I’m just watching ‘Clean Up the World – Lo sviluppo insostenibile’, a documentary showed on National Geographic Channel and these are some interesting estimates:
Interaction: in massively parallel microworlds theory the patterns that rules of a system are not planned by some centralized authority but are determined by local interactions among decentralized components.
Interaction: since knowledge theories have suggested that cultures are not pure, but mixed, combined, the very important ethnographic moment is the interaction among radically different cultures.
The most important skill determining a person’s life pattern has already become the ability to learn new skills, to take in new concepts, to access new situations, to deal with the unexpected.
The kind of knowledge children most need is the knowledge that will help them get more knowledge. This is why we need to develop mathetics. I would use the term mathetics to a course on the “art of learning”
Rules to solve problems (taken from Polya’s work):
- Before doing anything else, spend a little time trying to think of other problems that are similar to one in hand.
- Students often fail to solve a problem because they insist on trying to solve the whole problem all at once; in many cases they would have an easier time of it if they were to recognize that parts of the problem can be solved separately and later put together to deal with the whole.
- It is not using the rule that solves the problem; it is thinking about the problem that fosters learning. Spend more time with the problems.
One of my central mathetic tenet is that the construction that takes place “in the head” (ndr cognitive maps construction) often happens especially felicitously when it is supported by a construction of a more public sort “in the world” – a sand castle, a Lego house or a corporation, a computer program, a poem, a theory of the universe.
Mathetics is also connected to the term bricolage. The basic tenets of bricolage as a methodology for intellectual activity are: Use what you’ve got, improvise, make do. And for the true bricoleur the tools in the bag will have been selected over a long time by a process determined by more than pragmatic utiity. These mental tools will be as well worn and confortable as the physical tools of the traveling tinker.; they will give a sense of the familiar, of being at ease with oneself.
..by defending a strategy of deliberately designing a program that would be only vaguley right but capable of being redirected, instead of shooting for being precisely right on the first shot and risking a complete mis. The same thought underlies Voltaire’s maxim “the best is the ennemy of good”.
I defined bricolage as a style of organizing work that can be described as negotiational rather than planned in advance.
Machine offers children a transition
between preschool learning and true literacy in a way that is more personal, more negotiational, more gradual, and so less precarious than the abrupt transition we now ask children to make as they move from learning through direct experience to using printed word as the source of important information.
Some important learning happens in conditions very different from School: Babies learn to talk without curriculum or formal lessons; people develop skill at hobbies without teachers; social behavior is picked up other than through classroom instruction.
It was Piaget who coined the oft-quoted line that play is child’s work. But no one in that environment was looking at the other half of this pithy aphorism: the idea that work (at least serious intellectual work) might be the adult’s play. We thought of children as “little scientists” but did not think much about the complementary idea of viewing scientists as “big children”.
Generally in life, knowledge is acquired to be used. But in School knowledge more often is treated like money, to be put away in a bank for the future.
Warren McCulloch: heterarchy, which suggets a system in which each element is equally ruled bt all others.
Turning science into “used knowledge” has epistemological implications, because it allows richer ways to think about knowledge than a true/false epistemology based on authority.
What is typical of emergently programmed systems is that deviations from what was expected do not cause the whole to collapse but provoke adaptive responses.
Papert, 1994
Mies van der Rohe, Federal Center Chicago, 1964.