Fablearn Notes

Fablearn Notes Panel 

     Edith Ackermann                Limited CS perspective on what the creative process means—> debugging           Which metaphors are parallel to making? 

               Gardening…      Erica Halverson           “Children are not hackers"

Where does this stuff come from?      Rich: Homework: Production of representations of knowledge.       Edith: Ivan Illych: the worst thing is to sift out the possibility from learners in their communities and then to readminister it as if it were not there to begin with. 

What was the most encouraging/exciting thing you have seen in the last year

     Erica: Madison Public Libraries. How do you make Making a core service of the libraries?

     Rich: I study how schools change with technologies, and how they don’t change with technologies      Edith: (Eisenberg) breaking design as project, prototyping, fabrication AMBIENT COMPUTING. The most important thing. Bring computation back into the environment where it can make a difference. Construction kits without parts. Add affordances to the world, instead of replacing the world.            Coding has to become something different than we thought. You can no longer control the way the program will behave in the environment           “Programming in the weak sense"           “We move from the world of enlightenment to the world of entanglement"

Paulo: Code as expressive stuff as opposed to code as job skills      Edith: How literacy has changed when we moved from the Gutenberg era to writing with digital media. What i find important in this passage is that the writing is no longer just about descriptions, but the words can serve as commands/operators. And that’s a huge difference. The way we treat the text becomes very different. The gap between reading and writing is shrinking. Because when we read, we are already annotating, cutting and pasting, to steal ideas. And the act of writing becomes this cut-and-paste between readings. But there is much more space for what Searle used to call “Speech acts” and performativity. And that’s where coding comes in. It’s a way of re-thinking what the relations are between reading, writing, and quantification/measurement. I don’t even know where I am going with this, but this is the conversation we need to be having. It’s about how media and the new literacy, and the new forms of programming in the weak sense begin to resemble each other.       THIS IS WHAT MY PHD IS ABOUT. 

Our job is to take the representational tools available to us, and to use them to produce new ideas. (I cannot code anything) But I am a master at taking computational tools and using them to communication new ideas. My ideas 

us nto being trained to be the STEM engineers of tomorrow, but to become thinkers and doers who use tools productively. 

Saturday keynote: Edith Ackerman “Take something that happened to you and replay it under safe conditions in a more extreme form. And that’s what drama is about."      -> Reminds me of readings from Bruce’s class. Importance of narrative.  “America is a restless culture. A culture where mindfulness is becoming