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Learning in a Digital World
This "umbrella project" for Seymour Papert's work focuses on re-thinking
theories of development and ideas about what and how people, especially -
but not only - children should learn as a basis for fulfilled and
productive lives in the digital world. Professor Papert's writings have
formulated a number of assumptions underlying this work:
- established ideas about what children can do at specific ages are deeply colored by conditions of the pre-digital world.
- established practices of parenting must be re-examined.
- The content and methodologies of "school" need far deeper revision than they have been given by contemporary reforms.
Constructionism
We are developing "Constructionism" as a
theory of learning and education. Constructionism is based on two different senses of "construction." It is
grounded in the idea that people learn by actively constructing new knowledge, rather than having information
"poured" into their heads. Moreover, constructionism asserts that people learn with particular effectiveness
when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful artifacts (such as computer programs, animations,
or robots).
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RoBallet
Seymour Papert, David Cavallo, Anindita Basu, Shaundra Bryant, Arnan Sipitakiat, Sisi Chen, Erik Asmussen, Larissa Welti-Santos, Cynthia Solomon, John Maloney, Glorianna Davenport, Joe Paradiso, Tod Machover, Edith Ackermann, Alice Mello Cavallo, Jacques d'Amboise, Dufftin Garcia
RoBallet is a research project that brings together the Arts, Learning, and Technology. Children extend the joy and creativity of expression through dance. They use technology to augment their choreography by programming interactive robots, animation, music, light and image in their dance space. They outfit their bodies and the environment with computational devices and sensors so that their bodies can generate the activity of the space. Central to this vision is the insistence that children should control the technology to serve their own imaginations. They should never be driven by it. They will come out of the experience with a deeper understanding of the three themes of the RoBallet experience: the arts as expression, technology as a means to serve expression and learning as"hard fun"- creative and enjoyable yet disciplined and purposeful.
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The City That We Want (A Cidade que a Gente Quer)
David Cavallo, Paulo Blikstein, Arnan Sipitakiat, Anindita Basu, Georgina Echániz Pellicer, Edith Ackermann, Alice Mello Cavallo, Ron MacNeil, Roseli de Deus Lopes, Agencia Estado, Bradesco Foundation, Municipal Education Secretariat of São Paulo, Municipal Secretariat of Curitiba
In this project learners will construct computational models of how they would like to improve their communities. The basic premise is that students will perform a critical inquiry into the life, culture, and functioning of their city and create new models of how they would like some aspect to be. They can either address something they perceive as problematic (such as waste recycling, transportation, energy generation and consumption, employment, crime), or propose a model for a grand new idea to provide some elements desired but not previously possible or conceived (such as interactive public entertainment and art spaces for community, dynamic customizable clean transportation, instant playgrounds, responsive environments). They work in a variety of computational and traditional media. We are augmenting computational tools for learning and building new support technologies for distance support and collaboration. The project also serves as a concrete model for alternative learning environments and for teacherdevelopment.
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Learning Hubs
David Cavallo, Seymour Papert, Anindita Basu, Arnan Sipitakiat, Paulo Blikstein, Jacqueline Karaaslanian,Georgina Echániz Pellicer, Edith Ackermann and Alice Mello Cavallo
We are creating a network of initially small entities called"Learning Hubs."The two primary goals are to create at least one new"out of the box"pilot for an innovative learning environment, and to form a local group of"learning activists"to develop, guide, research and help others appropriate successful models. Those participating in Learning Hubs will share the belief that: significant changes in the learning environment are not only possible, but desirable, and that the need for such change has become more urgent with the spread of digital technology; that steps toward the introduction of computers in schools fall far short of the changes that must come; and that larger, necessary changes will not come as automatic consequences of the presence of technology in schools. Instead, serious intellectual effort is needed to define new forms of learning, and serious efforts of social consciousness-raising are needed before the public will accept the changes.
Local Learning Hubs will serve as public access technology and learning centers, schools, centers for community development, incubators for small technology-based businesses, sites for professional development of educators, and centers for intellectual and political discussion. Initial sites include various locations in the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, Thailand, Ireland, Senegal and other localities. The form differs in each country but the network provides a means to learn and benefit from each other. This international network of projects and activists is an essential part of the project, allowing the leveraging of each other's projects and the constitution of a critical mass of concrete examples and instantiations of innovative learning environments.
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Learning as a Basis for Sustainable Development
David Cavallo, Arnan Sipitakiat, Paulo Blikstein, Anindita Basu, Georgina Echániz Pellicer and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
The core ideas of this project are to explore how learning must be the basis of sustainable development and how constructionist approaches to learning can be applied to assist environmentally-benign sustainable development. If solutions come from outside local contexts, the situation is inherently unsustainable. We are developing a variety of new computational tools to apply towards agriculture, environment, and collaborative problem-solving, including tools for those who are not textually literate. We are doing fieldwork in Senegal with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN-FAO) and local partners to test the tools and refine the methodologies.
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GoGo Board: Retooling Learning Societies
David Cavallo, Arnan Sipitakiat, and Paulo Blikstein
GoGo is a toolkit that provides a simple interface for a computer to interact with its surrounding environment. The key feature of the GoGo kit is a multi-node mid-range wireless communication system. The tool kit can be programmed to remotely read/monitor sensors and control electronic devices. The goal is to enable new possibilities in community learning centers, schools, and other learning environments where learning activities are built upon local interest and resources.This project develops an open hardware framework for the design and implementation of sensing and control devices for use in learning environments. This work is currently focusing on schools in Brazil where, as in other places, low-cost alternatives to expensive technology are much needed. The GoGo board has been designed and used in schools in São Paulo. A network of teachers, students, and other users of the GoGo board is being created. The design of the GoGo board is freely available to anyone to reproduce or adapt to their particularneeds. The research goal is to study the factors, both technical and social, needed to support communities of not-so-technical-people to participate in the process of designing the tools that they want. We believe such community would play an important role in the development of innovative learning environments for the twenty-first century.
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Full-Contact Poetry
David Cavallo and Anindita Basu
Full-Contact Poetry is a digital play space for children's poetic expression. It is a software environment in which children can express their poetic thoughts, create their interpretations of writing by others and also share these expressions. The environment combines ideas from literary theory and analysis with constructionism to extend tools for poetic expression. Children can experience poetry by playing with words as objects, experimenting with typographic effects, moving words through space and navigating into and through the text, while also being able to incorporate and reconfigure sound and image.
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Environmental Education and Technology: sensing and monitoring devices
David Cavallo, Georgina Echániz Pellicer and Alexandra Andersson
At present, people are conscious about the environment and aware of its degradation. Therefore, society must be involved in field projects, accomplish the established regulation and participate in monitoring programs having access to essential information, basic tools and an adequate education. Unfortunately, some environmental elements (e.g. noise, ozone) are not evident or not easy to measure; therefore, we aim to develop a tool set to sense, process, manage and present collected data regarding a variety of environmental indicators. This tool would permit to assess particular environmental indicators, as well as evaluate the status of the environment by the utilization of different kind of sensors, which is indispensable to beware environmental degradation and to improve human interaction with the environment. The environmental sensing set would be useful as a versatile and crucial technology-based tool for environmental sensing. It would sense a variety of indicators that are basic determinants of the environmental status in a particular area, regarding human everyday activities and the impacts of activities in various fields as well, such as agriculture and industry. Due to the simple handling of the device, it will be an excellent instrument to engage children and adults with fundamental implications regarding the relation between the quality of the environment and public health, promoting best practices as well as environmental education. This will not only will make them be a responsible part of the society, but also will foster their creativity and encourage them to contribute to enhance environmental quality in their communities.
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Learning and Community Development
Seymour Papert, David Cavallo, Arnan Sipitakiat, Anindita Basu, Paulo Blikstein and Georgina Echániz Pellicer
This project is intended as an ambitious experiment to help bring new ways of working with local communities in order to help create long-term self-sufficiency through the introduction of new methodologies and new technologies. The idea is that using computational technologies (i.e. low/alternative power and low-cost technologies) can open not only new possibilities for development, but also new ways of learning and working. These opportunities can result in a deeper understanding of the environment and of applicable innovations leading to self-sufficiency. The methods used should take a systemic view and actively encourage and support sustainability, sustainable development, active participation, ownership by and empowerment of local communities, and integrated participative evaluation processes. At its basis, self-sufficiency implies that new project initiatives, and even new development of tools and technologies, originate in the local areas. Thus, one of the primary areas upon which we will focus is learning: not learning in the abstract or in the typical school sense, but instead learning in the context of the local needs of the community, such as food production, environmental issues, and infrastructure.
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Re-Thinking the Mentor's Development
Seymour Papert and Claudia Urrea
There are obvious issues regarding mentors' practice and development. When deciding how to better prepare and support a mentor's work, issues such as more preparation on a particular subject matter or a particular pedagogy, and how to test and evaluate results, should not influence and inform those decisions; instead, we should think more radically about knowledge, bring together research and practice, and give mentors more freedom and autonomy, so that they can better support people's learning process. In this context, Seymour Papert (based on authors such as Piaget, Dewey, and Freire, among many others) has developed the paradigm of Constructionism, which proposes the uses of digital technologies in the learning processes. When re-thinking mentor's development, we should consider tools that allow the kind of educational experiences encouraged by Constructionist approaches. This project proposes the use of educational technologies that have the following characteristics: they not only allow, but also encourage people to produce (vs. consume) information and content; they invite people to collaborate and communicate with others who share the same interests, goals and needs; they are functionally or conceptually transparent (vs. opaque) because they allow deeper level of understanding; and finally, they allow reflection.
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Programming Continuum
David Cavallo, Anindita Basu, Paulo Blikstein, Arnan Sipitakiat, Ariya Dararutana, Dean Lentz, and Alice Mello Cavallo
This project creates an environment that allows young children access to programming. They can program a robot and see its movements but are also presented with a more abstract, graphical representation of the physical movement. In addition to the graphical image, the Logo code that enables the movement is generated. Having the three versions of the same program allows children to transition from a concrete method of programming a robot to a symbolic programming language. The children can program with any of the methods and experiment with the relationships between physical and graphical representations.
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Redesigning Urban Learning Environment
Seymour Papert, David Cavallo, Paulo Blikstein, Arnan Sipitakiat,Anindita Basu and Georgina Echániz Pellicer
Urban educational systems face myriad challenges. In developing countries, these challenges are accentuated by a lack of resources and a diminishing public confidence. Approaches to school, informal learning centers, and community development need to change, but we lack concrete models and ideas. Through this project, we are engaged with several cities around the world to re-think, re-invent, and re-invigorate the learning environment for all children. We are creating centers of innovation for children, challenging mindsets about what education must be, and providing concrete examples of new learning. We are presently working in projects in São Paulo, Curitiba and Salvador (Brazil) and in different locations in Mexico.
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Learning for Rural Communities
Seymour Papert and Claudia Urrea
One cannot think about the future of learning without thinking about rural communities. There is an urgent need for different approaches to rural education around the world, especially in developing countries. Such approaches need to take into account the relationship between education, technology, and culture, and must build on local resources and environments. The goal of this project is to study how digital technololgies can enhance student learning while also improving community life by strengthening relationships between rural schools and their communities. The idea is to develop local, as well as remote, pilot programs that have the potential to infuse new meaning into rural educational settings.
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Things That Teach
Seymour Papert and a distributed network of collaborators
The paradigm for this project is learning to juggle using balls that know where they are at any time and give continuous feedback to the learner. Underlying this is a new theory of continuous learning.
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1-teacher schools
Seymour Papert, David Cavallo, Paulo Blikstein, Anindita Basu and Arnan Sipikatiat
Typically, 1-teacher schools are viewed as relatively backwards due to lack of resources, and in need of elimination or at least of dramatic overhaul. However, research shows that in the best cases teachers at such schools can have stronger, fuller, and deeper relationships with their students, and the students can be more autonomous and in control of their own learning while still more supportive of and cooperative with their colleagues. Technology obviously can provide connectivity, thereby eliminating some of the resource constraints. We are going further by using new learning methodologies and technologies to build upon the strengths of the 1-teacher schools to create models of learning environments to serve as exemplars not only for rural education but also in large urban environments.
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Re-Thinking Vocational Education
Professor Seymour Papert and Dr. David Cavallo
A long time ago, a distinction was made between working with one's hands and working with one's head. Somehow, much of the educational world treated this distinction as though children who could work with their hands could not work well with their heads, and a separate and quite unequal educational track was created. New technology absolutely demolishes the distinction, and creates new pathways for learning for those who think well with their hands. Typical vocational education trains people for jobs that no longer exist, using approaches to learning that should no longer exist. Our work is creating totally new possibilities for youth previously placed on a"vocational"educational track.
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Kaleidostories: Exploring Values and Identity Patterns
Professor Seymour Papert and Marina Umaschi Bers
In a society where concepts of family, community and"what is right and wrong"are constantly changing, there is a need for learning environments that encourage children to actively explore the social and personal values by which they live. This research looks at how on-line collaborative environments can become"tools to think with"when examining moral and ethical issues. This active inquiry involves introspection as well as the creation of narratives for reflection. The goal is to explore how new technologies can assist in children's discovery of their own identity, as well as the underlying patterns that connect the worldviews proposed by different religions and cultures.
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Con-science: Parents and Children Exploring Technology and Value
Professors Seymour Papert, Marina Umaschi Bers, Claudia Urrea, Professor Mitchel Resnick and Dr. Fred Martin
Most of the research done at MIT using programmable bricks and related technologies, aims at helping children develop technological fluency. However the aim of this workshop is to help children develop technological fluency along with ethical and humanistic fluency. This workshop is part of a research project aimed at exploring how new technologies can be integrated into a holistic learning experience that encourages critical inquiryabout social sciences and engineering, science and religion; mathematics and values. A first pilot experience was done with parents and children in the Arlene Fern Commnity School, a value-centered learning environment in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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The Junior Linguists Club
Professor Seymour Papert and Savalai Vaikakul
"Grammar,"for most children, refers to prescriptive rules that are taught or, more likely, fail to be taught in school. The main focus of The Junior Linguists Club is to provide children with a rich repertoire of heuristics for thinking about grammar as a robust system governed by underlying rules and constraints. Instead of instructing children on how their language should work, we aim to help them discover how it does work through playful modeling of language. Empirical evidence suggests that children start to develop theories about how language functions as a system around ages five and six. A good way to support this early understanding is to show children how much they already know, use their intuitions and existing knowledge to leverage enthusiasm for more knowledge, and encourage further knowledge construction by providing them with rich conceptual tools and environments. To help us do this, we are using the computer as a"tool to think with."The computer allows us to treat words as objects that canbe assembled, dissected, and recombined, enabling linguistic inquiry to become more concrete, and therefore more accessible.
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Zora: A Virtual City to Explore Identity and Values
Marina Umaschi Bers and Professor Seymour Papert
Zora is a constructionist graphical virtual world for kids, where they can learn about identity and values through storytelling and programming. Users are graphically represented as avatars and can navigate around the city. They can create places, objects and symbols as well as storytelling characters and role models from different religious and cultural traditions. Zora is a narrative construction kit especially designed to explore identity composed by multiple and contradictory aspects and values. The goal is to help kids develop technological and ethical fluency as well as a sense of self and moral imagination.
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Make (Almost) Anything (Almost Anywhere)
Dr. David Cavallo and Paulo Blikstein
Neil Gershenfeld and colleagues created an extremely successful innovative course titled How to Build (Almost) Anything. This project is an attempt to take the underlying ideas and tools of this course and place them in the hands of children and their communities in remote and economically disadvantaged areas. This builds upon prior work from Project Lighthouse in Thailand to use powerful digital technologies to design, model and build artifacts of interest and importance locally. This not only provides a powerful, creative, active learning environment but also potentially helps improve the living conditions of the local residents along the lines they want.
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Project Lighthouse
Seymour Papert, David Cavallo, Savalai Vaikakul, Marina Umaschi, Arnan Sipitakiat, Claudia Urrea and Michael Best
Project Lighthouse is an ambitious attempt to utilize computationally rich environments to highlight new paths to learning. Our approach involves creating a small number of pilot projects throughout Thailand, each of which represents a more radical change in learning conditions than could be envisioned within the structure of an existing school. Yet, the project does not pretend to be a blueprint for education. Rather, its intention is to provide educators and the public with models that will break their mindsets about what education must be. Currently, most Project Lighthouse sites are not schools. Some are village technology centers (where the learning function is combined with real-world purposes); others are projects within non-formal education community centers. Only one is integrated into a formal school. In a short period of time, these non-school sites have produced some very powerful examples of learning.
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Environmental Learning Environments
Dr. David Cavallo and Paulo Blikstein
It is evident that the sustainability of our planet is a major challenge that is only increasing in importance. Fundamental to successfully meeting this challenge is not only a broader global public awareness, but also for people to develop a deeper understanding of ecological systems. This project focuses on the development of technologies (e.g. low-cost sensors, modeling environments, communication devices) and the creation of learning activities and environments.
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Maine Youth Center
Professor Seymour Papert and Dr. David Cavallo
We have created a technologically-rich, constructionist alternative learning environment at the Maine Youth Center (MYC), the residential facility for adjudicated youth in the state of Maine. By radically changing the learning environment to one more learner-centered, project-based, cooperative, design and experimentally oriented, and by adding the expressive and constructive use of a variety of digital and analog technological tools, we are pioneering new models of learning environments. We have already seen dramatic early results among a population that, for the most part, has not done well in traditional school settings.
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