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Got links for crits of Papert / Piaget and modern alternatives? Constructivism at least appears to be live and kicking in the MIT Media Lab hype world Edit: al

Got links for crits of Papert / Piaget and modern alternatives? Constructivism at least appears to be live and kicking in the MIT Media Lab hype world Edit: also on computational thinking, I'm not sure that's what people are arguing for http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/ http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/

Cybiote 9y ago
The main failures of Piaget's work is that it assumes a smooth progression in reasoning facilities with age and secondly, that its notion of formal operations rests too much on deductive logic. But humans do not really reason logically: affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent are fallacies often encountered. However, as the 19th century logician Peirce once stated, Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step. A famous counter-example is an abstract selection task which adults fail with high probability. Yet, when a structurally identical set of rules are given to ~9 years olds but couched in the language of permission, the children are able to pass with high probability. Stating the rules in terms of what the individual has experience with (or altering the linguistic phrasing) significantly increases the probability of solving much more than adjusting the age. So we have that on one hand, people develop capacities sooner (and more unevenly) than his theory supposed and that on another, some stages of reasoning aren't ever reached. amasad is wrong to imply that the field has not progressed beyond the ideas of Piaget. Although, people do often get the important parts of Papert's ideas wrong by focusing too much on the computer part of computer-based learning. The computer should be a means to an end, a tool to help the learner explore more possibilities, make the abstract more graspable and amplify one's ability to ask better questions.
- Pulcinella 9y ago
  I would need to know what the actual task is, but isn't that obvious? If I ask adults "What's 2+2" in a language they don't understand and I ask the same question to children in their native language, the children will look smarter than the adults.
  - Cybiote 9y ago
    It's nothing at all like that. I already mentioned the Selection task above, it's a very googleable term. It's old and there is yet no theory fully explaining why people fail at it as they do. Pragmatic reasoning schemas are the nearest attempt at an explanation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task
    - saywatnow 9y ago
      by serendipity I clicked through on this link and sgentle's link to Kay on McLuhan and the following sentence comes remarkably close to my experience of the two presentations of the Selection task: > .. the most important thing about any communications medium is that message receipt is really message recovery: anyone who wishes to receive a message embedded in a medium must first have internalized the medium so it can be “subtracted” out to leave the message behind. (a tangent, but perhaps interesting)
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Even if we assume that all of Piaget’s theories about developmental timelines are bunk, how does that invalidate the concept of teaching constructively in a child-centered, problem-centered way? Those seem like mostly orthogonal concerns. As for block-based programming: that seems like something we can test empirically, and indeed there’s quite a bit of literature about it (which I have not read and am not familiar with, sorry).
  - Cybiote 9y ago
    I was directly replying to the asked question. But, it is not just the developmental timeline that was off. There's also its hypothesis of what children learn and how they reason or what they are capable of that is inaccurate. Child centered, problem centered is vague. More practically, the big things are: you want material that's novel to the learner but also somewhat familiar (this is true, regardless of age). Children's attention is more distributed and worse at blocking out irrelevancies. Therefore, more complex tasks (such as math) should be presented in a way such that the signal meant to be learned can be extracted with minimal ambiguity (less extraneous information in presentation). Few other things have replicated.
    - jarmitage 9y ago
      Thanks for your replies, which intuitively make sense and appear to come from a knowledgeable background. As in my question I would really like to read the peer-reviewed / field leading work that you're basing your statements on, same as the comment I replied to. Or even just names of people / labs / journals to search.
      - dhess 9y ago
        Yes, please do provide some citations. This is interesting stuff.
- walterbell 9y ago
  Thanks for the Peirce reference. Would you recommend any books/papers/videos as introduction to his work?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Cybiote 9y ago

The main failures of Piaget's work is that it assumes a smooth progression in reasoning facilities with age and secondly, that its notion of formal operations rests too much on deductive logic. But humans do not really reason logically: affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent are fallacies often encountered. However, as the 19th century logician Peirce once stated, Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step. A famous counter-example is an abstract selection task which adults fail with high probability. Yet, when a structurally identical set of rules are given to ~9 years olds but couched in the language of permission, the children are able to pass with high probability. Stating the rules in terms of what the individual has experience with (or altering the linguistic phrasing) significantly increases the probability of solving much more than adjusting the age. So we have that on one hand, people develop capacities sooner (and more unevenly) than his theory supposed and that on another, some stages of reasoning aren't ever reached. amasad is wrong to imply that the field has not progressed beyond the ideas of Piaget. Although, people do often get the important parts of Papert's ideas wrong by focusing too much on the computer part of computer-based learning. The computer should be a means to an end, a tool to help the learner explore more possibilities, make the abstract more graspable and amplify one's ability to ask better questions.

Pulcinella 9y ago
I would need to know what the actual task is, but isn't that obvious? If I ask adults "What's 2+2" in a language they don't understand and I ask the same question to children in their native language, the children will look smarter than the adults.
- Cybiote 9y ago
  It's nothing at all like that. I already mentioned the Selection task above, it's a very googleable term. It's old and there is yet no theory fully explaining why people fail at it as they do. Pragmatic reasoning schemas are the nearest attempt at an explanation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task
  - saywatnow 9y ago
    by serendipity I clicked through on this link and sgentle's link to Kay on McLuhan and the following sentence comes remarkably close to my experience of the two presentations of the Selection task: > .. the most important thing about any communications medium is that message receipt is really message recovery: anyone who wishes to receive a message embedded in a medium must first have internalized the medium so it can be “subtracted” out to leave the message behind. (a tangent, but perhaps interesting)
jacobolus 9y ago
Even if we assume that all of Piaget’s theories about developmental timelines are bunk, how does that invalidate the concept of teaching constructively in a child-centered, problem-centered way? Those seem like mostly orthogonal concerns. As for block-based programming: that seems like something we can test empirically, and indeed there’s quite a bit of literature about it (which I have not read and am not familiar with, sorry).
- Cybiote 9y ago
  I was directly replying to the asked question. But, it is not just the developmental timeline that was off. There's also its hypothesis of what children learn and how they reason or what they are capable of that is inaccurate. Child centered, problem centered is vague. More practically, the big things are: you want material that's novel to the learner but also somewhat familiar (this is true, regardless of age). Children's attention is more distributed and worse at blocking out irrelevancies. Therefore, more complex tasks (such as math) should be presented in a way such that the signal meant to be learned can be extracted with minimal ambiguity (less extraneous information in presentation). Few other things have replicated.
  - jarmitage 9y ago
    Thanks for your replies, which intuitively make sense and appear to come from a knowledgeable background. As in my question I would really like to read the peer-reviewed / field leading work that you're basing your statements on, same as the comment I replied to. Or even just names of people / labs / journals to search.
    - dhess 9y ago
      Yes, please do provide some citations. This is interesting stuff.
walterbell 9y ago
Thanks for the Peirce reference. Would you recommend any books/papers/videos as introduction to his work?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]