Matt Cronin's List: MIT-LCL

• • Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can’t, anything can be painfully difficult
• • My thesis could be summarized as: What 
    the gears cannot do the computer might. 
    The computer is the Proteus of machines. 
    Its essence is its universality, its power to 
    simulate. Because it can take on a thousand forms and can serve a thousand functions, it can appeal to a thousand tastes. ... A tabula rasa
• • Metaphors can be powerful tool in understanding abstract concepts. However understanding metaphor is directly related to the background knowledge of the student

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• I think it's fair to say that the most important thing that I learned in my formal education was touch typing in junior high school and possibly the importance of camaraderie and athletics during high school wrestling.
• • Interesting, someone else mentioned the importance of keyboarding in getting into business.
• having access to smart people and mentors, the support of an understanding mother, an interest driven obsessive personality and access to the Internet. I completely agree that improving formal education and lowering dropout rates is extremely important, but I wonder how many people have personalities or interests that aren't really that suited for formal education, at least in its current form

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• My sister calls me an "interest driven learner." I think that's code for "short attention span" or "not a good long term planner" or something like that. I can't imagine being able to read the dictionary from cover to cover. In fact, I don't think most people could sit down and read the dictionary from cover to cover.
• • I love the OED for finding out the origins of words. Or stated another way, figuring out how words are formed and evolve.
• Shouldn't we be looking at the Internet as an amazing network enabling "The Power of Pull" and be empowering kids to learn through building things together rather than assessing their ability to complete courses and produce the right "answers"?

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• Most significant events are not predictable. "Education" and at the notion that we actually understand the world causes us to be unprepared for the unpredictable. Science, which makes a great attempt at trying to make the world appear predictable, is really a rough approximation of things so that our simple minds can try to grasp the complex world around us.
• scientific facts are really a product of a very social and political process and isn't really a kind of channeling of mother nature as it might appear to be
• Immersion and mindfulness are really important ways to see things that you normally don't see.
• • They sicken of the calm those that know the storm
• What I find fascinating (and stressful) is that every day I spend in the Middle East is completely full of surprises and pushes me closer and closer to the understanding that I really don't understand anything. Sort of the pure idiot mode. In a way, I've become more aware and much more mindful of everything. One effect of this is that I less and less fear of the unpredictable and the unknown and unknowable.

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• "Being open, you're much less likely to have someone competitive emerge and you're also much more likely to find somebody who wants to come to work with you. Innovation is happening everywhere -- not just in the Ivy League schools. And that's why we're working with you guys [at Wired] too -- in the old days, academics didn't want to be in popular magazines. Openness is a survival trait."
• My favourite thing is managing communities and creating energy. That's really what the Media Lab is -- it reminds me of an open-source community like Mozilla." He knows he will have succeeded when "the Media Lab name is as ubiquitous as the word internet".

• • In Paris, I read the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who described bricelage as a way of combining and recombining a closed set
    of materials to come up with new ideas. I Material things,
    for Levi-Strauss, were goods-to-think-with and, following
    the pun in French, they were good-to-think-with as well.
• • Piaget recognized that
    young children use a style of concrete reasoning that
    was too efficacious to be simply classified as ·wrong."
    His response was to cast children's "c1ose-to-the-objectapproach as a stage in a progression to a formal think-
    6 Sherry l\"kle
    ing style.3 Levi-Strauss recognized the primitive's bricolage as a science of the concrete that had much in common with the practice of modern-day engineers. He said
    he preferred to call it "prior" rather than "premature";
    yet it was not fully equal.
• • There
    is the power of boundary objects and the general principle that objects are active life presences. Uvi-Strauss
    speaks of tinkering; Jean Piaget, of the child as scientist. With different metaphors, each describes a dynamic relationship between things and thinking. We tie
    a knot and find ourselves in partnership witlf-string in
    our exploration of space. Objects are able to catalyze
    self-creation. When Igor Kopytoff writes about the "biography of things," he deepens our understanding of how a
    new car becomes a new skin, of how a change ofjewelry
    can become its own voyage to a new world. Objects bring
    together thought and feeling.  
    
    We have anthropomophized mars rovers, computers, and other scientific tools.
• • Walt Whitman said: "A child went forth everyday/
    and the first object he look'd upon, that object he be·
    came." With generosity of intellect and spirit, the authors in this collection engage with the objects of their
    lives. For every object they have spun a world. They show
    us what they looked upon and what became the things
    that mattered.
• • We find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic, as necessities or vain indulgences. We are on less
    familiar ground when we consider objects as companions
    to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought. The
    notion of evocative objects brings together these {{vo less
    familiar ideas, underscoring the inseparability of thought
    and feeling in our relationship to things. We think with
    the objects we love; we love the objects we think with.

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• • The child, you can preschool ages, is in control: the child programs the computer. And in teaching the computer how to think, children are an exploration how to themselves think. The experience can be heady: thinking about thinking prints a child into an epistemologist, and experience not even shared by most adults.
• • Children develop these components of knowledge spontaneously without deliberate teaching.
• • Sesame Street might offer better and more engaging explanations than a child can get from some parents or nursery schoolteachers, but the child still in the position of listening to explanations.
• • Combinatorial thinking, where one has to reason in terms of the set of all possible states the system and self-referential thinking about thinking itself
• • Many children are held back in the learning because they have model of learning in which you have "got it" or "got it wrong"
• • When you create a computer program you almost never get it right the first time.

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