David Shaw vs. Seymour Papert Debate (1995) [video]

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4616565/david-shaw-vs-seymour-papert-debate

by ontouchstart • 6 years ago

52 30 6 years ago

Wow, thanks. I've never seen video of David Shaw speaking before.

conformist• 6 years ago

There are also some more recent academic talks of his on youtube, mostly focused on his bio-informatics research. E.g. https://youtu.be/PGqCeSjNuTY

ArtWomb• 6 years ago

What. A. Find. We are now living in the era of the $200 Chromebook for every child. But the ideal scenario Papert imagined is far from realized. Blocks-type environments, but extending past programming, to robotics, physics, biochemistry and beyond. And kids empowered to not just repair and administer complex systems, but to actually invent new objects themselves ;)

mwcampbell2• 6 years ago

We are now living in the era of the $200 Chromebook for every child. But the ideal scenario Papert imagined is far from realized.

There's no contradiction in those sentences. The $200 Chromebooks are a realization of what another commenter described as Shaw's neofeudal vision. Contrary to what Papert suggested, the kids themselves can't maintain them (at least not without sitting through a scary warning every time they boot into developer mode, IIUC), let alone assemble them. Outside of developer mode, Chromebooks can only receive OS updates from Google, and only as long as it wants to provide them. And as for the dispute between Shaw and Papert on the expected lifespan of a computer, while some new Chromebooks will receive updates from Google into 2028, I expect that their practical useful life will be much shorter, unless we software devs can somehow stop the bloat treadmill.

Un-disclosure: A few weeks ago, this would be the part where I mentioned that I was a developer at Microsoft, on the Windows accessibility team. I'm no longer there. Of course, they're not really any better than Google when it comes to really empowering kids like Papert envisioned. Indeed, the fact that both of them want to sell their systems and services to schools is IMO a big part of the problem.

seg_lol• 6 years ago

Do you want the C64 for the modern age?

freeopinion• 6 years ago

I live in a community where an incredibly generous individual bought a chromebook for every student in 4 schools, spanning K-12. They are completely locked down. For obvious reasons. This is very unfortunate.

I would love to spend $199 a piece to replace them all with Pinebook Pros. It would add up to about $300,000 for the hardware. Many would suggest this is a poor choice because of lack of an app ecosystem. But the current chromebooks are not allowed to have any apps anyway. Still, the school district would refuse them because they are not so locked down. The freedom to use them any way you can imagine terrifies administrators.

Pine64 sells replacement screens, keyboards, motherboards, harddrives, whatever. A knockoff parts market would evolve very quickly. You actually _could_ have students maintain these. They could learn enormously.

This terrifies most adults in the chain of power that can prevent it from happening. And some of the most important of those people are not educators. They work for SV companies. They convince the educators it is a bad idea.

gugagore5• 6 years ago

I think I am missing the overall context. What is the question? Does someone have the full video?

Here is my attempt: They both agree there should be more computers in the classroom, and that they should not be used for aiding rote memorization. But Papert paints a less expensive picture than Shaw does. Furthermore, there is something about how deliberate the curriculum should be, and Papert sees a benefit to a more organic (so to speak) pedagogical experience.

rmrfstar2• 6 years ago

That is an incredibly charitable interpretation of what Shaw said.

He paints a picture of a future where 80% of the population earns third-world wages unless they "compete for the kinds of jobs that are going to be at the top end".

Three minutes later, he rudely interrupts another speaker to argue against "one computer per student" on the grounds that system administration makes it too expensive and students shouldn't learn to sysadmin because its not a "high end" skill.

Basically, he wants an oligarchy and is unwilling to say it. It is interesting that his protege is doing more than any living person to make his neofeudal vision a reality.

gugagore5• 6 years ago

I do not think he argued against "one computer per student". Did he not explicitly say he agree with the point, but wanted to be clear that he thinks it would cost more than what Papert was saying?

patrec• 6 years ago

Which protege?

ontouchstart4• 6 years ago

What you see is a clip I made in 2016 out of an almost 5 hour long C-SPAN video aired on OCTOBER 12, 1995: Technology In Education Witnesses testified on technological advances in education.

Here is the full video:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?67583-1/technology-education

Today I got an email invitation from HN to repost it.

Look forward to more insightful discussions from our community about these important debates 25 years ago.

ontouchstart4• 6 years ago

It is kind of disappointing that the discussion got side tracked to the computer budget in the classroom, which is totally missing the point.

Perhaps it is a good idea to watch carefully the opening statement of Professor Papert:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4616563/user-clip-seymour-pap...

The mess we are in right now (such as https://www.c-span.org/video/?462071-1/technology-companies-...) might have been avoided if we had a few generations of kids grown up in the Professor Papert's vision of "Educational Jet" instead of "Educational Stage Coach with Jet Engine" (zoom?).

P.S.

This is also related to another discussion about Metaphors in teaching:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257087

in which I agree with EWD 100%.

gugagore5• 6 years ago

If there is a specific discussion direction you have in mind, you should put it forth. That clip helps add more context, for sure.

I don't have much to add, but I'll state that I adore Papert's vision, and that even those who disagree about "what we should do on Monday" should keep an eye on the vision. If it does not directly inform what steps to take in the short term, at least it should have an indirect influence. By a similar token, tearing everything down and trying to rebuilding it from scratch carefully is famously tempting and notoriously ineffective for software systems. Even with software it's hard to make that claim flat out, and I shouldn't dare try to draw an analogy to social systems, since, you know, revolutions happen and for good reason. But I am glad there are at least some people (though maybe there are relatively too many) with an eye toward incrementalism.

There are many similar ideas to Papert's and Kay's that could perhaps be organized under a theme of being visionary or radical or in stark contrast to the status quo. Coming to mind are: A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart [1] (2002) or much more narrowly Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Learned Before Teaching Differential Equations by Gian-Carlo Rota [2] (1997).

I'm also reminded of some work by Felienne that questions the idea that computer programming in particular is not amenable to traditional instruction. This idea is popular with this era's programmers (perhaps because for the most part, at least up until recently, programmers do not learn from school) [3].

[1] https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_03_08.htm...

[2] https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/lg5/Rota.pdf

[3] https://www.felienne.com/archives/6150

ontouchstart4• 6 years ago

Thank you for the links.

To be honest I don't know which direction the discussion might go. The context is this thread I posted on an Aug 1, 2016 discussion (Seymour Papert has died)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12202330

I have forgotten about it until four year later. Can't say we as a society had made any fundamental progress in education technology in the last 4 years, or 25 years.

What about the next 4 years?

todd82• 6 years ago

Thank you for pointing out Professor Rota’s remarks on teaching differential equations; He was my Professor for my first course in Probability about 50 years ago. He was an unforgettable teacher!

Once, I went to visit him during office hours. There was a light on visible behind a frosted window so I knocked on the door and awaited a reply. Instead of a reply, I heard a strange ring of what sounded like a chime. I waited a second and knocked again, and again the strange bell-like chime sounded in response. I peeked though the door and there was Professor Rota. Surrounded by stacks of books, on his desk, on a table, in mounds on the floor, Professor Rota, wearing as he did every day a three piece brown suit with a red tie and holding a large musical bell said “Well, come in!”

My kids are now in their mid 20’s and I’ve been disappointed by the way that they were taught math before college. The “Industrial/political educational complex” has convinced the school that tablets and laptops and math books full of colorful pictures are what students need. The teachers are sent to workshops where they learn things like Russian Peasant and Egyptian multiplication. Sadly, many kids come out of such programs with remarkably poor basic math skills. I have a math degree and was comfortable tutoring my kids in math, but the schools themselves should have done a much better job.

credit_guy• 6 years ago

So basically David Shaw's position was: we need to get children to become fluent in computers, this will be essential in the 21st century, if we don't then a large part of our country will be for all intents and purposes a third world country. But don't expect this to be cheap in the short run. In the long run it will be cheap, because the alternative is a disaster.

Seymour Papert's position was: we need children to spend time with computers, and this is going to be dirt cheap.

The whole debate was not whether or not children need to be exposed to computers, but whether it will be cheap. David Shaw's points were that hardware depreciates faster than Papert's projection (1.5-2 years instead of 5) and that sysadmin costs are much higher than hardware costs (Papert said there's no need for sysadmin, the kids can do it themselves). On both counts I think Shaw was right in 1995.

Where are we 25 years later? All kids are exposed to computers, if anything they have too much screen time. And the sysadmin costs have plummeted; for NYC for example [1], out of a total annual budget for 2020 of $26.9 BN, only $36.6 MM are earmarked as "Prof. Services -Computer Services", or 0.14%.

[1] https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2...

specialist• 6 years ago

Thanks for cite for recent sysadmin costs. Much of my long standing opposition to K-8 classroom computers is due to overhead, waste.

ughitsaaron• 6 years ago

Not totally related to the video, but a fun fact about Seymour Papert is that he was an anti-apartheid activist and a socialist organizer during his time in London in the 1950s, which I think gives some background context to his thinking about education and technology. The _Socialist Review_ archive lists a little over a dozen articles penned by him during that time. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/soc-rev-srg/i...

chaganated2• 6 years ago

So much acrimony over a faulty premise. A DaVinci will still be a DaVinci, even if he only has charcoal instead of photoshop.

The right tool in the wrong hands is a curse, not a blessing. Think "lottery winner syndrome." We've minted far more digital addicts than Fabrice Bellards.

yusufsa• 6 years ago

Couple pieces:

- Shaw has no experience working in schools. Papert at the time of this video had spent decades running experiments in schools in the US and with entire school systems (e.g. Costa Rica). Not perfect work, but he was likely one of the few people in the room with actual experience introducing both computers and radically different approaches to learning in a wide array of contexts. Share this not to preclude Shaw's contributions, but to note that Papert's comments on budget / logistics are coming from experience actually trying this stuff.

- While Papert was harsh in his critique of traditional education research, he kept up with the research (Shaw's point that Papert doesn't know that world is frankly false). For example, see Papert's critique of a seminal book on school reform: https://learning.media.mit.edu/courses/mas713/readings/why_s...

- I haven't seen the entire video, but the bigger point Seymour would make is that introducing computers to school offers an opportunity to radically rethink learning and teaching. Instead of learning math through lectures and worksheets, a kid might learn through creating personally meaningful things in microworlds (see his discussion of Logo in Mindstorms): https://mindstorms.media.mit.edu or Andrea diSessa's later work.

If you're interested in a more recent take, I recommend checking out Mitch Resnick's new forward to Mindstorms: https://medium.com/@mres/the-seeds-that-seymour-sowed-c28603...

chaganated2• 6 years ago

Why is David Shaw even part of that conversation? Between graduation, research, and joining Morgan Stanley, he couldn't have taught classes for more than a few years.

pinewurst• 6 years ago

A strong ditto: and when he did, it was hardly children as well e.g. CS under/grads. If he has any experience with children's education, it's in weaseling his own progeny into Ivy League schools, hardly general uplift.

David Shaw vs. Seymour Papert Debate (1995) [video]

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