativity, computing and children led to the creation of the Constructivist Consortium and the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute.

In 1999, Converge Magazine named Gary a “shaper of our future and inventor of our destiny.” The National School Boards Association recognized Dr. Stager with the distinction of “20 Leaders to Watch” in 2007. The June 2010 issue of Tech & Learning Magazine named Gary Stager as “one of today’s leaders who are changing the landscape of edtech through innovation and leadership.” CUE presented Gary with its 2012 Technology in Learning Leadership Award. A popular speaker, Dr. Stager was a keynote speaker at the 2009 National Educational Computing Conference and at major conferences around the world. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Melbourne’s Trinity College on several occasions.

Gary was the new media producer for The Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri Project – Simpatíco, 2007 Grammy Award Winner for Best Latin Jazz Album of the Year. Dr. Stager is also a contributor to The Huffington Post and a Senior S.T.E.M. and Education Consultant to leading school architecture firm, Fielding Nair International. Gary also works with teachers and students as S.T.E.M. Director at The Oaks School in Hollywood, California.

Video Portfolio

“Gary Stager My Hope for School”
Clip from the imagine it!² The Power of Imagination documentary

This is What Learning Looks Like – Strategiest for Hands-on Learning, a conversation with Steve Hargadon
2012 San Mateo Maker Faire.

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Ten Things to Do with a Laptop – Learning and Powerful Ideas
Keynote Address – ITEC Conference – Des Moines, Iowa – October 2011

Children, Computing and Creativity
Address to KERIS – Seoul, South Korea – October 2011

Gary Stager’s 2011 TEDxNYED Talk
NY, NY – March 2011

Gary Stager Discusses 1:1 Computing with the Omar Dengo Foundation
University of Costa Rica – San José, Costa Rica – June 2011

Gary Stager’s Plenary Address at the Constructionism 2010 Conference
Paris, France – August 2010

Gary Stager Excerpts from NECC ’09 Keynote Debate
June 2009 – Washington D.C.
For more information, go to: http://stager.tv/blog/?p=493

Dr. Stager interviewed by ICT Qatar
Doha, Qatar – Spring 2010

Learning Adventures: Transforming Real and Virtual Learning Environments
NECC 2009 Spotlight Session – Washington, D.C. – June 2009
More information may be found at http://stager.tv/blog/?p=531

Online Publications

• The Daily Papert
• Constructing Modern Knowledge
• Gary Stager’s Blog
• Gary Stager in The Huffington Post
• Gary Stager’s magazine articles

Selected Scholarly Papers

2012 Constructism 2012 Conference (Athens, Greece)
Friends of Papertian Constructionism

2008 Australian Conference on Educational Computing (Canberra, Australia)

• A New Paradigm for Evaluating the Learning Potential of an EdTech Activity
• Learning Adventures: A new approach for transforming real and virtual classroom environments

2007 EuroLogo XI (Bratislava, Slovak Republic)
Towards the Construction of a Language for Describing the Potential of Educational Computing Activities

Australian Conference on Educational Computing (Cairns, Australia)
Has Educational Computing Jumped the Shark?

2005 National Educational Computing Conference (Philadelphia)
Constructive Technology as the Key to Entering the Community of Learners

2005 World Conference on Computers in Education (Stellenbosch, South Africa)

• Towards a Pedagogy of Online Constructionist Learning
• The High Cost of Incrementalism in Educational Computing Implementation

2005 EuroLogo X Conference (Warsaw, Poland)
Papertian Constructionism & the Design of Productive Contexts for Learning

2004 International Conference on Learning Sciences (Santa Monica, California)
Climbing to Understanding: Lessons from an Experimental Learning Environment for Adjudicated Youth co-authored with Seymour Papert and David Cavallo

2003 Proceedings of the 3.1 and 3.3 working groups conference on International federation for information processing: ICT and the teacher of the future – Volume 23 (Melbourne, Australia)
Online Constructionism and the Future of Teacher Education co-authored with Terrence Cannings

1998 NECC ’98: Proceedings of the National Educating Computing Conference (19th, San Diego, CA, June 22-24, 1998)
Online Communities as a Vehicle for Developing Secondary Mathematics Educators co-authored with Terrence Cannings

1996 Independent Association of Registered Teachers of Victoria Monograph (Melbourne, Australia)
Computing and the Internet in Schools: An International Perspective on Developments and Directions

GOOD Magazine Cover Story Fall 2008
School Wars

Bibliography of older papers

Constructing Modern Knowledge may be the most important work of my career. For five years, we have demonstrated the competence and creativity of educators who spend four days of their summer vacation learning to learn in the digital age. I marvel at the complexity, sophistication and ingenuity illustrated by the educator’s projects created at Constructing Modern Knowledge. It is not an exaggeration to say that several of the projects created at CMK 2012 would have earned the creator(s) a TED Talk two years ago and an MIT Ph.D. five years ago.

CMK remains committed to creating a space where educators remake themselves by engaging in personally meaningful projects and learn through firsthand experience. It is NOT a conference. It is a samba school, laboratory, playground, library, maker space, film studio, atelier or workshop filled with people and objects to think with.

Constructing Modern Knowledge is a reflection of each participant. Some alums will say that CMK is about being at the forefront of the Maker movement, or about the Reggio Emilia approach, or about creativity, or robotics or filmmaking, or history, or school reform, or about S.T.E.M., or music composition or collaboration or visiting the MIT Media Lab. CMK is all of those things and what each participant makes of the experience.

Our remarkable faculty supports the learning of each participant and our guest speakers share a daily dose of inspiration. Given the diversity of the participants and the enormous range of projects created, CMK means different things to different people. So, what is CMK about?

Constructing Modern Knowledge is about:

• Jamming on a cupcake
• Looking up
• Looking in
• Cool tools
• Floating above the classroom
• Bringing Edison back to life
• Reinventing yourself
• Painting a piano
• Programming random Shakespearean insults
• Giving Lego a ukulele lesson
• Teaching a robot to use Twitter
• Becoming the next great YouTube filmmaker
• Getting lost in the flow
• Learning to solder
• Scoring a cartoon
• Snapping lots of photos
• Creating an animation
• Having lunch with your hero
• Sneaking around the MIT media lab
• Feeling smart
• Time lapse photography
• Laughing really hard
• Charging your iPhone by peddling a bike
• Tinkering
• Being a historian
• Working alone
• Working in teams
• Cool tools
• Aluminum foil
• Understanding astrophysics through dance
• Being silly
• Being serious
• A digital butler keeping your beer cold
• Engineering
• Secret ice cream
• Measuring your whiffle bat swing
• Manch Vegas
• Brightening a Rwandan child’s day
• Flow
• Fixing the future with air-curing rubber
• Makey Makey
• Conquering the geometry of islamic tiles
• Conductive paint
• Mathematical thinking
• Designing a video game
• Making friends
• Expanding your personal learning network
• Feeling smart
• Feeling foolish
• Confusion
• Finding science in your art and electronics in your peanut butter
• Satisfaction
• Scratch
• Learning to learn
• Bursting balloons
• The Reggio Emilia Approach
• Clarity
• Turning trash into treasure
• Reading
• MicroWorlds
• Constructionism
• Computer graphics
• Storytelling
• The 100 languages of children
• Chatting with Marvin Minsky
• Ingenuity
• Choreographed t-shirts
• Turtle Art
• Coffee with a legend
• Writing
• Progressive education
• Creativity unleashed
• Computing
• An amazing faculty
• Powerful ideas
• Changing the world
• A smile-controlled robot
• Exploring linguistic patterns of the 1940s
• Challenging yourself
• Sounding like Eleanor Roosevelt
• Brazilian churascaria
• Wearable computing
• Whimsy
• Never finding the pool
• Raising standards
• Blowing your mind
• MIDI
• Conversation
• Re-imagining education
• Expanding your comfort zone
• Being super awesome
• Taking off your teacher hat
• Putting on your learner hat
• Action!

Join the learning adventure with us July 9-12, 2013 in Manchester, NH!

Register today!

Download a printable brochure for Constructing Modern Knowledge 2013

Larry Ferlazzo invited me to share a vision of computers in education for inclusion in his Classroom Q&A Feature in Education Week. The text of that article is below.

You may also enjoy two articles I published in 2008:

1. What’s a Computer For? Part 1 – It all depends on your educational philosophy
2. What’s a Computer For? Part 2 – Computer science is the new basic skill

Technology is Not Neutral
Educational computing requires a clear and consistent stance
Gary S. Stager, Ph.D.
constructingmodernknowledge.com

There are three competing visions of educational computing. Each bestows agency on an actor in the educational enterprise. We can use classroom computers to benefit the system, the teacher or the student. Data collection, drill-and-practice test-prep, computerized assessment or monitoring Common Core compliance are examples of the computer benefitting the system. “Interactive” white boards, presenting information or managing whole-class simulations are examples of computing for the teacher. In this scenario, the teacher is the actor, the classroom a theatre, the students the audience and the computer is a prop.

The third vision is a progressive one. The personal computer is used to amplify human potential. It is an intellectual laboratory and vehicle for self-expression that allows each child to not only learn what we’ve always taught, perhaps with greater efficacy, efficiency or comprehension. The computer makes it possible for students to learn and do in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. This vision of computing democratizes educational opportunity and supports what Papert and Turkle call epistemological pluralism. The learner is at the center of the educational experience and learns in their own way.

Too many educators make the mistake of assuming a false equivalence between “technology” and its use. Technology is not neutral. It is always designed to influence behavior. Sure, you might point to an anecdote in which a clever teacher figures out a way to use a white board in a learner-centered fashion or a teacher finds the diagnostic data collected by the management system useful. These are the exception to the rule.

While flexible high-quality hardware is critical, educational computing is about software because software determines what you can do and what you do determines what you can learn. In my opinion the lowest ROI comes from granting agency to the system and the most from empowering each learner. You might think of the a continuum that runs from drill/testing at the bottom; through information access, productivity, simulation and modeling; with the computer as a computational material for knowledge construction representing not only the greatest ROI, but the most potential benefit for the learner.

Piaget reminds us ,“To understand is to invent,” while our mutual colleague Seymour Papert said, “If you can use technology to make things, you can make more interesting things and you can learn a lot more by making them.”

Some people view the computer as a way of increasing efficiency. Heck, there are schools with fancy-sounding names popping-up where you put 200 kids in a room with computer terminals and an armed security guard. The computer quizzes kids endlessly on prior knowledge and generates a tsunami of data for the system. This may be cheap and efficient, but it does little to empower the learner or take advantage of the computer’s potential as the protean device for knowledge construction.

School concoctions like information literacy, digital citizenship or making PowerPoint presentations represent at best a form of “Computer Appreciation.” The Conservative UK Government just abandoned their national ICT curriculum on the basis of it being “harmful and dull” and is calling for computer science to be taught K-12. I could not agree more.

My work with children, teachers and computers over the past thirty years has been focused on increasing opportunity and replacing “quick and easy” with deep and meaningful experiences. When I began working with schools where every student had a laptop in 1990, project-based learning was supercharged and Dewey’s theories were realized in ways he had only imagined. The computer was a radical instrument for school reform, not a way of enforcing the top-down status quo.

Now, kindergarteners could build, program and choreograph their own robot ballerinas by utilizing mathematical concepts and engineering principles never before accessible to young children. Kids express themselves through filmmaking, animation, music composition and collaborations with peers or experts across the globe. 5^th graders write computer programs to represent fractions in a variety of ways while understanding not only fractions, but also a host of other mathematics and computer science concepts used in service of that understanding. An incarcerated 17 year-old dropout saddled with a host of learning disabilities is able to use computer programming and robotics to create “gopher-cam,” an intelligent vehicle for exploring beneath the earth, or launch his own probe into space for aerial reconnaissance. Little boys and girls can now make and program wearable computers with circuitry sewn with conductive thread while 10^th grade English students can bring Lady Macbeth to life by composing a symphony. Soon, you be able to email and print a bicycle. Computing as a verb is the game-changer.

Used well, the computer extends the breadth, depth and complexity of potential projects. This in turn affords kids with the opportunity to, in the words of David Perkins, “play the whole game.” Thanks to the computer, children today have the opportunity to be mathematicians, novelists, engineers, composers, geneticists, composers, filmmakers, etc… But, only if our vision of computing is sufficiently imaginative.

Three recommendations:

1) Kids need real computers capable of programming, video editing, music composition and controlling external peripherals, such as probes or robotics. Since the lifespan of school computers is long, they need to do all of the things adults expect today and support ingenuity for years to come.

2) Look for ways to use computers to provide experiences not addressed by the curriculum. Writing, communicating and looking stuff up are obvious uses that require little instruction and few resources.

3) Every student deserves computer science experiences during their K-12 education. Educators would be wise to consider programming environments designed to support learning and progressive education such as MicroWorlds EX and Scratch.

The use of terms like “facilitator” always makes me queasy. The desire to rebrand teaching as facilitation results more from the low self-esteem of educators than either public opinion or a serious commitment to pedagogical progress. Regardless of the speaker’s intent, “teacher as facilitator” is a cliché that makes teaching sound more mechanistic and impersonal, not more. Modern medicine evolves and changes constantly, yet we still call its practitioners doctors. The invention of Viagra didn’t cause the public to make erector appointments. They call their doctor.

If one truly wants to improve the educational experience of children, then we need more teachers and fewer facilitators.

A popular parlor game among educators is debating the precise moment when “education went bad.” (Whether or not you believe there is a crisis in education.) A Nation at Risk, No Child Left Behind, Race-to-the-Top are often cited as the tipping point in the decline of K-12 education. I don’t blame a specific piece of legislation or blue-ribbon report entirely for the challenges faced by educators on a daily basis.

In my humble opinion, classrooms became less productive contexts for learning when teacher education became more concerned with training facilitators than creating teachers. The die was cast when professional educators accepted such dystopian rebranding as “facilitator.”

While earning my BA in teacher education during the early to mid-1980s, I was in the last class required to learn to play the piano a little bit, teach physical education, make puppets out of pop-tart boxes, create math manipulatives, design science experiments and setup a convivial classroom environment. When teaching was viewed as equal parts art and science, teacher education reflected that balance.

Around 1985, legislatures across the nation concluded that “teaching ain’t nuthin’” and changed credentialing requirements to ensure that teachers studied something “real” instead of education courses. Today, Teach-for-America spends five weeks preparing college grads to be teachers – less than half the time required for Marine Corps basic training and exponentially less time than I spent becoming an elementary school teacher. Educators know well that when elementary teacher preparation is less child-centered, secondary education gets even worse.

Today, new teachers truly are facilitators. They are “trained” to manage classrooms and deliver the curriculum handed to them. That’s about it.

This is great news for policy-makers and ideologues. Teachers are more compliant and less questioning than ever before. Flip the classroom? Sure! Tie teacher pay to standardized testing? Why not? Abandon labor protections secured by unionization? You betcha!

I remember being taught explicitly how to justify playing Scrabble for days or putting on a puppet show as educationally efficacious. This wasn’t just a “cover-your-ass in the plan book strategy,” but a way of understanding and articulating what your students were learning. The deafening calls for “accountability” are partially the result of teachers incapable of making learning visible. The less teachers have to think about their students’ thinking, the less thinking they do generally. Teaching needs to be thoughtful.

I have been stunned to observe the complete and utter return to whole class instruction in nearly every school I visit (public, private, rich, poor, urban, suburban and rural) everywhere in the world. New teachers have little or no experience with classroom centers, independent work, student projects and the sorts of agency that allow children to enjoy the “flow” experiences that build upon their obsessions and lead to understanding. Even when teachers are not lecturing from bell-to-bell, the classroom agenda is top-down and leaves little chance for serendipity or student initiative.

The most generous rationale for the Common Core Content Standards is that teachers lack a personal compass for what students should know and do. Teachers expert in inspiring long-term, personally meaningful and interdisciplinary projects or thematic instruction regularly exceed the standards, but that realization is lost on facilitators.

Great teachers know their students in deeper ways than any data can provide. They ask kids about their weekends. They chat about what kids are reading and console them when their hamster dies. Teachers spend thirty minutes per month in Toys R Us on the lookout for cool stuff to use in the classroom and as a means to learning about the culture of the children they serve. They learn continuously for themselves and their students. Teachers share their love of reading and are patrons of the arts. They are active citizens and engage students in current events. Outstanding teachers are not afraid to appear silly or create a whimsical classroom environment. They play in the snow with kindergarteners like Maria Knee.

The best thing we can do for children is to have them spend as much time with possible with interesting adults. So, great teachers need to be passionate, competent and interesting humans beyond the scope and sequence of the curriculum.

If we truly wish to make the world a better place for children, then we need many more teachers and a lot fewer facilitators!

‎”The school must open its doors. It must reach out and spread itself, and come into direct contact with all its people. Each day the power of the school must be felt in some corner of the school district. It must work so that everybody sees its work and daily appraises that work…

We must change the notion that the school is a cloistered institution, by breaking down its walls and having it come into direct contact with people… It must use the factory, the stores, the neighboring parks, the museums, not incidentally, but fully and with deliberation…

We must change our attitude toward the child… I feel that the attitude toward the school and the child is the ultimate attitude by which America is to be judged. Indeed, the distinctive contribution America is to make to the world’s progress is not political, economical, religious, but educational – the child (is) our national strength, the school as the medium through which the adult is to be remade.”

Angelo Patri – 1917
A Schoolmaster of the Great City: A Progressive Educator’s Pioneering Vision for Urban Schools

He was right then. He is right today! Read and learn!

Every problem in public education (and society in general) is identified and solved by Patri in this book published nearly a century ago.

Bad drill and practice doesn’t become good because it is programmed in Logo, or by kids. However, the person who learns the most from “educational” software is the person who made it.

I thought of doing this because “practice multiplication facts” has been written on the classroom board for months. If the kids “write the software, perhaps they’ll think about multiplication a bit.

This is also an opportunity for introducing concepts, like percent, in order to create a cumulative score.

Download the PDF project starter by clicking the link below:

 A “Math” Game Only A Mother Could Love (PDF)

Be sure to click on the links at the bottom of this list for additional materials you’ll want under the tree.

All of the recommended products are affordable and may be purchased online with one-click!

Makedo FreePlay Kit For One$15.30 (larger sets are also available) Wicked cool reusable connectors, hinges and child-safe saws for building cardboard constructions. Rolobox Reuseable Wheel Kit for Boxes$13.95 Wheel sets for cardboard boxes. You need these with Makedo! Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun$15.67 A zillion high and low-tech project ideas and suggestions for amusing yourself. Super Scratch Programming Adventure!: Learn to Program By Making Cool Games$13.92 A full-color project book for learning Scratch programming. It even includes a chapter on using the external Picoboard! The Big Book of Hacks: 264 Amazing DIY Tech Projects $16.25Really cool and beautifully photographed tech projects ideas for kids and adults alike. Geek Mom: Projects, Tips, and Adventures for Moms and Their 21st-Century Families$13.59 The latest addition to the three book Geek Dad series for girls, their moms (plus teachers, brothers and fathers) The Unofficial LEGO Technic Builder’s Guide$18.97 A new full-color guide to building machines out of LEGO Technic! Mechanical principles are explained clearly. Make: LEGO and Arduino Projects: Projects for extending MINDSTORMS NXT with open-source electronics$19.75 Makers: The New Industrial Revolution $13.98 This new book about the Maker revolution is by the former editor of Wired Magazine. However, Neil Gershenfeld’s seminal book, Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication, does a better job of covering the “maker” revolution despite having been published seven years ago. Big Trak$60 – 70 My late friend, Steve Ocko, invented this programmable floor turtle (robot) for Milton Bradley in 1979. There has never been a more powerful easy-to-use robot available for kids since. The good news is that some lunatic bought the rights to the Big Trak and is manufacturing new ones 30+ years later Kids from 5+ will play and learn with Big Trak for ages. Makey Makey$49.95 – $59.95 There’s no adequate way to explain Makey Makey, “the invention kit for everyone,” but you need to own at least one of them! Learn more here. LEGO WeDo$129.95 An early-childhood robotics construction kit that may be controlled via Scratch. Sugru various pricesMiraculous shapeable air-cured rubber, because “the future needs fixing!“ Amazing book!Highly recommended! The Cryptoclub: Using Mathematics to Make and Break Secret Codes $36.24 (and worth it!)This fantastic book makes real mathematics come alive for kids (and teachers) grades 5 and up through the exploration of cryptography. There is plenty to keep you busy for years within this book. New York Street Games$14.83 A star-studded documentary chronicling the dizzying variety of street games invented and played in New York City, as well as the life lessons learned playing them. This DVD should inspire a great deal of play and creative “research” projects among young people. The DVD The book New York City Street Games$14.95 A terrific print guide to playing classic games including: Kings, Skellzies, Potsie, Stick Ball and Hit the Penny. The book even comes with bottlecaps, sidewalk chalk and a “spaldeen.” Photojojo!: Insanely Great Photo Projects and DIY Ideas $14.66This book is filled with insanely creative ways to turn your photographs into amazing products and crazy ways to capture photographs you won’t believe. Fun for the whole family! Check out the exciting description of projects and photo techniques included in this unique book. I love love love these LEGO construction books! Yoshihito Isogawa’s three magnifcent wordless books of LEGO Technic project ideas are like the holy books of LEGO construction. There are enough ideas contained within to keep you building for years!The LEGO Technic Idea Book – Fantastic Contraptions The LEGO Technic Idea Book – Wheeled Wonders The LEGO Technic Idea Book – Simple Machines $12-14 each   Painting Chinese: A Lifelong Teacher Gains the Wisdom of Youth$7.98 Legendary educator and education author, Herb Kohl’s beautiful meditation on life, teaching, learning, art and aging. This is one of my all-time favorite books. It makes a lovely inspirational gift for the artist or educator in your life. For grown-ups I’m in this book, along with Phillip-Seymour Hoffman, Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie Perez, Bill T. Jones, Bill Ayers, Deborah Meiers, Lisa Delpit, Maxine Greene, Diane Ravitch and many others. The Muses Go to School: Inspiring Stories About the Importance of Arts in Education$20.06 Herb Kohl & Tom Oppenheim interviewed some of today’s most prominent artists about the educational experiences that led them to their creativity and then leading educators responded to each interview. Surely, You’re Joking Mr. Feynman (Adventures of a Curious Character)$10.85 The first magnificent memoir by this Nobel-Prize winning physicist, raconteur and tinkerer. This is a must-read for anyone over twelve years of age. Feynman $19.04 A fine biography in graphic-novel format. Appropriate for teens.   Books by and about the ultimate tinkerer and scientist For the frustrated parents of young tinkerers Not With Our Kids You Don’t! Ten Strategies to Save Our Schools$18.69 Parent activist Juanita Doyon offers practical advice for protecting your kids from destructive school policies like standardized testing. The Best Tinkering Books The Best Cameras of 2012 The Best LEGO Books The Best Education Books Ever

Read out latest newsletter for creative educators. There you will find other book reviews and recommendations for stimulating learning adventures!

Add your email address to our mailing list for updates on CMK 2013 and for information on the forthcoming Los Angeles Education Speaker Series!

Rufus T. Firefly
President: Huxley College

I often explain to graduate students that I don’t play devil’s advocate or any other clever games. Just because I may say something unsaid by others, does not mean that I don’t come to that perspective after careful thought and introspection.

Being an educator is a sacred obligation. Those of us who know better, need to do better and stand between the defenseless children we serve and the madness around us. If a destructive idea needs to be challenged or a right defended, I’ll speak up.

My career allows me to spend time in lots of classrooms around the world and to work with thousands of educators each year. This gives me perspective. I am able to identify patterns, good and bad, often before colleagues become aware of the phenomena. I have been blessed with a some communication skills and avenues for expression. I’ve published hundreds of articles and spoken at even more conferences.

People seem interested in what I have to say and for that I am extremely grateful.

The problem is that I am increasingly called upon to argue against a popular trend. That tends to make me unpopular. In the field of education, where teachers are “nice,” criticism is barely tolerated. Dissent is seen as defect and despite all of my positive contributions to the field, I run the risk of being dismissed as “that negative guy.”

Recently, I have written or been quoted on the following topics:

• Against Khan Academy in Wired magazine
• Against BYOD in Learning and Leading with Technology
• Against interactive whiteboards in Technology and Learning magazine
• Against tablet computers in education (in-press) for Scholastic Administrator magazine
• Against video games in education in Parade magazine
• Against Bill Gates’ influence on school policy in GOOD and The Huffington Post
• Against Daniel Pink’s dubious learning theories on my personal blog
• Against Education Nation in The Huffington Post

I’ve also written against homework, NCLB, RTTT, Michelle Rhee, Eli Broad, Joel Klein, standardized testing, Education Nation, Common Core Curriculum Standards, Accelerated Reader, merit pay, Arne Duncan, union-busting, Cory Booker, Teach for America, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, mayoral control, the ISTE NETs, Hooked-on-Phonics, President Obama’s education policies, etc… You get the idea.

The “Jetbow” sandwich at NY’s Carnegie Deli

These are perilous times for educators. When once bad education policy was an amuse-bouche you could easily ignore, it has become a Carnegie Deli-sized shit sandwich. Educators are literally left to pick their own poison, when choice is permitted at all. If I take a stand against a fad or misguided education policy, my intent is to inform and inspire others to think differently or take action.

So why, pray tell am I boring my dear readers with my personal angst? An old friend and colleague just invited me to write a magazine article about the “Flipped Classroom.” Sure, I think the flipped classroom is a preposterous unsustainable trend, masquerading as education reform, in which kids are forced to work a second unpaid shift because adults refuse to edit a morbidly obese curriculum. But….

The question is, “Do I wish to gore yet another sacred cow?” Is speaking truth to power worth the collateral damage done to my career?

In the 1960s, the great Neil Postman urged educators to hone highly-tuned BS and crap detectors. Those detectors need to be set on overdrive today. I’m concerned that I’m the only one being burned.

What to do? What to do?

I don’t know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I’m against it!
No matter what it is
Or who commenced it
I’m against it!

Your proposition may be good
But let’s have one thing understood
Whatever it is, I’m against it!
And even when you’ve changed it
Or condensed it
I’m against it!

Whatever It Is, I'm Against It
by Harry Ruby & Bert Kalmar From the Marx Bros. film "Horse Feathers" (1932) 

The following is the program description and proposal for my upcoming “conversation” at Educon 2.5 in Philadelphia, January 26th.

You Say You Want Tech Standards?
Here Come the NITS!

Gary S. Stager, Ph.D.
Brian C. Smith
Martin Levins

Program description

The ISTE Nets (tech standards) are approximately a decade old. They’ve produced endless meetings, cliché-laden documents and breathless rhetoric, but no perceptible increase in student computer fluency or teacher competence. Rather than standardizing, it’s time to amplify human potential with computers. A new diet of computing is required for learners.

Abstract

There are a lot of computers in schools, but not a lot of computing. The ISTE Nets and their state and local spawn offer an imagination-free vision of school technology use that hardly justifies the investment let alone realizes the potential of computers as intellectual laboratories or vehicles for self-expression. The current crop of technology standards form the basis, at best, for a form of “computer appreciation” being taught in school.

If school leaders demand them, we should offer tech standards worthy of our students based on powerful ideas and a commitment to teacher renewal. We must move beyond the trivial and use computers in a fashion consistent with modern knowledge construction. These new “standards” elevate school computing and challenge traditional notions of top-down schooling.

Let’s call them N.I.T.S. – New Intergalactic Technology Standards.

Gary and his virtual friends, Brian Smith in Hong Kong and Martin Levins in Australia, will share their recommendations for raising our standards to the level kids deserve. Educon participants can argue the merits of these goals and add their own. You should have a lot fewer meetings to attend when your superiors are afraid of our new standards.

Everybody wins! Standards, up yours!

Feel free to add your standards suggestions as comments below…

It is indeed an honor to speak at this conference and share my experiences and expectations with such an august audience. My qualifications for this conference could be based on my two decades of work with technology and kids, the work I did in the early days of school laptop computing right here in Australia or the fact that I am the parent of two teenage girls. I originally suggested that this talk be titled, “I’m not sure why Dale Spender hates me,” based on my experience as Ms. Spender’s human piñata at an MLC dinner and the ironic fact that she went on to quote me extensively in one of her books.

The theme of this conference, girls and technology, implies a problem. Neither girls nor technology are the problem. If a problem does exist, it is with the men and women commonly identified as educators and to a lesser extent, parents. It is the intellectual timidity, professional indolence, imagination gap and what Seymour Papert calls, idea aversion that prevents us from meeting the needs of all digital age children. The greatest number of victims of such idea aversion may be girls since for reasons real and imagined. The prevailing myths that girls don’t like computers; girls need different technology; girls should learn to criticize technology; girls have adequate access and ample role models; school leaders are qualified to make technological decisions; and schools should be used as social sieves lead to the creation of pedagogical decisions ultimately detrimental to girls themselves.

Microcomputers and the global information infrastructure offer unprecedented opportunities for expanding the learning community and for children to engage with powerful ideas. The choice is between an increasingly irrelevant system of schooling or the realization of John Dewey’s dream for a learning environment in which children can achieve their full creative and intellectual potential. Computational and communication technology may be used as an intellectual laboratory and vehicle for self-expression or as a tool for oppression. The first option makes schools better places for teachers and kids to learn, the second will hasten the demise of school’s monopoly on education.

It would be a shame if we missed the chance to revolutionize the learning environment if we were simply ignorant. It would be a sin to ignore the remarkable possibilities demonstrated right under our noses in order to preserve some quaint notion of 19^th century education. We know how the combination of elevated expectations, respect for epistemological pluralism, a dash of creativity and ubiquitous can produce a learning renaissance because we’ve seen it in schools a tram-ride away.

The most important educational technology innovation in the past two decades began at Methodist Ladies’ College in 1989 when David Loader, a giant in girls’ education, committed his school to the proposition that every child should own a personal laptop computer. This was never intended as a stunt, experiment or project. David noticed that computers were getting more portable and affordable while anticipating that such a bold investment would pay great dividends for educators concerned with making schools what James Britton would describe as, “more hospitable to the intentions of children.”

Six years before the World Wide Web, Loader shared these provocative thoughts with his school community.

Apparently the sun cannot rise in present schools…

Unlike David Suzuki who dismisses computers as information processors, we see knowledge not so much as being processed but as being constructed in the classroom. John Dewey’s observation that the content of the lesson is the less important thing about learning, is relevant (here). – David Loader

Almost every child, on the first day he sets foot in a school building, is smarter, more curious, less afraid of what he doesn’t know, better at finding and figuring things out, more confident, resourceful, persistent and independent, than he will ever be again in his schooling – John Holt

This was the shot heard ‘round the world. Soon after laptops were delivered to MLC, impressive student LogoWriter projects inspired teachers to rethink their notions of curriculum, assessment, scheduling and most importantly, the under-appreciated learning abilities of their students. Humanities teachers demanded long uninterrupted blocks of time to accomplish interdisciplinary collaborative projects. French teachers ventured into the uncharted waters of maths classrooms, boatloads of educators from around the world visited Kew and the idea of Marshmead was born.

Steve Costa, was patient zero – the first teacher in history to teach a class of girls each equipped with a laptop. Steve’s extraordinary teaching abilities coupled and willingness to share his talents with colleagues has made his classroom one of the most visited in the world. Not only did Steve Costa possess the confidence and courage to invent the future, he has demonstrated a remarkable focus over the past thirteen years. He has not been seduced by the latest technological fad or gimmick, but has continued to help students maximize the potential of their minds and computers by remaining committed to the hard fun of programming in Logo (MicroWorlds). Steve’s work continues to inspire me. What he and his girls have accomplished is remarkable. If there were any justice, Mr. Costa would appear on an Australian postage stamp. He is arguably one of the most important teachers in this nation’s history.

I am delighted that Steve Costa and David Loader will keynote a conference in Maine, USA this August between Alan Kay, the inventor of the personal computer, and Seymour Papert, the educator who predicted thirty-five years ago that every child would have a personal computer. Maine has built upon the foundation laid by these educational giants by passing a law requiring the provision of an iBook computer and 24/7 net access for every seventh and eighth grade student in the state.

This however is not an all-male history lesson. Many female teachers at MLC and Coombabah State Primary School in Queensland helped the world rethink the role of computers in schools. Merle Atherton, a quiet humanities teacher two years from retirement, embraced Logo and laptops with enormous enthusiasm and inspired countless colleagues to enjoy thinking about thinking. She was given an “in-school sabbatical” so she could work in classrooms alongside her colleagues.

Joan Taylor’s world-class Community Education department played an enormous role in the organization of holiday computer camps, global conferences and professional opportunities for teaching staff. The holiday computer camps provided parents with a creative child-care service and benefited the school in two important ways. The first benefit of the camp was as a “strongly suggested” prerequisite to attending the school as a new student. Four days of project-based computer use, the arts and a bit of sport provided adequate preparation for new children to succeed when they joined existing classrooms. Another benefit of the camps was that members of the teaching staff served as counselors. More “expert” teachers would lead robotics or Logo classes and less experienced teachers would apprentice. The casual nature of the camp allowed teachers to gain new knowledge and develop increased levels of consequence. Apprentices often replaced the experts in subsequent camps.

Community education also provided a venue for teachers interested in learning basic computing skills or finding out how to use computers for administrative tasks. This way the school could dedicate its professional development resources to using computers in ways that reformed education and benefited kids.

Merle and Joan are unsung heroes in the history of school computing.

I remember bringing some student projects back to the USA from MLC. When I shared them with one of America’s most accomplished computing-using teachers he remarked, “Oh, that’s what it looks like when the kids have time.” The ability to learn and work anywhere anytime is an obvious, yet important rationale for laptop use.

MLC was a magical place during the early nineties. Every aspect of schooling was open for discussion and reconsideration. I spent as long as three months at a time at the school with a brief to do anything I thought would contribute to educational excellence. I worked with teachers and kids in classrooms, consulted with staff, created the holiday computer camps, built a LogoExpress system to facilitate telecommunications from home and within school and had constant access to the principal. When I expressed concern over the gap between classroom reality and the rhetoric proclaiming the school’s commitment to constructionism, the principal supported my desire to take dozens of teachers away for intensive residential professional development sessions, fondly remembered as pyjama parties. After all, constructionism is something you DO as well as believe. You cannot be a constructionist who subcontracts the construction. “Do as I say, not as I do,” will no longer cut it.

Not all was perfect, even during these halcyon days. I remember needing a small bit of electronic tinkering done while at MLC and saying, “I’ll just get a girl to solder this for me.” My colleagues looked nervously around the room before someone said, “our girls don’t solder.” Concern for gender equity apparently ended at the point where students use tools, learn about electronics or perform actual service to the school community. The school musical theatre production hired professional musicians to provide accompaniment rather than utilizing talented student musicians. Ted Sizer, Deborah Meier and others write elegantly about the benefits of students assuming more responsibility for sustaining the intellectual culture and accepting responsibility for the operation of their school. We need to work harder

Soon after the pioneering efforts of MLC, two other groups of laptop schools emerged. The “marketeers” were schools more concerned with the marketing and publicity benefits of “doing laptops” than with reforming schools while nearly every other school found laptops in its future by inertia. The “marketers” and their “neighbours “ lacked the vision of the pioneer schools and found that they could differentiate themselves by embracing less empowering uses of computers and cynical assessment schemes like the International Baccalaureate. Some principals became more concerned with schmoozing hardware vendors and rising software version numbers than with educational innovation.

I am most disappointed at how little impact the laptop volcano has had on the structure of schooling. I assumed ten years ago that any educator with common sense would recognize the need for new school environments incorporating multiage, learner-centred, interdisciplinary learning. The creation of fantastic alternative learning environments at Marshmead and Clunes are evidence of a failure to bring about substantive school reform in traditional schools. The need for a school to build a new campus in order to be more learner-friendly suggests the institution’s incapacity for self-correction.

Perhaps I was naïve, but in the early nineties I had the following expectations for today’s schools.

¹ This is not a scholarly paper. It is intended as a manifesto to accompany a keynote address. This print document cannot reproduce the examples, video clips, anecdotes, humour and passion shared during the conference. The books I love and learned from may be found at http://www.stager.org/books/. A collection of my articles about education may be found at www.stager.org.

² Real time Computers, Change and Schooling – National sample study of the information technology skills of Australian school students

Merydth, Russel et al.
October 1999

³ Hillis, Daniel. (1998) The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work.

I’m a curious guy who wonders a lot about the forces and rhetoric influencing education. At the risk of kicking a hornet’s nest and incurring the wrath of being flamed, I wish to raise what I honestly believe to be an important issue. If you are unfamiliar with my work, outspoken opposition to the standards movement, commitment to equity or embrace of computers in education, I humbly ask you to consider the questions posed in this blog post in the spirit with which they are intended – to stimulate thoughtful professional dialogue or at least Google my body of work.

A handful of educators have been blogging now for more than a decade. Countless others have fallen in love with social media. They make conference presentations showing viral YouTube videos and lead Twitter workshops. There is more than an air of grandiosity that accompanies the use of the tools known collectively as Web 2.0. This self-importance is manifest in two ways.

1. Frustration that every educator hasn’t joined the PLN/PLC/social network/Twitterverse/blogopshere, because “if they only knew what I know…”
2. A few gazillion blog posts and tweets proclaiming the use of Web 2.0 as either already having transformed education or the prediction that it will transform education. A variation on this theme is the threat that social media will destroy, replace or delegitimize formal education.

Don’t shoot the messenger,  but I have a very serious question to ask.

In this era of heightened educational “accountability,” why are there so few, if any, demands being made for evidence of Web 2.0′s efficacy in schools?

I have my own hypotheses, but I would prefer to read some of yours.

The following are my current favorite cameras  at all price points and for use by kids of all ages.

Killer still camera with HD video

The Nikon 1 V1 is somewhere between a point-and-shoot and DSLR. It is mirrorless, works great in low light, shoots up to 60 frames per second (capture a balloon popping) and records beautiful HD video, with slow-motion available. It’s a solid camera with really fine compact lenses. The battery life is terrific. The 30-110mm lens isn’t much bigger than the 10-30mm one and my photos at a Jets game look like I work for Sports Illustrated.

This is the camera for the teacher you love most (yourself)

For Chubby Little Fingers

While supplies last, you can buy a waterproof and rubberized Kodak Playsport Zx5 video camera. This camera takes a licking and keeps ticking. It shoots stills and HD video. The quality is not as good as the other cameras I recommend, but this camera fits in your pocket, is waterproof and has a battery life capable of recording an hour or so of video for $95! I’ve bought several of them.

Jack of All Trades

The tiny $!51 Canon PowerShot ELPH 110 16.1MP Digital Camera with 3-Inch TFT LCD takes great photos and records 1080P HD video. Unlike the other cameras, this one has a flash if that’s something you like. Every classroom should have a few of these babies!

For the Daredevil

If you need a classroom monkeycam or to strap a rugged high-definition video camera onto an underwater skateboard, then you need the $250 GoPro HD  Hero2 Edition. This tiny camera is designed for extreme activity and is capable of time lapse photography as well.

• Recommended books
• Tinkering resources

It is time for us to stop arguing against high-stakes testing. Americans LOVE the idea of high-stakes as long as it means that their kid beats someone else’s kids at school.

We are losing both the battle and the war of ideas.

I humbly suggest that we replace high-stakes testing with the term, constant testing.

Parents, policy-makers and taxpayers are likely unaware that kids in some jurisdictions spend dozens of days each school year taking standardized tests. That doesn’t include the costs or time wasted on endless test-prep. This practice is obviously unsustainable, excessive and nonsensical.

This subtle rhetorical shift to constant testing has the potential to move public opinion in our direction.

S.T.E.M. currently suffers from the Sasquatch Syndrome. People have heard of S.T.E.M. just like they have heard of Bigfoot, but they’ve never actually seen either.

Two years ago, I taught Masters level Elementary Math and Science methods courses. One night, I asked the class of preservice teachers currently student teaching what I thought was an innocent question. I asked, “Tell me about how science is approached in your school?” The students looked around nervously for a moment and then shared observations like the following:

• We are supposed to do science after testing season.
• The science teacher is on maternity leave.
• Nobody knows where the key to the science materials is.
• Our school is focusing on numeracy and literacy.
• Science is supposed to happen on Mondays, but we have had a lot of holidays.

You get the idea…

Not a single student teacher working in several dozen Southern California elementary schools could cite a single incident of science being taught. Forget about engineering or computer science.

After all, it’s not like little kids are curious or enjoy exploring the world around them. You couldn’t possibly teach reading or language arts in a scientific context, right?

Gary with his boss Caine, of Caine's Arcade fame

November 5, 2012
Keynote speaker
16th Annual Innovative Learning Institute
Norman, Oklahoma

November 6, 2012
Workshop Leader – Digital Reggio
NAEYC Annual Conference
Atlanta, Georgia

November 7, 2012
Featured speaker
ISACS Annual Conference
Louisville, Kentucky

November 14, 2012
Keynote speaker
Three Rivers Educational Technology Conference
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

November 28, 2012
Multiple presenter
Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference
Manchester, New Hampshire

Watch presentations by Gary Stager

November 29, 2012
Keynote speaker
Illinois Educational Technology Conference
Springfield, Illinois

December 6, 2012
Keynote speaker
RCAC 2012 Conference
London, Ontario

January 9, 2013
Keynote speaker
New keynote = The Creative Technology Revolution You Can’t Afford to Miss
Technology Leadership Institute
Briarcliff Manor, NY

January 27-28, 2013
Presenter
Educon 2.5
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Australia/New Zealand
Late May – Early June 2013

Constructing Modern Knowledge
July 9-12, 2013

If you wish to have Gary Stager lead PD at your school or speak at your event, contact him here

A list of workshop and keynote address topic may be found here.

Once you endure the first few minutes of a clip from the fictional West Wing, O’Donnell makes a quite compelling case that the current debate format favors superficiality over substance and is a poor predictor of a candidate’s success as President of the United States. O’Donnell is making the case that the President must be deliberate, collaborative and well-informed. The pop-quiz format of the debates reward memorization and superficiality.

In school terms, the debates measure the wrong things and focus on inauthentic tasks. This misdirects resources and distracts teachers from sound pedagogical practices.

I won’t tell you O’Donnell’s recommendations, but most if not all could be applied to matters of curriculum and assessment. You should watch for yourself!

You may be able to watch the video here or here if you’re using a dopey iPad.

I have asked the Valerie Strauss, editor of The Answer Sheet, for an opportunity to write a full rebuttal. In the meantime, here are the comments I whipped together and published on the web site, along with a stray one or two.

Dr. Carlsson-Paige is correct that most “educational” software is crap, but she jumps to some conclusions that I find quite disappointing and wrong. Her intergenerational panic conflates a great number of issues and will alarm parents well-conditioned to overreacting.

She identifies the drop in creativity (citation would have been nice) in children between kindergarten and sixth grade).  Could this not be due to the dramatic changes in schooling that Carlsson-Paige rightly rails against, such as the narrowing of curriculum, endless test-prep, drill & practice and lack of arts education? Perhaps, technology has slowed the decline in creativity, however that is measured, being caused by school. Children building and LEGO programming robots, making movies, composing music, designing worlds in Minecraft, sewing wearable computers, playing with Squishy Circuits (conductive and non-conductive clay), programming their own video games, collaborating with others over great distances are demonstrable evidence of childhood creativity.

It is quite possible that school has a greater prophylactic impact on creativity than the Internet.

It is hideously simplistic to privilege one media over another, especially when decrying the death of creativity or loss of innocence. For example, nobody ever questions the cognitive value or impact on creativity of a kid holding a Hotwheels car and saying, “Vroom Vroom,” over and over again for hours at a time. We value that activity, right? Do we have any evidence that it is more beneficial than a toy with batteries or Internet connection? Does a wooden toy increase creativity more than one made of plastic? If drawing with a crayon is better than drawing with your finger on a screen, why is it so? How do we know? Is drawing with a crayon better for childhood development than drawing with chalk?

If a child was shown a photo of Mom and Dad on a screen or able to video chat with them (as is possible in the real world of the child), would that somehow be worse than carrying a physical photo? Would a cherished video clip of mother and child harm a child’s ability to develop resilience?

What role are parents playing in the overregulation of children’s play through overprotection and over-scheduling? What is the impact of homework on play? What has silent lunch and the end of recess done to children’s creative development?

Why not evaluate the quality of the activity rather than superficial aspects of the medium?

Television is passive, but Dora the Explorer may have value beyond its tranquilizing effect. Surely, there are incredibly engaging ways in which computers can and are used by children. Educators should do much better job of bringing those rich modern experiences to children.

How can having the ability to answer any question you wonder about instantly be bad for children? If you make simple things easy to do, you make complexity possible.

In my humble opinion, we visit great violence on the development of young people by dishonoring or ignoring the world and milieu in which they live. Nostalgia is no substitute for reason.

Welcome to Uzupis!

I enjoyed a lovely lunch today in the Republic of Užupis. In between bites of pizza, I couldn’t help but think of how many teachers are busily assembling the class rule and penalty documents for distribution on the first day of school.With each passing year, these reams of paper begin to resemble the US tax code in size, scope, severity and arbitrariness.

Don’t strain your back hanging the laminated set of class rules used for decades. Why not consider adopting the Constitution of Užupis for class governance?

Constitution of The Republic of Užupis

1. Everyone has the right to live by the River Vilnelė, and the River Vilnelė has the right to flow by everyone.
2. Everyone has the right to hot water, heating in winter and a tiled roof.
3. Everyone has the right to die, but this is not an obligation.
4. Everyone has the right to make mistakes.
5. Everyone has the right to be unique.
6. Everyone has the right to love.
7. Everyone has the right not to be loved, but not necessarily.
8. Everyone has the right to be undistinguished and unknown.
9. Everyone has the right to be idle.
10. Everyone has the right to love and take care of a cat.
11. Everyone has the right to look after the dog until one of them dies.
12. A dog has the right to be a dog.
13. A cat is not obliged to love its owner, but must help in time of need.
14. Sometimes everyone has the right to be unaware of their duties.
15. Everyone has the right to be in doubt, but this is not an obligation.
16. Everyone has the right to be happy.
17. Everyone has the right to be unhappy.
18. Everyone has the right to be silent.
19. Everyone has the right to have faith.
20. No one has the right to violence.
21. Everyone has the right to appreciate their unimportance.
22. No one has the right to have a design on eternity.
23. Everyone has the right to understand.
24. Everyone has the right to understand nothing.
25. Everyone has the right to be of any nationality.
26. Everyone has the right to celebrate or not celebrate their birthday.
27. Everyone shall remember their name.
28. Everyone may share what they possess.
29. No one can share what they do not possess.
30. Everyone has the right to have brothers, sisters and parents.
31. Everyone may be independent.
32. Everyone is responsible for their freedom.
33. Everyone has the right to cry.
34. Everyone has the right to be misunderstood.
35. No one has the right to make another person guilty.
36. Everyone has the right to be individual.
37. Everyone has the right to have no rights.
38. Everyone has the right to not to be afraid.
39. Do not defeat
40. Do not fight back
41. Do not surrender

The motto of Užupis, “Don’t Fight! Don’t Win! Don’t Surrender!” would be swell for your school as well. This web site has a terrific tour of Užupis I recommend reading it.

As you begin another school year, my best advice comes from the great American philosopher Gerald Norman Springer, “Take care of yourselves and each other!”

“By taking the burden of lesson planning and assessment creation for all students at once away from the teacher, administrators can empower teachers to individualize instruction for every student.”

Tony,I would argue that the mess we’re in is largely the result of twenty years of thinking like you describe. Reducing teachers to technicians who may make decisions about individualizing instruction for each student is impossible since agency to make larger decisions has been steadily robbed from teachers, along with an ability to fight the forces deskilling them. Teachers incapable of deciding what to teach will be less capable of determining how to teach. There is no pedagogical change or dramatic shift in student outcomes possible without an ability to change the intellectual diet provided for children.

Papert used to say that School at best teaches a billionth of a percent of the knowledge in the universe, yet we quibble endlessly about which billionth of a percent is most important – the piece we have always taught. Take mathematics for example, the curriculum and pedagogical approach has remained constant since the Inquisition, despite dramatic societal shifts and the revolutionary impact of computers in real mathematics, not the BS served up in school. Teachers can either be experts in the true nature of mathematics, it’s beauty and power or devise little tricks to make a toxic curriculum a tad less poisonous. The result of that decision creates a scenario where we teach “Algebra in Utero,” pushing it down a grade level constantly while NAEP scores remain stagnant.

I want children to have teachers who can see a flower, read a short story or use a newspaper article as the basis for connecting lots of disciplines and powerful ideas at any moment to create rich rewarding learning contexts for children.

I’m in Krakow, Poland right now and am staying across the street from sort of school. I walked by today and heard children singing along to a song being played on the piano by their teacher. I don’t hear a lot of singing in American classrooms these days.

I became an elementary school teacher at the very end of the era when you needed to learn how to play the piano a tiny bit, teach PE, harvest meal worms and make puppets out of Pop-Tart boxes. We were explicitly talked about how if we saw educational value in playing Scrabble for three months, how to identify the educational objectives being met and write them in our plan book.

For generations, THAT was a teacher. Why do we ask so little of them today?

When I walk into classrooms, rich and poor – private and public, around the world today I see a remarkable return to whole class instruction. Gone are the projects, centers and other joyful spaces for becoming lost in one’s own learning. This sad reality may be the result of changing the definition of teaching to the delivery of curriculum and management of classrooms.

The elaborate ruse called differentiated instruction is only necessary because the curriculum is handed down to teachers on stone tablets. If the educators closest to children had the greatest voice in curricular decisions, individualization would be natural.

Gary Stager

Since the evidence supporting computerized teaching systems has been weak since WWII, the dystopians and their bankers pushing this idea feel compelled to dress it up in fancy names like “Carpe Diem,” “Flipped Classroom,” “School of One,” “Blast,” “Khan Academy,” etc…. Each of these old wines in new marketing slogans have at their core a desire to reduce the cost of education as low as possible and attempt to do so by replacing qualified educators with 200 terminals, Math Blaster and an armed security guard.

Soon after Chris published his article, our mutual friend Will Richardson wrote “The Thin Value Proposition,” in which he too agrees with Chris and argues that the the value in schooling is the establishment of relationships among teachers and students. I often end my speeches by saying that teachers make memories and when students come back to reminisce, they never speak about the time they raised PISA scores or used all of their spelling words in a sentence, they remember meaningful projects teachers created the context for.

I agree with the arguments made by Chris and Will. They perfectly frame the terms of the conundrum many of us who advocate the use of computers as intellectual laboratories and vehicles for self-expression face when more powerful forces wish to use computers as tools of oppression, cost-cutting or antidotes for progressive education. How is it possible to love computers in education and hate the popular implementations of computers in education?

It is questions like this that led me to create The Daily Papert two years ago.

Papert articulated Will’s argument twenty-two years ago.

“It is this freedom of the teacher to decide and, indeed, the freedom of the children to decide, that is most horrifying to the bureaucrats who stand at the head of current education systems. They are worried about how to verify that the teachers are really doing their job properly, how to enforce accountability and maintain quality control. They prefer the kind of curriculum that will lay down, from day to day, from hour to hour, what the teacher should be doing, so that they can keep tabs on it. Of course, every teacher knows this is an illusion. It’s not an effective method of insuring quality. It is only a way to cover ass. Everybody can say, “I did my bit, I did my lesson plan today, I wrote it down in the book.” Nobody can be accused of not doing the job. But this really doesn’t work. What the bureaucrat can verify and measure for quality has nothing to do with getting educational results–those teachers who do good work, who get good results, do it by exercising judgment and doing things in a personal way, often undercover, sometimes even without acknowledging to themselves that they are violating the rules of the system. Of course one must grant that some people employed as teachers do not do a good job. But forcing everyone to teach by the rules does not improve the “bad teachers”– it only hobbles the good ones.”

Papert. S. (1990, July). Perestroika and Epistemological Politics. Speech presented at the World Conference on Computers in Education. Sydney, Australia.

Seymour Papert began giving voice to Chris Lehmann’s concerns as far back as 1968!

“The phrase, “technology and education” usually means inventing new gadgets to teach the same old stuff in a thinly disguised version of the same old way. Moreover, if the gadgets are computers, the same old teaching becomes incredibly more expensive and biased towards its dumbest parts, namely the kind of rote learning in which measurable results can be obtained by treating the children like pigeons in a skinner box.”

Papert S. (1980). Teaching Children Thinking in Taylor, R., Ed., The Computer in School: Tutor, Tool, Tutee. New York: Teachers College Press. pp. 161 -176.

Note: This paper was originally presented in 1970 at the IFIP World Conference on Computers in Education in Amsterdam. The paper was published as an MIT Logo Memo No. 2. Nicholas Negroponte reports that Papert first presented this work in 1968.

After far too long of a hiatus, Jonathan’s latest book, “Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America,” is out today! I have read the galleys and the book is riveting, profound, tragic, hopeful and beautifully written. You should read it AND buy a copy for a friend or colleague. Click to buy from Amazon.com.

Jonathan Kozol & Gary Stager at CMK 2011

This school year, Constructing Modern Knowledge will expand beyond its unique summer institute (July 9-12, 2013 – Manchester, NH) to offer some exciting new learning opportunities for learners and parents. The first event by Constructing Modern Knowledge Productions is in collaboration with my colleagues at the Willows Community School in Culver City, California.

On September 10th at 7:00 PM, The Willows Community School will host An Evening with Jonathan Kozol, Acclaimed Author and Educational Activist. Due to the generosity and public mindedness of the school, the event is free and open to the public! Reservations are required via the web site.

At this event, Kozol will speak and sign his new book, Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America. I hope you will join us for this very special evening!