Seymour Papert
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About Seymour Papert
This is the beginning of a document about the Pioneer. In general, we are interested in two types of information:
- General information about the pioneer.
- Specific, personal stories drawn from your experiences in interacting with the pioneer or in interacting with others who have personal knowledge about the pioneer. Help the reader gain insight into the pioneer as a human being, a pioneer, and a leader dedicated to improving informal and formal education.
Quoting from http://www.papert.org/
- People laughed at Seymour Papert in the sixties when he talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity. The idea of an inexpensive personal computer was then science fiction. But Papert was conducting serious research in his capacity as a professor at MIT. This research led to many firsts. It was in his laboratory that children first had the chance to use the computer to write and to make graphics. The Logo programming language was created there, as were the first children's toys with built-in computation. The Logo Foundation was created to inform people about Logo and to support them in their use of Logo-based software for learning and teaching.
- Today Papert is considered the world's foremost expert on how technology can provide new ways to learn. He has carried out educational projects on every continent, some of them in remote villages in developing countries. He is a participant in developing the most influential cutting-edge opportunities for children to participate in the digital world. He serves on the advisory boards for MaMaMedia Inc. (whose founder, Idit Harel, was once a doctoral student of his at MIT) and of the LEGO Mindstorms product line (which was named after Papert's seminal book Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas).
- Papert lives in Maine, where he has founded a small laboratory called the Learning Barn to develop methods of learning that are too far ahead of the times for large-scale implementation. He has been named distinguished professor by the University of Maine and is credited with inspiring the first initiative aimed at giving a personal computer to every student of a state. He spends a large part of his time working in the Maine Youth Center in Portland, the state's facility for teenagers convicted of serious offenses.
Quoting from a November 2007 paper about a project at Harvard: Developing Minds with Digital Media:
- This paper also does not address how computer interfaces in a broader sense can function as prosthetic extensions of brain power impacting human cognition. The work of neurologist Antonio Battro, educator Seymour Papert and others has demonstrated the computer’s ability to extend brain function, allowing deaf children to ‘hear’ music, children who’d undergone radical brain surgery to cultivate surprising skills, and children with cerebral palsy to communicate with the outside world. The work of these pioneers in the field of brain/computer interface shows how computers can dramatically alter brain functioning and facilitate communication, but these stories tell us less about the typical young person’s experience. Our focus here is on how the NDM impact on cognition by way of affecting habits of mind, or how we think. [Bold added for emphasis.]
Comment by David Moursund 1/6/2009
Recently I have been reading about Alan Kay's contributions top the field of ICT in education. I have also viewed a number of videos of his presentations.
Over and over again Alan Kay mentions a 1968 meeting he had with Seymour Papert. He tends to represent this as a life-changing experience. As a consequence of this meeting, Alan came to view computers as a media especially suited to the education of children. He picked up on the idea of children needing to learn challenging and powerful ideas, and that tough love and hard work are essential to this task.
Questions and Answers
This is an "Up close and personal" section. It includes both questions directed to the Pioneer if he or she is still available to answer questions, and personal stories contributes by friends and acquaintances. If it is appropriate, please include the following question submitted by Dave Moursund. Remember, this is a question to the Pioneer, not to the person writing about the Pioneer.
Q. Drawing upon your years of experience in the field of education, what do you think are some of the very best ways to improve our current informal and formal educational systems?
A. (Response not yet provided.)
Seymour Papert's Past & Current Insights
Here, we want to capture one or both of the following:
- A section written by the pioneer if he/she is still with us and is able and willing to write. We are interested in personal insights, retrospective analysis and comments, suggestions to the world of education, and so on.
- Material similar to (1) above, but written by the pioneer in the past.
Comment by Dave Moursund 1/18/08
I have known about Seymour Papert for many many years, and I have actually known him for quite a few years. I have seen him present at a number of conferences and I have occasionally "shared the stage" with him in presentations. I have read his books and a number of his articles. I feel humbled by his work!
A time that I vividly remember was after he had recently returned from India and I got to see him do a great presentation that included the metaphor of pencil-assisted instruction. During that part of his talk, he waved a pencil in the air, and it was a dynamic and inspiring presentation. However, a question came from the a member of the audience pointing out that many of the villages in India didn't even have a pencil—so how could one expect to provide them with computers?
That was many years ago, and India and many other parts of the world have changed greatly. Seymour is one of the people involved in the "$100 Laptop" project, and computer technology has made a major contribution to India's economy in the past decade.
Logo: The Dream is Still Alive
This is a 1988 Editorial written by David Moursund and published in The Computing Teacher.
- Moursund, D.G. (May 1988). Logo: The Dream is Still Alive. The Computing Teacher. International Council for Computers in Education.
This is the third "Editor's Message" that I have written about Logo. It is motivated by three relatively recent Logo-related events that have affected me.
First, this past summer ICCE acquired the Logo Exchange and installed it as the publication of SIGLogo. This represents a serious financial commitment on ICCE's part. It is a major extension of ICCE's previous Logo-related activity of publishing Logo books and carrying a Logo column in The Computing Teacher.
Second, my recently increased interest in problem solving has extended in the Logo direction. Sharon Burrowes Yoder (editor of the Logo Exchange) and I are currently writing a series of articles on Logo and problem solving that will appear in the Logo Exchange. We focus on using Logo as a vehicle to help students learn general ideas about problem solving, and on helping students transfer this knowledge to domains outside of the Logo environment.
Third, I recently had the opportunity to spend quite a bit of time talking with Seymour Papert and to attend several of his presentations at a conference in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. This was a most enjoyable and rewarding experience.
Initial work on Logo began about 20 years ago. This was several years before Art Luehrmann coined the phrase computer literacy and educators began to talk about helping all students become computer literate. The basic ideas underlying Logo, both 20 years ago and now, have little to do with computer literacy. The focus is not on the computer. Rather, the goal is to help create a rich, exploratory learning environment that empowers the learner. Twenty years ago Seymour Papert had a vision that computers would eventually prove very powerful and cost effective in helping to create such environments.
But a lot has happened in the computer field during the past 20 years. For example, microcomputers with graphics and sound have become available. Applications software, such as word processors and spreadsheets, has come into general use. Many millions of people now have computers in their homes, and perhaps a quarter of the adult workforce in the United States regularly uses computers. It is reasonable to ask whether such changes have obviated the need for or the value of Logo.
In responding to such questions, it is important to be aware that Logo is a living, growing, ever changing language and an aid to creating good learning environments. Original Logo versions lacked Turtle graphics and ran in timeshared environments on mainframe computer systems with output to relatively slow printers. Logo with graphics, sound, and color are all more modern developments. Still more modern are LogoWriter and LEGO TC logo. In the future we may well see Logo versions that include built-in database and telecommunications capabilities.
The trend is clear. The Logo goal is to make use of computer technology to help create learning environments that engage the minds of children in rich, exploratory, open ended enquiries. Progress in understanding how to accomplish these tasks depends on field-based research, and such research has continued throughout the history of Logo. Progress in hardware capability and in software methodology has supported the development of new and better versions of Logo. The decreasing cost of hardware, the increasing availability of teacher and student support materials, and the growing understanding of staff development and how to support teachers using Logo with their students have all contributed to the potential of Logo.
It is easy to understand why Logo has so many dedicated supporters and will continue to thrive. All educators want to help children learn and develop their potentials. All educators recognize the value of having rich learning environments consisting of varied combinations of teachers, books, audiovisual materials, hands-on materials such as math manipulatives and artist supplies, and so forth. Computers can help create rich learning environments, and Logo represents one major approach to doing this.
The Logo dream is still alive, and in a few places the dream is slowly becoming a reality. Seymour Papert suggests that significant effects become clearly visible when students have easy access to a Logo environment for an hour a day. Research by Papert and others at the Hennigan School in Boston supports this position. Significant changes are noted in many children who have that daily hour of computer access for Logo-related activities. One standard question is whether time taken away from the conventional curriculum will lead to decreased test scores. Researchers at the Hennigan School feared that this might happen, but it didn't. This suggests that an hour a day can be taken from the regular elementary school schedule with no ill effects on conventional school goals. The net effect of the conventional curriculum plus the Logo intervention is proving quite positive at the Hennigan School.
I feel that the work of Papert and others in the Logo field should be an inspiration to all of us. Computers are not a quick fix for what ails our educational system. But we are making continued and cumulative progress in the use of computers in education. Eventually computers will contribute substantially to some of the major changes needed in our educational system.
End of Editorial.
Follow-up to the Logo article.
On 7/6/08 I did a Google search to see if Logo is still an important part of the Hennigan School program of study. I concluded that computer use at Hennigan School is alive and well, but use of Logo may have shrunk substantially or disappeared. The school has computer labs and is tied in with a number of powerful partners such as TERC. Quoting from a 2007 document describing the school' program of study:
- Our Math Leadership Team assists all teachers in implementing TERC Investigations 2 curriculum. [Editor's note. This is a math curriculum.] Computer technology develops computer literacy and supports classroom instruction.
Logo-oriented historians will want to read the article, Being Digital Learners, by Lars Kongshem. Quoting from this 1996 article:
- At the Hennigan School, unspoken assumptions about the use of computers in education have been turned upside down. Here, computers don't regurgitate answers; they're used to formulate questions. Inside, you won't find kids on the receiving end of automated drill-and-practice programs or glitzy "edutainment" software. Instead, students use personal computers much like carpenters use hammers -- as tools to construct authentic, personal, and meaningful projects.
- What does that look like? Taking a seat in front of one of the 72 networked IBM PS/2 computers arranged cluster-fashion in a common area in the school, fifth-grader Nebiyu Elias proudly fires up one of his inventions: a grand tour of the solar system. He's written a computer program that allows users to navigate an on-screen spaceship from one planet to the next with the keyboard's cursor keys. The program rewards successful arrival at each port of call by displaying interesting facts about the planet and then launching the ship into space with an eye-catching animation sequence. Nebiyu wrote this interactive adventure in Logo -- a programming language for kids -- over a period of three months.
- Nebiyu is smart, but his sophisticated computer program is typical of the work kids at this school are doing. In fact, says Hennigan teacher Joanne Ronkin, when the kids sit down in front of a computer and start programming, "you can't tell who's the smartest child and who [has] special needs. It's a great equalizer."
- Four computer periods per week is the norm at Hennigan. On this particular day, some of the fifth-graders are working on a long-term assignment to create educational computer games for third-graders. The fifth-graders choose topics such as multiplication or spelling, and as their programs take shape, the third-graders try out the games and offer their feedback. These homemade games tend to be much more popular among the kids than commercial ones, Ronkin says.
Author or Authors
Initial work on this Page was done by David Moursund.
References
This includes references to courses of information about the person as well as references to some of the published works of the person.
