CAMDEN (Oct 25): Targets Hit; Targets Missed Seymour Papert, LEGO Professor of Research at MIT

.The power in the idea of randomness is its presence in evolution and nature itself.

"You can't think about thinking, unless you think about something." -- Seymour Papert

"To use crude analogies, there are two ways to view education: as a free market, driven by many small and divergent stimuli, or as the former Soviet Union, centralized in decision making and curriculum control. Our education system is like the latter.

By asking questions such as: "What's the best way to teach science," there's an implication that there's a single entity that can make that decision. It's not like that, maybe never was.

It is analogous to a market-driven economy. Like Darwinian evolution, numerous interplays allow many results to organically emerge. How do we intervene in this divergent, organic, apparently chaotic system?

As in a "free market" the government doesn't tell us how many nails to produce, but it does intervene in the economy; the FDA doesn't tell us what to eat, but it intervenes.

For example, there was no such thing as environmentalism until a conceptual revolution occurred in the '50s. Learning needs a similar conceptual shift, called for now the "Learning Environment."

There is nobody who has a job in education that is analogous to the environmental agencies' jobs. We need this.

Schools are only part of the learning environment. The line between what is concerned at the home and at the school is disappearing. Until recently parents never had a thought about how math should be taught, for instance.

But now, there are software products that say "here's how to learn math without even knowing" (which is wicked idea, and should be banned by an educational protection agency).

Games never advertise as being easy; rather, how difficult. Kid never say schools is too hard; they say it's boring. Yet we still insist on "making it easier."

Game designers know that if games aren't hard, they will go out business. Well, curriculum designers must make it easy to get through, to encourage more curriculum design.

Information technology is the wrong name, and leads to its misuse. The fact that you can get a lot of information out of the Net is NOT merely what it's about.

Most digital technologies -- processors and chips, for example -- are not about information at all. They are constructional medium...we make things from them.

Another application of "digital technology" is a representational medium. How to show a familiar object in a new context. That's not about information either.

Education also has three aspects: learning as information exchange: learning as doing; learning as a representational environment. And the information exchange side (like in digital technology) is easier to conceptualize. That's why it trends that way.

By over emphasizing the information side in the context of the Internet, it is actually causing a greater resistance to change. We fail more and more to see the larger context of education.

A demonstration of a programmed robot car shows the metaphor of a set of powerful ideas that go out into the learning environment in a form that children enjoy interacting with.

The way probability s taught in schools is a "disempowering" activity. It is pointless "school stuff" that answer questions no one ever asked. A powerful way to teach probability is demonstrate how to get the robotics car to detect an obstacle and get around it.

Pick the simple way -- randomness. Every now and then, send the car in a random direction. If it IS meeting a obstacle, it will avoid it. If it ISN'T facing an obstacle, it won't matter.

The power in this idea is its presence in evolution and nature itself. The right use of randomness in the right balance with systematism is a powerful idea. Promulgating an idea like that has a ripple in the environment, much better intervention than forcing a new curriculum.

Papert has three pieces of advice toward this intervention

1. A lot of chutzpah. We needn't fell subservient to technology. Conferences on "Computers and Technology" exist. But that implies a secondary role to a more "exotic" or "complex" entity. We must overcome this with chutzpah.

2. School is segregated by age because it is built on a industrial age model -- the production line. It'll take nerve to abandon that. And vision of a better and different way.

3. What do people need to know? 90% of what we teach in school is absolutely unjustified. The only reason we teach fractions -- that particular piece of math -- of all the more powerful connected and useful math aspects -- has no validity. We need to take an epistemological stance.

It takes an army, and we have one, called kids. Kid power will change the future for its own generation, and we have to see them as our ally and we ourselves as part of that force.

There's no such thing as "the school of the future." There will be a great variety of environments, some virtual, some real, where we go to learn.

If you want to learn carpentry, you go to a carpenter and watch how it happens. If you to learn to learn, you should go to someone who is a "professional learner." But we don't encourage our teachers this way. This must change.

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