My Educational Computing Vision in 5 Tweets

Last week, Ben Grey asked me, “In 5 tweets or less, can you share your vision for computing in education?” via Twitter. I’m not sure if anyone else was asked or the motivation behind the question, but I quickly rattled off the following five tweets. I could have accomplished the goal in fewer tweets, but a good tweet is a terrible thing to waste.

1. The computer amplifies human potential by allowing learners to make things and explore powerful ideas otherwise impossible,
2. The computer is a protean material with which you can make all sorts of shareable artifacts, theories and powerful ideas.
3. The computer allows abstract ideas to be concretized through programming. simulation and modeling.
4. The computer makes Papert’s “Mathland” possible where students can be mathematicians rather than being taught math.
5. “The computer is an instrument whose music is ideas” – Alan Kay

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Gary Stager

Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.