Ideas I wanted to remember and share.
Last year I lived in Washington, DC, and the White House was on my way to work. I often took a photo as I passed by.
What to do with all those photos? A great talk about the intersection of photography and data visualization inspired me to create a photo montage.
“Newton ‘understood’ the universe by reducing whole planets to points that move according to a fixed set of laws of motion. Is this grasping the essence of the real world or hiding its complexities? Part of what it means to be able to think like a scientist is to have an intuitive understanding of these epistemological issues and I believe that working with [LOGO] can give children an opportunity to get to know them.”
-Seymour Papert, Mindstorms (p. 117)
“Discovery cannot be a setup; invention cannot be scheduled. Can an adult and a child genuinely collaborate on elementary school arithmetic? A very important feature of work with computers is that the teacher and the learner can be engaged in a real intellectual collaboration; together they can try to get the computer to do this or that and understand what it actually does. New situations that neither teacher nor learner has seen before come up frequently. Sharing the problem and the experience of solving it allows a child to learn from an adult not “by doing what teacher says” but “by doing what teacher does.”
-Seymour Papert, Mindstorms (p. 115)
The modern construction site meets timeless human needs.