Re: LOGO-L> Re: Recursive Stars

[Frank Caggiano <caggiano@atlantic.net>]

Brian Harvey wrote:

> 
> The difference is that teachers have always discouraged students from
> copying their papers out of the encyclopedia, whereas today the same
> teachers (because of the "hype" aspect of the issue) are *encouraging*
> their students to copy off of the net.
> 
I was going to stay out of this thread even though I had strong feelings
after reading Brian Harvey's article but......

..really Mr. Harvey teachers encouraging students to copy. 

Is research done over the net different than research done at a library?
And is research done over the net from a terminal in the library OK? :-)

Going now to your article in the Logo Exchange. 

What is so wide eyed about  'ArtsEdNet: Bringing Art into the Classroom
with the Web' and 'CyberSchool: Delivering High School Credit Classes
over the Internet' ?  When I was in school, well before computers, film
strips and slides were used.  Now it's computers. In the next century it
will be holograms. I really miss your point on this.

As for your feeling that a major problem with the web is that it uses a
'publishing metaphor' rather than a 'conversational' one: first even if
this is true what is wrong with publishing?  Books have been published
for a long time now and no one complains that they aren't
conversational. In fact Adler considers reading to be a conversation
between the reader and the author, see 'How to read a Book' by Adler and
Van Doren. (perhaps it needs to be updated to include web pages). 

But I don't feel that web pages are any less conversational than other
forms of communication over the web and they are a lot more
conversational than film or print or TV.  Only talk radio comes close to
the web in this respect.

Most web pages I've visited have a provision for feedback and most web
authors are truly interested in that feedback.  That you don't respond
to the author with your comments isn't the fault of the web. And as you
must know, most of the readers of newsgroups are just that readers
(lurkers). Only a small percentage of people ever post an article.
 
Concerning the incident you describe in the article, about the student
finding the answer to the simplex lock problem over the net:
When I first read it I had to chuckle.  What I saw was a bright student, 
bored with the work going on in class and uninterested in the problem
you gave him to solve and enjoying tweaking the nose of the teacher.

Now while the simplex lock problem is one of your favorite programming
projects it obviously wasn't one of the students. I don't know the
situation of the class you were teaching (time, number of students per
teacher, etc.) so it's hard to make any comments  but if you had been
able to find out what the kid was really interested in and frame a
problem around that perhaps he wouldn't have taken the 'easy' way out. 

This seems to me one of the major ideas from Papert, getting the learner
to own the process by making the subject something she is truly
interested in. It's a difficult thing to do and there are times when it
may not be possible to do but it needs to be tried.

You then go on to say that kids publishing their own web pages is a good
thing but than worry that to much emphasis is placed on the 'form'
rather than the 'content'.  But you also state that, "creating a Web
page requires much more planning and implementation, especially if you
want people to read and admire your page."  I'm at a lost as to way
getting kids to do this is a bad thing.  One of the major complaints
about kids is the shortness of their attention span and how they are
conditioned for instant gratification.  Getting them to plan and
implement seems a good thing to me. Sites without content, no matter how
glitzy the graphics, soon are forgotten. And while  hyper links are
overused, especially it seems in kids pages 
(see: http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/home2.html  Oh no a hyperlink!) 
let's remember that web publishing is a new medium and the rules are
still being worked out.

If some kid, wanting to do some special thing on his web page, digs
deeper into java, or whatever the language dejuer is, I think that's
great. He at least has a problem that he owns and whatever he learns
solving it will stay with him a long time.

Finally two last points.  One, please don't declare logo obsolete
especially in favor of java. You want a language from hell spend a month
some day with java. And I speak as an old C programmer who loved and
still loves that language, and who converted (most happily) to
smalltalk. 

And you and Gary better not let any collage artists read that second to
last paragraph. Really "making a collage as opposed to creating one's
own painting."!  

regards
----------------
Frank Caggiano
caggiano@atlantic.net
http://www.atlantic.net/~caggiano
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