(2014-11-13) Watters Convivial Edutech

Transcript of Audrey Watters talk on "Convivial Tools in an Age of Surveillance" (EduTech).

The Personal Computer isn’t “personal” because it’s small and portable and sits on your desk at home (not just at work or at school). It’s “personal” because you pour yourself into it — your thoughts, your programming. And as a Constructionist framework would tell us, a device like the DynaBook wouldn’t be so much about transmitting knowledge to a child but rather it would be about that child building and constructing her own knowledge on her own machine.

But as Seymour Papert wrote in his 1980 book MindStorms, "In most contemporary educational situations where children come into contact with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child.”

I’ve heard it suggested often that the World Wide Web is an example of what Ivan Illich called “convivial tools” (Tools for conviviality) — although his book predates the Web by 15+ years, Illich speaks of “learning webs” in Deschooling Society. I grow less and less certain that the Web is quite “it." But of this, I am: Education technology is not convivial.


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