In 2018 this paper reframed a major chapter of computing history in a way that's more apparent and relevant today.
The paper traces the ideological roots of Seymour Papert's constructionism and Logo, as well as projects his work influenced such as Scratch and OLPC, to the MIT hacker culture. It also explains the fall from grace of the theory in the education world, but notably not in the technology world, as a consequence of that culture and its disconnect with the wider social implications.
@amoroso Thanks for sharing, I will read this. Bookmarked.
His 1980 book Mindstorms was a big influence on me a few years back when I was getting into the computational side of the world. It's been made legally freely available as a PDF at this link, I just saw, in case anyone is interested:
@amoroso I, like many others working in technical fields, whether they realise it or not, benefited tremendously from the ideas of Seymour Papert getting into the traditional education system via logo and computer-assisted learning. The availability of information on the internet has done a tremendous amount to democratise access to learning, which aligns with Papert's constructionist ideas. This paper criticises Papert, damns his groundbreaking work (for its time) with faint praise and does not point to anything superior in the standard public education system that the author contrasts it with. I'm old enough to remember how dependent students were on the quality of their teachers and library resources before the internet. This dependency ensured inequality of educational outcomes for generations before. Papert did not get everything right for everyone, and I can accept that he overestimated how many students would benefit from learning maths through logo, but I think he got a lot of things right educationally, at least for an important subset of students who were ill-served by the traditional education system. Another thing not mentioned in the paper was that schools tried to implement his ideas without the people implementing them having a good idea of what those ideas were trying to achieve.
@amoroso Thanks for sharing.
I think he meant well (and a lot better than many others of the OG AI MIT people), but fell into a trap of rigid ideology.
(The most obvious being that children learn better when there’s engaged adults there to share experience with them and help guide them; the tools of learning being mostly secondary.)
@amoroso A cautionary tale perhaps: wanting to solve social issues and breaking questionable societal norms but becoming a part of the machinery that helps to uphold the status quo
@amoroso Thank you! This is a lovely paper, and one I had not previously encountered.
One comment: the acronym CSCW is repeatedly used but not explained, which I find very annoying. It should expand to 'Computer Supported Collaborative Work'.
@amoroso thank you for sharing this one, Paulo. It's new to me.
Adding the title and author for my own notes:
"Hackers, Computers, and Cooperation:
A Critical History of Logo and Constructionist Learning"
MORGAN G. AMES
