{"id":881,"date":"2008-10-05T03:12:13","date_gmt":"2008-10-05T07:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=881"},"modified":"2008-10-05T03:12:13","modified_gmt":"2008-10-05T07:12:13","slug":"premature-projection-weakening-powerful-ideas-in-two-easy-steps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2008\/10\/05\/premature-projection-weakening-powerful-ideas-in-two-easy-steps\/","title":{"rendered":"Premature projection: weakening powerful ideas in two easy steps"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Michael<\/strong> was talking to me today about the importance of capturing narrative for <strong>transmitting<\/strong> education. \u00a0And the way this came out was from an <a href=\"http:\/\/lists.laptop.org\/pipermail\/sugar\/2008-October\/008863.html\">email conversation<\/a> 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&#8217;t produced within it). \u00a0This made me cringe, in a way that I often do when a deep idea is projected onto whatever noun is at hand. \u00a0In this case, software (and <em>Sugar<\/em> in particular) was the <strong>proxy<\/strong> for the set of [&#8230;] tools and interfaces and communications <strong>shared<\/strong> over the course of a school session.<\/p>\n<p>I see this happen most frequently when people are possessed of a Powerful Idea and want to share it. \u00a0It is natural then for the power of the idea to be projected onto whatever circumstance (programming language, computing as technology, or subject matter) was <strong>foremost in their mind<\/strong> when it came up.<\/p>\n<p>One of the reasons that <strong>educators<\/strong> and <strong>technologists<\/strong> who care about <a href=\"http:\/wiki.laptop.org\/go\/Educators\">OLPC<\/a>\u00a0and constructionism clash over definitions of necessary l<strong>earning experiences<\/strong>\u00a0is that each projects too soon their own inspirations onto software on the one hand and classroom \/ interpersonal <strong>dynamic<\/strong> on the other. \u00a0 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 <strong>useful<\/strong> ouside the context of whatever implementations we have in mind.<\/p>\n<p>In particular, the larger discussions of how to capture and share different <strong>levels<\/strong> of connectedness in the process of learning : a piece of knowledge, a sequence of facts and discoveries, a series of problems, a topology of <strong>concepts<\/strong> and thinkers, a narrative of exploration&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael was talking to me today about the importance of capturing narrative for transmitting education. \u00a0And 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-ed","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}