Katherine Parrish

I used “mindstorms” in the title of my previous blog entry in which I described my first full-on use of Gen AI in the classroom because there was something about the power and the pleasure of the immediacy of input to result that got me thinking about Seymour Papert.

When I was studying Computer Applications in Education at OISE, it was a friend and colleague who said, you know, you really should read Mindstorms. I had barely finished the foreword when I knew that the book would be hugely important to me, and also deeply loved.

A few years later, I got wind of the fact that the principal of my school had arranged to host Papert meeting with the superintendents of the board in our school library. I went straight to her and said, I need to be there! She granted me access, and I sat quietly, a superfan, while this warm, avuncular gentleman gently waved aside the digital projector and computer that had been set up for this group of 20 people. “I don’t think we need that,” he said. “We can just talk with each other here, yes?” My fan-heart swelled. One of the things he talked about was the futility and wastefulness of the “cross-curricular computer lab.” (remember those?) He said, imagine introducing the pencil, and saying, this technology is going to revolutionize education. Now, we have 10 pencils, and you can sign them out for 5 days at a time for your classes.

As an alternative, he said, laptops for everyone, for every student. He gave an example of a very successful program in New Brunswick, if I remember correctly.

It would take 20 years and a pandemic before “laptops for every student” would become almost a reality in the TDSB.

I grabbed my copy of Mindstorms on my way out the door today, and began to re-read it on the way home. I felt again the same heart-mind swell when I read the foreword, and his emphasis that, equally important to his understanding as a child of how gears worked and how that would help him later understand differential equations, was the fact that he “fell in love with the gears.”

But when I read the introduction again, I was arrested by its prescience in a way that I couldn’t have been in the early aughts. And I also saw how it addressed, almost verbatim, the concerns that one of my dear friends had raised about AI.

Instrumental uses of the computer to help people think have
been dramatized in science fiction. For example, as millions of
“Star Trek” fans know, the starship Enterprise has a computer
that gives rapid and accurate answers to complex questions posed
to it. But no attempt is made in “Star Trek” to suggest that the hu-
man characters aboard think in ways very different from the man-
ner in which people in the twentieth century think. Contact with
the computer has not, as far as we are allowed to see in these epi-
sodes, changed how these people think about themselves or how
they approach problems. In this book I discuss ways in which the
computer presence could contribute to mental processes not only
instrumentally but in more essential, conceptual ways, influencing
how people think even when they are far removed from physical
contact with a computer.

He goes on to talk about his vision that “computers can be carriers of powerful ideas and of the seeds of cultural change.” But it’s not a naive vision:

But there is a world of difference between what computers can
do and what society will choose to do with them. Society has many
ways to resist fundamental and threatening change. Thus, this
book is about facing choices that are ultimately political. It looks at
some of the forces of change and of reaction to those forces that are
called into play as the computer presence begins to enter the politi-
cally charged world of education.

I wish I could write more here at this time about what I’ve witnessed and experienced about those forces of change and reaction. But I haven’t got to the best part yet.

In many schools today, the phrase “computer-aided instruction”
means making the computer teach the child. One might say the
computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the
child programs the computer.

This is it. Exactly.