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Michael was talking to me today about the importance of capturing narrative for transmitting education. And the way this came out was from an email conversation about narrative in software (and before that, from a conversation about the amount of time teachers spend developing lesson plans to engage a new software interface, when such things aren’t produced within it). This made me cringe, in a way that I often do when a deep idea is projected onto whatever noun is at hand. In this case, software (and Sugar in particular) was the proxy for the set of […] tools and interfaces and communications shared over the course of a school session.
I see this happen most frequently when people are possessed of a Powerful Idea and want to share it. It is natural then for the power of the idea to be projected onto whatever circumstance (programming language, computing as technology, or subject matter) was foremost in their mind when it came up.
One of the reasons that educators and technologists who care about OLPC and constructionism clash over definitions of necessary learning experiences is that each projects too soon their own inspirations onto software on the one hand and classroom / interpersonal dynamic on the other. If we can find a way to separate and give full attention to powerful ideas in their own right, before deciding how they must be pursued and passed on, hopefully we can make our investigations into them useful ouside the context of whatever implementations we have in mind.
In particular, the larger discussions of how to capture and share different levels of connectedness in the process of learning : a piece of knowledge, a sequence of facts and discoveries, a series of problems, a topology of concepts and thinkers, a narrative of exploration…