EDUC 628-Spring-08

With his Personal Thinking chapter, Papert has really gotten me into this book.  It seems the first chapter was just me getting my feet wet, so now I am thoroughly engaged in his analogies and personal style. 

He refers back to when he wrote a newspaper when he was a child and how this was a valuable learning experience for him, then, and for years to come afterwards.  He talks about how learning experiences like this one are hard to measure in the typical school setting and how alternative ways of learning, especially involving computers, can be so much more engaging and valuable than what some test scores actually reveal about students learning outcomes.

Papert reflects on his own experiences of successful learning talking about making croissants and how he learned how he learned from this activity stressing that his first batch of dough will always be his practice batch, and the second will be the good batch.

He looks at the history of aviation and how creative thinking initiated this reserach emphasizing how lift was discovered as opposed to bird’s wings –or wings needing to flap in order for flight to be achieved.

I especially like what he says about children being little scientists when he refers to his time spent at Piaget’s center, and how adults can really be viewed sometimes as “big children” when they work—if they like what they do when they work–because the adults are really just playing with what interests them, and continually learning and developing new ideas—as do children.