diff --git a/Marsellus Contribution b/Marsellus Contribution index 8e79bd8..13be5f1 100644 --- a/Marsellus Contribution +++ b/Marsellus Contribution @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ Papert, in Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, contextualizes h Papert's early work saw the development of capacity, of being able to act in the world (especially the microworlds children programmed in LOGO), where one is able to make mistakes and learn from them through iteration and repetition, as essential to learning. While he frames it here in the language of mastery - likely a specific point of contention between himself and Joseph Weizenbaum - the more fundamental point for Papert is the way that all learning happens in the first person: “the actual job of getting to know an idea or a person cannot be done by a third party." (137) Other people can't learn something for you. You may be able to benefit from (or be harmed by) their learning, but if you didn't learn it, you didn't learn it. With LOGO, with the educational computer that you program rather than letting it program you, Papert thought, there was a safe place to make mistakes, to learn not only factual or descriptive content about our world as we describe it in science and mathematics, but processual knowledge of what to do when something goes wrong. Papert, from his three books on computers and education, really did believe that with the right programming environment students would be able to learn anything they could possibly become curious about without the need of formal instruction or schooling. -In Computer Class, what was remarkable to me was how clearly wrong Papert was. Not in the sense that the participants, all capable programmers, were more than able to play with and test out solutions to problems that came their way without receiving aid from one of the facilitators. But that to a person, everyone had to ask for help at some point, had to call on one or both of the developers of Ludus about a stubborn problem that just wasn't providing the affordances needed to debug it on their own. I think there’s something rich in these minor experiences of helplessness. +In Computer Class, what was remarkable to me was how clearly wrong Papert was. Not in the sense that the participants, all capable programmers, were more than able to play with and test out solutions to problems that came their way without receiving aid from one of the facilitators. But that to a person, everyone had to ask for help at some point, had to call on one or both of the developers of Ludus about a stubborn problem that just wasn't providing the affordances needed to debug it on their own. I think there's something rich in these minor experiences of helplessness. Joseph Weizenbaum, our second interlocutor for the Computer Class seminars, whom we read after Papert's cynical turn (which, briefly, was more about his own failure in transforming institutional schooling than any lost optimism about the right kind of computation), was also worried about the relation of computer to user when it came to the directionality of programming. In Computer Power and Human Reason, Weizenbaum argued that computers, because they operate on computational logics, can't help but program their users to see the world in computational terms. At its most extreme this generated what he called the “compulsive programmer” and we can see how his description of this figure puts him at odds with Papert's vision of the child who learns mastery through computation: