[Edu-sig] An OLPC comment (vs. Apprenticeship)

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Art-

I think one issue is here is the difference between "apprenticeship" and
"teaching". Perhaps there is a middle position of "mentoring" between
those too, as "apprenticeship" can often be exploitive, plus take many
years. One of the best ways to learn a skill (like programming) might be
to be apprenticed to someone who does it to some useful end. For example,
I learned much about computers in high school working (for pay, outside of
school hours) for a teacher who had an educational computer company. He
didn't teach me much directly, but he provide me documents and hardware
and reasonable challenges and experiences and time which helped me grow as
a software developer. Still, two other high school teachers provided me
access to computers as well to a lesser extent, and I was also aided by my
father's support of my earlier IC electronic hobby and subsequent computer
activities, including buying a KIM-1, some books at  a computer fair, and
then a Commodore PET with printer and disk drive. It's hard to remember
how difficult *access* was to computers in the USA way back when in the
1970s. But obviously that difficulty still exists in much of the world for
many people.

I am happy to agree that human apprenticeship (or even mentoring) is more
powerful than a sink-or-swim approach of just connecting a kid with some
technology or a "hole in the wall":
    http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/
-- as far as learning effective skills as part of a larger liberal
education including values and strategies. When I read of the experiences
of many other programmers who grew up around, say, Palo Alto (Xerox) or
Yorktown Heights (IBM), I can see the tremendous advantages they had being
part of such cultures and being able to learn from others. Consider, for
example, Bill Gates, who learned to write better code by reading the
operating system code listings thrown in the dumpster at a computer center:
    http://www.dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/002646.html
Not that he would extend that privilege to others, of course. Contrast
that to me at the one time I went to a local computer users group meeting
as a kid and the person with a print out of the FORTRAN source code for
"Adventure" would not let me look at it. So, these people who were close
to such industrial or adult activities had big advantages.

When people are put in a role of being a "teacher", and they bring a
personal enthusiasm for their subject, that enthusiasm can carry over into
aspects of apprenticeship despite operating in a conventional classroom.
Kirby U. here sounds like he does that. But, there is no realistic way a
person can really have 30 apprentices, let alone 150 as is typical in high
school (one teacher with five classes of thirty kids each). One or two
apprentices is quite doable, even up to five, maybe. Much more than that,
and at best you have a pipeline (like the one room schoolhouse) where the
older apprentices teach the younger, as a sort of learning community.

But the big difference is that with apprenticeship there is generally some
easily measurable economic goal (or at least, someone one, the "master")
who is assumed to be in a good position to judge the apprentices output in
terms of usefulness or craft. This is not always the case, since obviously
apprenticeships can go bad, and some acclaimed masters are that way for
bad reasons. But in general, apprenticeship is how most people have
learned most complex skills for most of history -- well, that coupled with
trial-and-error coupled with reading. Learning skills mainly from books or
lectures is likely a very recent thing. Listening to people stand and talk
has a place in human society -- but it often is more by way of story
telling and communicating history and values through entertaining story.

So perhaps if one wants a coherent alternative to a constructivist vision
of OLPC and Kay and Papert and so on -- perhaps pushing "apprenticeship"
(like to learn Python) is a positive alternative?
However, schools typically do not have
apprenticeships, in part because of child labor laws intended to protect
children but which sometimes may harm them. Gatto talks about this from
his own experience hooking kids up with apprenticeships only by breaking
the rules:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/4e.htm
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/5j.htm
But he values other types of experience as well:
    http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/JohnTaylorGatto

--Paul Fernhout

Arthur wrote:
> What I hear when I look over the Squeak shoulders is that of course we 
> are not claiming that any of this is a substitute for an involved, 
> caring, creative teacher working in a caring, creative environment. But 
> given such a teacher in such an environment do you really suppose that 
> Squeak, or the OLPC, or Python, or PyGeo, or PataPata is actually of 
> much importance?
> 
> I don't.
> 
> My interest in computers and education is almost 180 degrees away.
> 
> I am not convinced that they have any fundamental importance in the 
> deliver of instruction.
> 
> They are quite a worthy *subject* of instruction, however.
> 
> I naively came to edu-sig thinking that was what everyone thought, and 
> what we were to be about here.