“Imagine a party of time travelers, among them a group of surgeons and a group of school teachers, who came from the last century to see how things are done in our days. Think of the bewilderment of the surgeons when they find themselves in the operating room of a modem hospital! The nineteenth-century surgeons can make no sense at all of what these strangely garbed twentieth-century people are doing. Although they may be able to see that a surgical operation of some sort is being performed, they are unlikely to figure out what it is. The rituals of antisepsis, the practice of anesthesia, the beeping electronics, even the bright lights are utterly unfamiliar. Certainly they would not be able to help.

How different the reaction of the time-traveling teachers to a modern classroom! These teachers from the past are puzzled by a few strange objects, they are shocked by the styles of clothing and haircuts, but they fully see the point of most of what is happening and could in a pinch even take over the class. They disagree among themselves about whether the changes they see are for the better or for the worse.” (Papert, 1996, p. 158)

Seymour Papert (29 February 1928 - 31 July 2016) was a titan of educational technology during the time that I was in graduate school, and even through the bulk of my early career. Many of his thoughts are still relevant, related to the way children are activated while exploring concepts through the use of a carefully programmed experience. However, this above example is one that hasn’t aged well. I know that when it was written (late 1990s), it was 100% accurate. Its accuracy has waned largely in the past five years, though. Especially during the past two years in light of the way that the COVID pandemic shifted most mainstream learning onto videoconferences.

This passage came to mind while visiting the Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality lab that my department has established in the past year. There are potential use cases for this type of technology, but the usefulness of the technology is narrow (perhaps enhancing one or two lessons in a module). The narrowness of the application comes because there are insufficient volumes of developed curricula and lessons that make appropriate use of the technology.

Going beyond the narrow bounds is gimmickry in my view. ANd shares this status with the simulations that I studied so assiduously as a graduate student from 1994-2002.

PS, the book that I couldn’t remember was Mindstorms.1996, ISBN 1-56352-335-3

Here are references to the three named books:

Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Papert, S. (1993). The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Papert, S. (1996). The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. New York, NY: Taylor Trade Publishing.

(Recorded Live 2022-01-28)

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