Paolo Amoroso

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.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3274287

#LogoLang #mit #hackers

Dec 22 at 9:52amWeb
Show threadRiley S. FaelanDec 22
@amoroso This looks like it's highly relevant to something that I've been working on. Thanks!
Show threadAmin GirasolDec 22

@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

Show threadPaolo AmorosoDec 22
@fluidlogic You're welcome, the paper provides an original framing worth thinking of.
Show threadSimon BrookeDec 22

@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'.

Show threadPaolo AmorosoDec 22
@simon_brooke CSCW was all the rage in the 1990s and possibly earlier, if I recall correctly.
Show threadThomas 🔭🕹️Dec 22

@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.)

Show threadThomas 🔭🕹️Dec 22
@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
Show threadPaolo AmorosoDec 22
@thomasfuchs Such human and technology system are much more complicated than generally assumed.
Show threadengtaoDec 22
@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.
Show threadDigital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 👽Dec 23

@amoroso I haven't finished the paper, but it spends a lot of time attacking "every student learns from free computing". Which, sure, it isn't every student. Many are well-suited to the industrial boot-in-the-face-forever school prison. Papert was trying to reach those like himself who weren't born prisoners, which the jailers didn't like.

OLPC got sabotaged & taken over by Microsoft and other scum until it couldn't do the job at all. Who knows what it could've been?

Show threadJamie CullenDec 23

@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:

https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/mindstorms/

Mindstorms – MIT Media Lab

Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms was published by Basic Books in 1980, and outlines his vision of children using computers as instruments for learning. A second edi…

MIT Media Lab
Show threadPaolo AmorosoDec 23
@jbc Thanks, I'm not much familiar with the details of Papert's work.
Show threadJamie CullenDec 23

@amoroso It was one of those books that I rushed through too fast because the ideas were exciting.

One thing that did stick with me is how Papert used to view the mathematical operations as the physical movements of gears when he was a child. As in, a three-digit number would be three seperate gears, 0-9, which would rotate with satisfying clicking sounds and all in his mind, and he would visualise it vividly. Having never visualised much like that, I thought it was very cool!