Posted by Daniel Ajoy-2 on Apr 22, 2006; 7:24pm
URL: https://forum.world.st/Las-TICS-NO-son-necesarias-Alan-Kay-tp132372.html

Hay una discusión super interesante (aunque larguisima) y
en inglés en la lista de Python y Educación. Hablan de:
si migrar las ideas de Etoys (Squeak) y Logo a Python,
y crear materiales curriculares para una tal herramienta,
o crear materiales curriculares para herramientas existentes:
Logo, Squeak, Python; o no crear materiales curriculares,
sino herramientas para unshoolers y homeschoolers porque
el sistema educativo no cumple con lo que debe hacer,
sobre cómo prepara científicos escépticos en lugar de
obreros complacientes... y otras cosas interesantes.

Todo esto porque hace poco hubo una reunión de personajes
convocada por el tipo sud-africano que se compró el pasaje
al espacio, Mark Shuttleworth, sobre cómo mejorar la educación
en sud-áfrica, Shuttleworth Summit. Creo que es el tipo que
patrocina Ubuntu.

De esa discusión extraigo esto para ustedes, quizá lo traduzca:


Consider what Alan Kay says here:
http://www.squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/dynabook_revisited.htm

"B&C : So is the Dynabook just another potential learning
tool? AK : It's just like a musical instrument. You don't
need it. The most important thing about any musical
instrument is that you don't need the damn thing in the
first place. Because people all have got an instrument
inside them. If you have a great musician and a bunch of
children, you've got music, because that person can teach
them how to sing. On the other hand, you can have the best
instruments in the world, but if the music teacher is no
good, nothing's going to happen. You can look for the music
inside the piano, but that's not where it is. Same thing
with the Dynabook. You don't need technology to learn
science and math. You just absolutely don't need it. What
you need to have are the right conditions. In music, if
you've got the right conditions and you've got music
happening, then the instruments amplify what you've got
like mad. The best thing a teacher can do is to set up the
best conditions for each kid to learn. Once you have that,
then the computer can help immeasurably. Conversely, just
putting computers in the schools without creating a rich
learning environment is useless -- worse than useless,
because it's a red herring. There's a sense something good
is happening, when nothing real is happening at all.
Marshall McLuhan made the point that one of the crucial
things about printed books was that you didn't have to read
them in a social setting, such as a classroom. People can
pursue knowledge independently and from the most
unorthodox, subversive, or just plain weird points of view.
But that is rarely how things are taught in school. Most
educators want kids to learn things in the form of belief
rather than being able to construct a kind of skeptical
scaffolding, which is what science is all about. The
ability to explore and test multiple points of view is one
of the great strengths of our culture, but you'd never know
it by looking at a classroom. Science today is taught in
America as a secular religion. But science is not the same
as knowing the things learned by science. Science itself is
a stance in relationship to knowledge. In order to do
science, you have to give up the notion of truth. Because
we don't know the world directly; we know the world through
our mind's representational systems, which are like maps.
Science is a map that is always incomplete, and so it can
always be criticized and improved. And that's why it's so
effective at, say, treating diabetes, or whatever. Because
the map is incomplete, it can always be improved, and so it
is the best way to deal with what is. One of the problems
with the way computers are used in education is that they
are most often just an extension of this idea that learning
means just learning accepted facts. But what really
interests me is using computers to transmit ideas, points
of view, ways of thinking. You don't need a computer for
this, but just as with a musical instrument, once you get
onto this way of using them, then the computer is a great
amplifier for learning."