Deeply Atomized, Even Oppositional: The Unlikely Origins of the Technology Industry’s Rugged Individualism and Dogged Solutionism
Seymour Papert’s learning theory “constructionism” has influenced not only educational technology, but computer-based collaboration more broadly for nearly fifty years — despite decades of evidence refuting its central tenets. Why?
“Can anyone envision a school robotics subculture without Papert? Can we imagine the field of computational literacy without him? Or for that matter, most of technology-enabled project-based learning?” Paulo Blikstein asked the keynote audience at the 2013 Interaction Design and Children conference. He clearly expected an emphatic “no!” in response to each question — even though the late MIT professor Seymour Papert’s contribution to the field of education has been, as Blikstein put it, “largely invisible. It is not that educators disagree with Papert’s theories or recommendations, they just ignore him entirely.”
Seymour Papert is certainly not ignored in the technology design world, where his ideas have been mainstays for some fifty years. But even as Papert’s ideas continue to crop up in software and his writing continues to be read in classes at the MIT Media Lab and beyond, Blikstein is right: he is indeed less commonly discussed in schools of education. My paper “Hackers, Computers, and Cooperation,” explores the origins of this discrepancy through the history of the Logo programming language, which took the technology and education worlds both by storm in the early 1980s.
The Logo programming language was developed to embody Papert’s signature educational theory, “constructionism.” Papert’s constructionism borrows heavily from Jean Piaget’s theory of constructivism, as reflected in the confusing similarity between the two names. While both focus on the ways the children “construct” knowledge about the world, Papert proposes the use of “objects-to-think-with,” particularly open-ended computer environments, to allow children to learn programming and complex mathematical concepts as easily, joyfully, and independently as they learn language or playground games.
The source of most of the qualities of Papert’s learning theory that make it unique, however, come not from Piaget, but from the early MIT “hacker” culture. Papert readily admits that this culture had a strong influence on him throughout his writing — and it continues to influence the technology world more broadly. Because of this ideological connection, even as Papert’s constructionism failed to live up to its lofty promises again and again — via wide-ranging applications and evaluations from the 1980s to the present — it has remained popular at the MIT Media Lab and beyond. Papert’s writings, like Logo’s computational “objects-to-think-with,” still enchant many who recognize themselves in his descriptions.
Moreover, the same forces that shaped constructionism also shape the ways that we tend to view computers and the nature of collaboration. First, Papert’s constructionism tends to present learning (especially learning motivation) as largely and implicitly individualistic when it is actually a deeply social process — and, in particular, that teachers, parents, and other adults play crucial roles. Second, this foundational computer-supported cooperative learning project — one of the first, and certainly one of the best-known — still frames assumptions about the universal allure and importance of learning to program computers. Taken together, the ubiquity of these individualized, computer-centric perspectives can make it more difficult to envision alternatives for computer-supported collaboration — ones that encode pro-social behavior, mechanisms for countering power differences, or modes of social reciprocity, for instance — or even de-center the computer as a solution for social problems altogether.
The reasons that Papert’s constructionism and hacker culture are still so influential involve how those in the technology world view their own school experiences, what kinds of learning they consider most valuable, and their own identities as technologists. Explore them in “Hackers, Computers, and Cooperation,” published in the November 2018 Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction and presented at the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) conference in Jersey City in November 2018 — as well as my book The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child, due out in 2019 from The MIT Press.
Citation:
2018. Ames, Morgan G. “Hackers, Computers, and Cooperation: A Critical History of Logo and Constructionist Learning.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction, 2:CSCW, Article 18.
