Learning Creative Learning - Session 4 - Powerful Ideas

The fourth session of Learning Creative Learning this week we'll be focusing on the theme of Powerful Ideas and

its great to have with me here at MIT Brian Silverman and remoting joining from California, Alan Kay.

But before getting into the conversation with Brian and Alan, I just want to

do a little recap and update of some of the things we saw in the online community this week. Its great to see

Its great for us, as we see what's going on in the Google community, to see people representing, whats

going on in the different, their representations of the discussions from last week. Here's one of the images that

was put up by Julie Donders of her representation of some of the the conversations from last week on making

and constructionism. And people also have representations of their own work, this is a representation by

Corrine Thompson about her thinking about the creative learning spiral as she was working on her Scratch

project. But actually what we get most excited about is some of the work in the online community where people

are self organizing for new types of activities not things that we suggested but other things. Adriano from

Italy put up a template for the creative learning spiral

and encouraged people to translate it to other languages. So we see here a few of the other languages

that people have translated during this past week. I think we also see people helping out one another in all sorts

of different ways. Here's one where somebody was worrying in the online community saying that their group

wasn't very active and it was great to see that other people just jumped right in and invited her into their discussion

group. We've seen that happening over and over, we really appreciate the way people are pulling people in and

forming their own discussion groups. We also see people providing different resources for the community . I know

that Simon Fogg has been putting together the readings each week into a single read file so that people can

download it onto their tablets, make it easier for people to get access to the readings during the week.

We're also checking out that some people are giving us various suggestions and critiquing the work that is going on

in the course and actually we are really open to that and are interested in hearing people's comments.

We've said from the beginning and as Phillip was setting up online that this is a big experiment and its us

experimenting with things and trying things out. And we get some comments like heres one from Hans Roes

who says " I just don't get why the folks at the Media Lab chose such a terrible classic form for this course,

lots of readings (which I don't mind) and talking heads." And he went on to talk about other things about

aren't there more innovative ways of doing it and I do think there are more innovations. This is our first try at this

and also theres also some constraints. We're doing it in connection with an in person class here at MIT.

Ok we're getting an echo here. Anyone know where that echo is coming from? Ok, is that coming back through

Alan? Ok, we see this as a first step and we're experimenting with different formats. We've gotten a lot

of good feedback from the different activities but we know that theres a lot more that could be done.

Here's one from John Smith, who gave a variety of ways we can use different media, different ways of engaging

people in different forms of collaboration and these are things we are very interested in and I as I said

we are doing this because partly in reaction to some of the other online courses and we want to continue to

experiment over time. So we'd love to hear from you whats working, whats not working and in time in the future

we'll continue to think about it. And also just by these comments we've been sparked just by the coming together

as a community to start thinking of this course less as a course and more as a community. Its been great to see

the collection of people who have come together and we're starting to think how we can continue and sustain

this community and we look forward to hearing from you about ways to see this not just as a course because

we know its not going to be like a course here in person at MIT, what it means to bring together a community

around shared ideas that we have here. As we get started, I want to mention again, we will be having the

backchannel chat again if you go to candy.media.mit.edu, you can participate in the chat.

I think Shai Mindu here will be looking at the chat so if you have questions that you want to ask to Brian and Alan

you can put them there and we'll relay some of those questions as the session goes on. Its been interesting

for us to see the discussions going on in that online chat, which we see as just as important as the conversations

that Alan, Brian and I will be having. So we look forward to providing avenues for you to have those

ongoing discussions. As we moved into this week, in thinking about the theme of Powerful Ideas, we thought

it was great bringing together both Brian and Alan, two people who have really influenced my thinking about

powerful ideas over the years. Brian is a longtime colleague and collaborator who like myself is deeply

influenced by Seymour Papert, worked with Seymour . Brian helped, was the lead force in several companies producing

Logo commercial software and he's worked together with us in the Media Lab on a wide variety of projects over the

years. Many of you know Alan, often seen as the father of the personal computer in many ways for his early visions

from the dynabook vision, many of the early visions just coming into reality now that really helped influence

and guided some of the directions as the technology moved forward over the last forty to fifty years. But for us

its not just about the insights about the technology but Alan from the beginning has been deeply interested in

the issues around learning and eduation and the role that new media can play there. Actually as you might have

seen when Brian and I wrote our paper about designing construction kits, we talk about the two people who most

for learning and kids were Seymour and Alan. So its great to have Alan here to join us. And I also think

todays theme of powerful ideas is a nice bookend with last weeks sessions talking about constructionism and making.

I see two big themes that I took away from Seymour Papert. One was engaging kids as makers and designers

and the other was engaging kids in powerful ideas. So it was nice to have last week's discussion about making and designing

and this week's discussion about powerful ideas. And theres a lot of discussion online about what is a powerful idea

and how we can be thinking about powerful ideas. So I thought in starting the discussion today with Alan and Brian

getting them to talk a little bit about, with this term powerful ideas, how they think about it. Because its something we

that we all feel although its in the subtitle of Seymour Papert's book Mindstorms: Children, Computers and

Powerful Ideas, Seymour said it was the part of Mindstorms that people really didn't get. Part of this session today is

how to we help people get it and foster and support it out in the world? Actually Alan, do you want to get started

in saying some of the things you think about powerful ideas? Alan: I first heard the phrase from Seymour Papert

not sure, maybe not the first time I met him along with Cynthia in 1968 but shortly thereafter. And Seymour

had more than a knack, he had a positive genius for finding very short, very expressive ways of taking a

whole bunch of things and bundling them up in a way that made it much easier to think about. And of course,

as Seymour put it, the first powerful idea is that there are powerful ideas. And I just have to say that the first visit to

Seymour and Cynthia in the fall of 1968 changed my course of life entirely. I had already done a desktop personal

computer as part of my thesis work at the University of Utah. But I thought of it as kind of like a tool or an

automobile or something for adults who are kind of like me or other professionals like doctors and stuff. I had

a degree in Mathematics and another one in Molecular Biology and I'd heard about Seymour from hearing a talk by

Marvin Minsky roughly on the lines of his Turing Award lecture which is a wonderful lecture, he gave a talk like that

in '68 so I resolved to visit Seymour when I could. But what I saw was something I knew all along except I didnt' know

it and that was that there are forms of mathematics that fit much better into the world of the child and what children

can think about. And Seymour is a Mathematician who had spent some time with Jean Piaget and honed in on this.

And again he had something that we all knew about except we didn't know it and that is that differential models

, the reason we have differential models is because they're simpler and the computer is there as an iterator so you

should be able to base things on simple forms of addition and be able to introduce the child into an honest

form of calculus for young children, thats what I saw. I also say children doing things that, in many ways, the turtle

de-emphasized. The turtle has just appeared there at Bridge School and it was wonderful mathematical

characteristics but before the turtle arrived the children, these were 12 year olds, were making Logo programs

to translate English into Pig Latin. And some children were doing a French translation, so they were actually using

Logo in a way that was more purposeful in many ways. Because you can do a lot of things by writing long

procedures full of turtle commands. But for the language stuff they had to use recursion, they had to understand

parameters. So what I saw there was just the best thing I'd ever seen, maybe still is. Fortunately we all survived

the car ride back from Lexington to Cambridge, Seymour driving, me in the back seat and Seymour talking to

me and Cynthia pounding on him to pay attention to the road. Cynthia may remember that ride, I certainly do.

And what Seymour was getting at was what a study of history and particularly, the other concentration I had in

college was anthropology, which reveals pretty strongly that wer're set up by nature to learn certain things fairly

readily from the culture around us. And then there are inventions so most people learn languages very readily

because we actually are genetically set up to acquire language from a culture around us, we're not a blank slate.

But writing was hard to invent despite the fact its an attempt of dealing with something that people have been

doing for hundreds of thousands of years, its only a few thousand years old. And that fact has to be striking

for most people that this incredibly powerful idea of writing and reading took a hundred and ninety thousand years

or more to invent. And example that I use of a powerful idea is calculus because once you learn it in a fluent way

you're not the same kind of thinker as you were before. And thats my definition of a powerful idea and I think that was

Seymour's also that its not just an idea, its not just something that has a little bit of leverage as many ideas

do but its something that is across an important threshold. And I think a threshold is one of the most

important things that we should talk about. And when you're across that threshold and fluent, like an intermediate

musician or an intermediate guitar player or an intermediate mathematician, you're actually not thinking

the way people did a hundred thousand years ago, you've taken on a little extra brainlet and as Jerome Bruner

pointed out its one of the most wonderful things about humans is that up to some extent we can use

our language facilities to simulate, to make interpreters for these ideas that our genetics don't set us up with.

Mitch: I know one question that came up in the discussion in the community was, what do you consider as a

powerful idea. Alan, I think you're making the case that some ideas which are historically important, that

required invention by our culture. There's also talking about the personal connection, do powerful ideas need a

personal connection? Brian, maybe this idea of historically important or personally important, what do you think

about that? Brian: Can I start off by saying I really wanted to come here and say, "This is what powerful ideas

are and here's the list" but disappointingly we couldn't find any good way of doing it. We were talking about Seymour's

genius. One of Seymour's geniuses is to produce really good pieces of vocabulary and then never fully define them.

The reason thats actually really good is the idea of powerful ideas as your question is pointing out its a complicated one.

And if you actually had a clean cut definition of it, you'd be narrowing it to some of the facets of it.

One of the things I got from Seymour's more recent paper is instead of saying powerful, you can say empowering.

Thats really capturing the personal aspect of it. Because one of the things I saw in the forum and two papers is

people were talking about powerful ideas and people were talking about big ideas and those are kind of two different

concepts. That you can have.. Alan: I once gave a talk with the title Big Ideas are Sometimes Powerful Ideas.

Brian: And how did you make the distinction between them? Alan: Well in the same vague way that Seymour did. But

again with this threshold idea, I think this threshold idea is a really good one for, its like social interaction which

is built into us as very popular. But in fact, we have to do a fair amount of learning to make it work for us rather than

against us because it leads to rivalries, tribalism and all the other stuff thats built into us. Brian: So part of what I think

Mitchel is asking is theres a category of powerful ideas that can be summed up by standing on the shoulders of

giants. The thing that you're saying is that it did take 100,000 years to invent writing, it took another

4000 years to invent calculus. The thing is that once invented we want to have a social mechanism

in place to not forget them. Thats very different from the individual form of it. Theres a lot of ideas that are

empowering that are new inventions to you that aren't necessarily new inventions to the world. Mitch: And you're

saying those are important but you wouldn't categorize them as powerful ideas, you would sort of separate..

Brian: Its again, its not clear that its spending a lot of time figuring out who gets to keep the label. There really

are, there are categories of different ideas. And in fact the week leading up to this session, I kind of felt like a

caterpillar tripping on his feet, I couldn't even figure out if I understood what idea meant. Mitch: Although one things

important that again I saw in the community is that a lot of the examples given in the papers from Seymour's

examples and to some of Alan, a lot of them do come up in this math, science, engineering partly because of the

backgrounds of the people writing, partly because they were constructs of the last few hundred years that enabled

new ways of thinking. But I do think some people were asking, is it just about that? I think its clearly not just

about that. And actually I'd like to, in your paper you talk about democracy as a powerful idea or actually

someone in the online community was talking about that, and I'd be interested to know what you think about this, the

idea of less is more that came out of Mies van der Rohe, from architecture, you can apply it to other things in the way

you think about it. So people are raising what sort of counts as a powerful idea within the culture? How would

you think about in these different fields how you think about powerful ideas? Alan: Well Seymour and I were once

at a conference at the MIT Conference Center that was called, I forget who called the conference, various friends

and enemies were at this conference and at least one day was spent fruitlessly arguing about, this is, the desire

of that day was to make a list of powerful ideas. And the problem is they come in different shapes and sizes.

Like to me science is right up there to me as the most powerful idea we've ever come up with and its not because

its about the scientific results that have happened over the last 400 years. Its because science is a

collection of heuristics for trying to fix whats wrong with our brains and that was articulated actually very

clearly by Francis Bacon in 1610 when he was writing about the four main flaws we have in our brains that come

from genetics, that come from our culture, come from the way we use language. So his proposal was what we have to do is come up with

processes and tools that can help us get around these problems. So the tools are things like telescopes and microscopes

things that can detect electromagnetic radiation which was not dreamed of in 1610 to deal with all the things

that are invisible to our nervous systems that we should be paying attention to and also mental tools for dealing with

, which are basically a collection of heuristics and many of these heuristics would count as powerful ideas all on

their own. So to me the important thing about this phrase, as Brian pointed out so well, is its simple symbols are

ones that stand for something and really interesting symbols stand for things that we don't completely

understand yet. And I also define an interesting person as somebody you find interesting whether you agree with

them or not. Seymour was definitely one of those, I didn't agree with him on everything but it didn't matter because

Seymour was a generator of points of view and he really helped all the rest of us think about many of these

issues. Mitch: Maybe this fact is not so easy just to make a list of powerful ideas, so theres a complexity of

how they're connected. Also leads to the question, how do we help people engage with powerful ideas because its not

just a matter of having the list, doing the curriculum and then we're done. So the idea is how do you build a culture

that can foster and support..Alan: I would say just don't worry about definitions just take science and things that

you can find good analogy, strong analogies to that will count as them also. Instead of trying to define something

and expanding it out, we can be more aristotelian and collect examples of things and save. And things like were

like this, that was Aristotle's strength as opposed to Plato was that he didn't go to a class oriented system, he

went to an example driven way of codifying the world. Brian: If anybody's keeping score, so , so far we have two ideas

on our list. There was science and there was democracy. Those are big ones. Could I add a little one that may be

a big one. So I read Seymour's paper as we all should have and a point in the paper said he brought in a rat trap

and that generated a lot of enthusiasm because for one of the kids the rat trap represents an idea. And I thought

about that for a bit and say rat trap, well trapping rats isn't a very powerful idea even if the rat trap is very powerful.

What did he mean? And trying to read between the lines my guess is the kid understood by seeing a rat trap that

theres an idea that you can use a tiny bit of force to unleash a huge amount of force. Thats a really powerful idea that

things can have triggers. Mitchel and I were discussing this earlier and we trying to figure out historically, how far back

does that one go? 400 years maybe? Alan: The interesting thing about triggers, I would say is the

complementary powerful idea is that you can train a pidgeon to pull a trigger of an AK47 or set off a nuclear

explosion. So triggers are both powerful and dangerous. That brings up the idea that most powerful ideas are double edged swords

they cut both ways, they can be amplifiers or they can take things away from us. Mitch: Right, actually can I try

to push this in the direction of how is it that we can help people support others in the engagement of powerful

ideas and getting a deeper sense of it? I think in a lot of the writings its about creating a culture that supports

it, creating environments, so maybe a little bit more about what are strategies for fostering and cultivating

the engagement with powerful ideas? Brian: Since the sessions about what classifies, Seymour's vocabulary that

doesn't have good definition, let me throw out another. Its a good strategy for that making microworlds. Right and

making microworlds is kind of like make environments where you're making things and in the course of these building

things come good ideas will have an opportunity to emerge. Mitch: This is in some ways connecting last week's

theme and this week's theme. One of the reasons that we like making is not just because it enables you to

express your ideas but the activity is more likely to engage you with ideas. Brian: Yes, and one of the things

that we used to talk about, debugging, and we're talking less today about debugging and I was thinking

just the word debugging isn't a great word because bug has negative connotation even though the word was

invented to have less of a negative connotation. The thing is when you're making anything either in the microworld

or the real world, you're constantly getting stuck. And a lot of education is about figuring out how to get unstuck.

in certain circumstances. Now what happens? The sprites at the edge of the screen and you want to do something about it.

You're stuck. Somebody will wander over and give you a suggestion. If you like the suggestion, you'll say thats a good

idea. So often the ideas are the things that help you get unstuck. A powerful idea is a way of getting unstuck that

you then realize will get you unstuck in future places. That when you run into an analogous situation, you can

use the same idea to help you get through that one. Alan: Yes, I would say the, an interesting thing to look at

now theres a lot of talk about STEM these days. I always like to take it in its historical order which is

now TEMS. And Technology is not be a word that is in there because technology technically is about

everything that we make. So for the T, I put in Tinkering. We're not the only species that tinkers with

things so its a good place to start. And Seymour used the french word "bricolage" for this which is just fooling

fooling around, trying things, seeing what works and what doesn't and historically engineering came in, I claim,

when people started to try and extract principles from the tinkering and they would make cookbooks. And

engineering was possible long before science because you don't have to understand a lot to do engineering.

Even when I was learning there was a joke that even if the bridge fell down, you'd just double the cross-section

of all the beams and that works up to the point where the square cube law will pull the bridge down directly.

So there's a lot of this finding sweet spots that still defines engineering today. And then mathematics happened

in a variety of places but I think modern mathematics happened in Greece 2500 years ago and then finally

science 400 years ago, so TEMS. And I think that the possibilities for enlightment enlarge as you go from one

of these to the next. Its difficult to get really enlightened about tinkering because..Brian: Can I argue that? But

first since we were keeping score of powerful ideas, another that came up in what you said is that fact that

there are sweet spots. For me a very powerful idea was realizing that you can't simultaneously optimize everything.

Right, you can't have something be the simplest, the most powerful, the cheapest and the prettiest all at the

same time. But let me get back is actually Mitchel pointed out the paragraph in the paper we gave for the course

where you said about tinkering what you're saying now, and its funny though because you were putting tinkering

in opposition to storytelling. And I thought that in my own career, the best technique has been systematic

tinkering. Mitch: And let me put it another way, and this came up in the Google community, people discussing

it because it could be that people are just using the words differently. But you were using tinkering to mean an

unsystematic approach and that later you can make systematic. Whereas I think Seymour had written

about tinkering as an alternate approach as opposed to a predessor approach but tinkering could be a pathway

systemeticity but maybe its just a matter of words. Alan: Its like Jerome Bruner had a good insight which is

when you're doing curriculum, Jerry said, if you don't know what else to do try recapitulating the Piaget

stages. Try to find the kinesthetic encounter with the idea first learner, find the figurative one, visual or auditory

and this could build the basis for a more symbol approach to the idea because you're using other ways

of knowing to build up to it. Mitch: And maybe..go ahead Alan: Same thing, I don't think theres any scientist

today who doesn't tinker. So I think the basic idea is that these four things are kind of like an overlapping venn

diagram and practitioners try to get in the sweet spot of that. And I think a really good practitioner, another

powerful idea is to have some sense of whether you're tinkering doing engineering, doing mathematics or

doing science because even though they are highly related and you have to do use all of them when you're doing

them, they actually have different points of view on what success is and what the powerful ideas within them

are. Mitch: I think one thing I was taking away from the readings is there are these powerful ideas, then

there are pathways in engaging with those ideas. Even though some of the things we talked about, making personal

connections, that can be sort of, help you make a pathway for making engaging with the ideas. So, one thing

is I don't...Alan: Let me try a thing on you. So let's go to neutral ground here and take music. So music has

analagous stages and theres definitely a tinkering part of music. And some people are actually quite happy to stay

there because from their standpoint, what they're out after is a sense of personal identity and belonging,

participation and they don't have to be fluent in order to feel like they are participating, this is what Guitar Hero is

all about, its a way Brian: Well actually...Alan: No, hang on Brian. Brian: Sorry Alan: Its a way of feeling like you're

in this club without paying the dues and so I think that with music its pretty clear that people who stay with

tinkering are at best in a pop culture and that they are missing an enormous amount of stuff that has been

discovered, created, invented, done in illuminating this large field and I feel the same way about tinkering. Its a

necessary part but its far far from sufficient. And one of the big problems when computers came in thirty years

ago in general use was pretty much everyone was happy if they saw the kids tinkering. And from my standpoint

the kids weren't doing anything interesting at all but from the adult standpoint they were dealing with something

adults were upset about or frightened about or were wary about and the children were just piling in. And you

see a lot of this rhetoric with One Laptop Per Child also. Just the fact that the children are using them and

everything is deemed to be a good thing and I think it is but I think its far far below the threshold that is required

before it becomes worth it. Mitch: Since you're bringing up computers, lets turn to that a little bit, whats the special role

computers play in thinking about powerful ideas? Brian: And I was going to say if I can't interrupt Alan, can I interrupt

you? Mitch: Yeah Brian: We're using, I like repurposing the word tinkering to mean something I like and maybe

you would even like because I think we're using the word differently. The way that we've been trying to use

the word tinkering is going through the design process with materials in hand rather than the engineering process

don't engage the materials until you have a plan. Alan: Yeah, I think you want to do both, in the arts, so if you

go to art school to sculpture class they don't give you a lump of clay, the reason is you can't debug a lump

of clay into something neat except by lowering the thresholds tremendously. Brian: For sure, for sure but you

can debug a computer program into something neat. Alan: I don't think so, I think you have to have an idea

and I think those ideas that you are putting in there are absolutely critical. I think, you know, in every, you can

make a computer program do something interesting but I don't think it, I think in the same way you can

make a cup of clay without a plan, you can make, just fool around and do stuff but its just such a low level of

engagement with the material, it just isn't enough as far as. This is one of the big differences in how Seymour

looked at the world and how I do. Seymour essentially liked the viewpoint of Rousseau and from my background

in anthropology, I just didn't believe in Rousseau. And 200,000 years of history says Rousseau was

merely an idealist, he didn't actually, wasn't actually looking at human beings as they are and thats, so children

are simply not going to discover things that took human beings two hundred years to discover. Right,

they have to be put into a context that is really something more like Montessori and of course Seymour did

like Montessori. Mitch: Its not saying to have a blank slate but you could, I think Seymour was saying that you

could create some environment they you would start by tinkering so its not just this do anything but its one that

makes you more likely to discover and make progress through your tinkering. Alan: You can but thats what

cultures are. Cultures are places where theres a start in tinkering and most cultures never invented writing or

calculus or anything else. So I think what human culture is and what we are basically wired to do which

is to find ways of coping with situations where we don't have the tools which we've done for most of our time, finding

ways of dealing with the powerful and deleterious effects of our social system, thats what we're set up to do.

We're not set up to invent science. And so if we're going to have children learn science, its not something

that we want to put them back into a classroom where somebody's talking to them about science but we have to

have adults that actually understand. If you look at the experience on eToys and you can tell me about your

experience with Scratch. But eToys has at least been touched by some millions in twenty or thirty different

cultures and in every case that we've been able to look at closely, what the children were able to do was entirely

predictable on what the adults around them knew. And if the children don't have knowledgable adults around them

they tend to use the computer medium as a storytelling device because thats whats built into us. Thats what we do.

And the most interesting thing about science perhaps from that perspective is that it really isn't about stories.

Scientific knowledge is not in the form of stories, its not judged the way stories are judged, it has a completely

different epistemology and learning that epistemology I think is one of the primary reasons for helping children

very strongly. Mitch: But certainly the culture around makes a big difference, is something I think everyone would

agree on. Even if you become a good storyteller, not just to become a good scientist I think you would..Alan: I'm

not against stories, I'm talking about adding something in rather than confusing it so much that you try to make

science into a story where in order to do that you have to completely distort any reasonable definition of story

and narrative. Maxwell's equations just doesn't have a narrative, I'm sorry. Mitch: Alright, maybe we can see if

theres questions, I don't know if there are questions coming up from the online community or there are

questions from the class here? Brian: Come on Natalie Alan: So this is the problem with 24,000

students and no questions Mitch: No, we have one here, go ahead Natalie. Natalie: I do think some people

are thinking about being creative with crayons or pencils or pens which might feel more direct and then say turtle art

programming and what is it about programming and how do you think about creativity? It has something to do

with powerful ideas, I'm not sure. Brian: Yeah, in what you were just saying it seems you are treating two

distinctions as if they're the same when I think they're different. One distinction is narrative, not narrative

distinction. The other distinction is the tinkering, not tinkering distinction. Alan: Uh no, but let me answer the question

that just got asked. Seymour and I used to talk about this a lot, I think I've seen it less talked about now

but maybe I'm in the wrong place. One of the most interesting observations that was makeable forty, fifty years

ago but is incredibly makeable now is the sweeping generalization that among the least enlightened people

you might ever meet on the planet are programmers. And so...I see a hand. Mitch: No, its okay, go ahead.

Alan: Ok, so that was noticeable back then and the idea was yeah you can become incredibly enlightened by writing

programs, this was kind of a standard doctrine of Marvin and Seymour when they were working together.

Marvin talked about it at some length. Theres no question that you can use programming as a path to larger

insights and yet these larger insights don't appear for most programmers thats patently clear. So the analogy that

Seymour and I used back then, there was a saying of the '60s called Zen and the Art of Archery and it was

all about just learning to shoot a bow and arrow isn't enlightening but in fact you can use it as a vehicle as you

can use many other things that require concentration and learning and are difficult to do. Theres a point of view

that you can hook onto this that can give you a different set of perspectives by the time you wind up doing this.

The question was what is there about teaching programming, what is there about presenting different kinds

of programming languages that could, what kinds of environments could you create for the learning of them

that would actually lead to something that thought of programming the way that Marvin and Seymour did which

was a new way of representing very important ideas that could not be easily represented any other way. So I think

thats fallen by the wayside now. But you two guys I'm sure have some real interest in this still. Mitch: For sure, I think

maybe one question is how to support this out there, maybe to each of you, Brian over here has done a lot with

not just putting the software out there but trying to provide support around it to help engage people in that

type of thinking. And maybe it would be great to hear from Alan about some of things you've done like the open

school, as you said this doesn't just happen on its own. And how you support it with the right people. Brian, if you have

something to say about the right ways to support it with concrete examples of things that are being done to

support it. Brian: Partially to answer the question, partially to respond to what you're saying, you're pointing to

that there are two good reasons to think about learning programming. One is a very instrumental reason. One of the

things that Mitchel and I have found that a little bit of programming goes a really long way. That almost no matter

what you're building, being able to write a short program really is a jet assist. The other thing that you're talking

about is, programming is a way of organizing your thinking in a very broad, very deep way. And I guess for

some of the things we've done recently, Natalie was asking specifically about Turtle Art, we're only Alan: Is Natalie

here? Mitch: Yeah Alan: Yeh Natalie! Brian: I guess you can't see her. Alan: Sorry Brian, go ahead Brian:

I half feel like the kid saying you can't see me now. What I was saying is a number of the things that we're doing

certainly with Turtle Art and to a certain extent with Scratch, we really want to provide the jet assist of a little bit

of programming. And what the actual microworld is about, its not about programming in the deeper sense

that you're talking about. In Turtle Art's case its about making pretty static images, beautiful static images and

in the Scratch case, you should say what you think it is. But it really isn't about touching on deeper ideas that

came from the Marvin/Seymour view that included that. Mitch: Wait, not touch at all, touching on ideas about

debugging, procedures, those are, its not just the..Brian: It should have said not focusing on rather than

not touching. Alan: Yeah, I think this is the big issue of our time where we are now. Mitch: Alan, do you want

to say a few things, because I do think its an important issue and one that would be, one that people are interested

in, there needs to be a culture around it, how do you go about supporting that, again you've had experience

with the open schools, its not just technology but the overall environment around it. Alan: I think, I'm not sure

I've had any ideas that I didn't get from somebody else here but Montessori I think had a really great insight,

she was a true genius, first woman to get a medical degree in Italy and she could see things other people

couldn't see. But she realized that, and she was also a huge student of anthropology. One of the things she said

was something that actually Seymour quoted in one of his first papers which is a little boy in Africa imitating

his father by hunting squirrels where the father is out hunting antelopes is actually starting to participate in the actual

behavior that he will be doing as an adult, whereas Montessori said that a little girl in a nurses uniform with

a stethoscope is only participating in the form of being a doctor or a nurse not in the context. She said this is true

with a lot of things in the 20th century and the twentieth century is only a few years old. Then she said

we want children to grow up in embedded in the powerful ideas of the 20th century, in order to do that

we have to have something different from their homes which were in the 15th century as far as she was

concerned. So she wanted to make a real 20th century environment that embodied ways of thinking and doing

that were the best of her time. So I think this environment, that had a huge effect on me in thinking

about designing user interfaces that its not just having a command line interface but its actually doing media,

that its building an entire environment because you're actually in the world multiple hours per day. And of course

this is not a new idea of mine but I got a lot of it from Englebart who thats what he was trying to do to build

a world, and people laughed at him, people are going to, what he wanted to have the interaction be efficient,

several commands per second and people asked why, why put a learning curve on it. He said people are going

to spend six hours a day on their computers and they laughed at him. But he realized that what we have

actually is something not at all as well conceived as what Engelbart was thinking about and we are on the

computers for six hours a day. So the way I looked at it was, that children are, you have to start where children are.

This is an idea of David Ozabel, you start where they are and children are into stories, that is their best way

of learning. So one of the things you have to do is have something like a story perspective to orient them, you have to have

an environment. You have to have adults that embody these other epistomologies because if you don't have

enthusiastic adults, this is why Adele Goldberg was such a factor at Xerox Park because she embodied the idea

of a talented, creative, super intelligent woman and we got incredible response from the twelve year old girls

that we brought in, they wanted to be like Adele. And if you think about all the motivational factors that young

children respond to, they tend to be storylike and social and other kinds of things. Then the question is

can you, its like teaching kids classical music, can you start getting them to see these things that are actually

inventions, harmonic relationships that nobody suspected until the beginning of the 17th century. You have to

start sifting them in because the adults love them and they play them with the children. So its the whole magilla

, the whole deal. And I think this is the thing we haven't been able to put in our online.., but this is not a new idea.

But remember long ago, Brian will remember, we used to say, if we could only put Seymour on the disk packs.

Right because Seymour could lead, Seymour was the ultimate pied piper when he got in front of children,

they just loved him, so if you just have that as a user interface then it would work. But Seymour didn't see

himself as being that charismatic even though he had some inklings of it because he thought the Logo stuff

or the Park stuff would sort of work by itself and it doesn't work by itself, you have to tie into what children

are trying to learn. And just to finish off, Montessori said that, look children are driven by nature to master

the environment that they're put into, thats their primary learning thing. So just make a total environment

that includes artifacts and people embodying this stuff and you're nineteen steps ahead already. And this is what

we haven't been able to do. You certainly don't see it if you go tracking the $100 laptop around the world, it isn't there .

Mitch: Let's take another question coming from the community. Phillip you had something? Phillip: Yeah

, we had one from the backchannel by a user called TL2 and he says please ask Alan to talk a little bit about the

central form of thinking that he called systems dynamics and how that fits into the current discussion. Alan: Ok,

so again none of my ideas are original so its always a pleasure to give credit. So there was a guy by the name of

Ludwig Bertalanffy in the '30s and a guy earlier than that by the name of Alfred Korzybski who was really a character

and a half who had a set of perspectives that he called general semantics. It was based on his view of what the

20th century was all about in terms of thinking patterns and I found both of these by the way via science fiction

books that I read as a teenager. I went to the library and looked them up. So the point here is that the , Korzybski's

point was something arose out of the dynamic of science in the late 19th century. Maxwell again started looking

at systems and biologists started looking at systems and as especially as biology got more and more understood,

it was found to be systems within systems, some very very complicated like the endocrine system. And the

interesting thing about systems is that most systems are only dynamically stable and so it started looking like

you couldn't find stability in nature that even stuff we thought was statically stable was dynamically stable because

they could be perturbed into a different state. And all of a sudden you really have a different perspective on most

human knowledge. We could look at things as a systems point of view rather than looking at individual cases

and this has a different set of things to look at, its got a different equivalent of mathematics and the neat thing

is to the extent that we think this is important and I really do, because I think a lot of the confusions right now

are systems confusions. The computer is a godsend for being able to understand dynamic systems because it is

the only thing that we, its a mathematics that enables us to deal with non-linear things that are in process and

gradually get some insights about them. So when my ideas are forming based on Seymour, the two different

things I did, even though I think they're a part of Seymour's agenda all along but he chose to stay more with

mathematics. I thought it would be fun to try do Seymour like things with science so I poked around at that

and then the system simulation idea was kind of directly what I was thinking, boy it would be fantastic to have children grow

up being systems conscious. Mitch: And to just add, if they do that it goes beyond science, just understanding all

sorts of other things in the culture. Natalie: Can you guys give more examples because I think some people

are interested in this idea of microworlds and dynamic systems that you play around with. Give more examples

maybe Brian and ..Alan: So the image that I show, I should have prepared it, it shows three circles with visible humans

standing in front. One circle is the earth, another circle is full of people so the earth represents natural systems

, the circle with people in it represents social systems, theres a self portrait of the internet in a circle that represents

all of our technological systems and then theres us as a collection of systems. And you could think of a really interesting

curriculum for children running over a number of years called the Systems We Live In and the Systems We Are.

And now, I got this idea because I was on one of the matrix directorates at NSF which was called Environmental

Research and Education. And the lingua franca at that table was systems. There were biologists, geologists,

everybody had something different but everyone of us was concerned with the fact that these things were systems

organized. So I started thinking about boy it would be really neat to use The Systems We Live in and The Systems

We Are as a rubric and you could relate science and technology and engineering and epistomology to this

systems thing and use it as a lingua franca. Mitch: Well I do think when we first connected with each other Alan, was

when I was working on Star Logo which was about kids experiencing systems..Alan: That had a huge, why don't

you put it into Scratch, come on for crying out loud? Mitch: And we saw one thing that I think connected to

both of us was that it was broad ranging and it wasn't just about, although you could do ant colonies or bird flocks

but you could also do people, traffic jams on the highway or why housing patterns get segragated or all sorts of

things from social systems as well. Brian: I think Natalie was asking for, can I give a concrete example of why systems

thinking is important? Here's a very concrete example. Take a block of concrete and you want to move it over by

a foot, what do you do? You push it over by a foot. Now imagine instead of a block of concrete you had a dog and

you wanted to move it over by a foot, try pushing it over by a foot and it won't work. And what happens is, in any

complex system which there are a lot of in the world, where you push and what happens, have a very very very

complicated connection. Mitch: But the point of the question..Alan: Try it with cats..Brian: Beg your pardon?

Alan: Try it with cats. Mitch: But the goal of microworlds is to create these worlds where you start to play with

those ideas, playing with an ecosystem where you're adding some more rabbits and seeing what happens to a number

of foxes or make the cars go a little faster and see where the traffic jams form or change the price in an

economic system and see how unemployment goes up or down. Alan: Mitchel, you know, I think your thesis was the

best thing that has happened in this journey that goes back to the '60s because it was again one of these things

that everybody knew except you did it. And do have it manifest, brought home, just how powerful being able to

learn to start thinking, and as you found in your thesis, its not easy for the high school students you work with

to actually take an other than god like view. Thats very hard to get down there and imagine yourself in the system

looking out and to me making that transition to what you can imagine is something that lets us imagine whats

going on through us in a way that most people simply can't right now. Mitch: But I do think theres the multiple message

there that people have all sorts of misconceptions, certain ways of thinking about these things that aren't so

powerful but if we give the right tools they can start moving towards new ways of thinking about it. Alan: And

by the way, tinkering with a system you better watch out because the most interesting thing about systems is

that the nature of the stabilities are rather narrow so if you poke them a little bit they recover, if you poke them

a little bit more and you'll get a cataclysmic change and that non-lineararity I think is the thing you need to start

experiencing just as a way of thinking about when I poke this, if I push this little button like this wonderful

cartoon from the New Yorker that showed Reagan's bedroom and on the wall there were two switches on the

wall and one said lights and the other one right next to it said nuclear war. And off screen, you hear Nancy saying, "Can you turn out

the lights, dear?". That's basically where we are right now. Mitch: I'm not sure I want to end on that image but

it is time for ending. I do think its been great to have this wide ranging discussion of the nature of powerful ideas,

ways that we can foster and cultivate them and tools and cultures that we can build to help support them.

So I really want to thank Alan for joining us and Brian to help spark our thinking. Hopefully this will lead to much

lots more discussion both here for the local class at MIT, we'll go into our discussion now, in the upcoming week

hopefully in the discussion groups will continue to have discussions in following up on some of the things we've

been talking about around the idea of powerful ideas. I want to end on a quick look ahead to next week. Next week,

the theme of the week will be open learning. And Phillipp Schmidt whose been coordinating the overall infrastructure

for this experimental course will be taking the lead next week and bringing in Mako Hill who has been a real

leader in the open source movement. They'll be talking about drawing on inspiration from the open source movement and open

source software, what it means to bring those ideas to learning. A couple things, we'll be passing this along,

in the emails and online, we'll just say very quickly some of the things we'll be asking for as activities. We'll

have an activity, Phillip do you want to come up and just say a few things about it? Phillip: Sure. The theme is open

learning and one of the most powerful experiences people have in these open learning communities is really

the interchanging the role of teacher and learner and when you help someone else learn, you may learn new things

about the process about the things you're teaching yourself. And when you learn from someone else you may

develop a relationship with them that goes beyond just the factual knowledge that you're developing. I think the

best way to do that and understand that is to experience it, so we've thought of two ways of doing it. This is definitely

for the online components, the local students have the advantage that you'll be able to do more in depth versions

of this. But for the online components, we thought a good starting point would be to ask people to go to

Stack Exchange which is a series of question/answer forums and pick a forum that they're interested in. And

theres a wide range, theres photography, theres writing, pick one that they're interested in and create an

account and post a question that they are trying to get an answer to and also look at other people's questions

and post answers to their questions. And then reflect on the experience. We're going to send some questions

to sort of support the reflection. And then secondly, if people want to go deeper, we will make available some kind of a matching

service where people can say I'm willing to teach someone this and people can also say I'm interested in learning

something else, we're going to try to match people up. It will be a low tech way, it will be a little bit messy but for people

who want to go deeper, I think that will be an interesting experience as well. And just one extra addition

we have this week is we're going to have a mid-week chat, we want to find new ways to be able to engage interaction among

people in the community but also people on the staff here. So we're going to try it out this week, up on the screen we

see this Wednesday, March 6 from 7:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m., Boston time. Also, we're going to try a different time of day

maybe we'll reach some different people who can't join us on Monday mornings here. So Wednesday from 7:00 p.m. -

8:00 p.m., the same backchannel chat, we'll have an online chat with some of the staff from the course will

also be involved too. You can have an ongoing conversation about this week's theme of open learning

or any of the ideas from the course. We'll give that a try as part of our continuing experimentation. So please

feel free to join on Wednesday otherwise we look forward to seeing you next Monday for the next session

focusing on open learning for the next session on Learning Creative Learning. Thanks a lot and thanks again

to Brian and Alan for joining us this week. See you next week.