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University of the West of England Home Page - Peter Hale Home Page - SEEDS Site Map - Text Only Site Map
End User History - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/EndUserHistory.htm.
In the mid 1960s Seymour Papert, a mathematician who had been working with Piaget in Geneva, came to the United States where he co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Marvin Minsky. Papert worked with the team from Bolt, Beranek and Newman, led by Wallace Feurzeig that created the first version of Logo in 1967.
'Logo is the name for a philosophy of education and a continually evolving family of programming languages that aid in its realization.' Harold Abelson - Apple Logo, 1982. This philosophy is based on Constructivism (a learning theory). The Logo Programming Language, a dialect of Lisp (a language whose name derives from "List Processor"), was designed as a tool for learning. Its features - modularity, extensibility, interactivity, and flexibility follow from this goal. It is used to develop simulations, and to create multimedia presentations. Logo is designed to have a "low threshold and no ceiling": It is accessible to novices, including young children, and also supports complex explorations and sophisticated projects by experienced users. The most popular Logo environments have involved the Turtle, originally a robotic creature that sat on the floor and could be directed to move around by typing commands at the computer. Soon the Turtle migrated to the computer graphics screen where it is used to draw shapes, designs, and pictures.
Alan Kay and Seymour Papert envisioned in the 1960's the computer's role as a tool for the mind an 'idea processor'. They have worked at bringing computers into this role for adults and children through Croquet, and several of Croquet's predecessors like the Logo language and environment by Papert, and Squeak, the open source Smalltalk language and environment, by Kay. Squeak and Croquet have developed from the early work in Smalltalk and provided a tool for end user programming, collaboration, visualisation, and simulation.
The work of Seymour Papert demonstrates the approach of Constructionism (Papert and Harel, 1991) (Resnick, 1996). The Constructionism idea is based on the constructivist theories of Piaget. To this theory constructionism "adds the idea that people construct new knowledge with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally-meaningful products" (Resnick, 1996). Resnick goes on to say "This vision puts construction (not information) at the center of the analysis. It views computer networks not as a channel for information distribution, but primarily as a new medium for construction, providing new ways for students to learn through construction activities by embedding the activities within a community." Resnick explains the theory known as Distributed Constructionism. This involves a community gaining an understanding of a problem by interacting with a knowledge building community, the problem to be modelled, and tools to model the problem, and build a solution. An example that Resnick cites is the work of Kimberly (1995) where participants became part of the simulation they constructed in order to understand economic models. The idea of constructionism is related to end user programming, and ontology modelling, and building. Resnick explains his use of interactive web based knowledge building communities to use and test the theory.
BBC Technology news - Free tool offers 'easy' coding - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6647011.stm - A free programming tool that allows anyone to create their own animated stories, video games and interactive artworks has been developed - Jonathan Fildes - 14 May 2007.
Constructivist Computer Assisted Learning: Theory and Techniques - http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/adelaide96/papers/21.html - Barney Dalgarno - Information Services Division - University of Canberra - The changes that have occurred in accepted approaches to teaching and learning in recent years have been underpinned by shifts in psychological and pedagogical theory, culminating in moves towards a constructivist view of learning.
Distributed Constructionism - http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/Distrib-Construc.html - Mitchel Resnick, Proceedings of the International Conference on the Learning Sciences Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, Northwestern University (accepted: March 1996; published: July 1996) - This paper introduces the concept of distributed constructionism, building on previous research on constructionism and on distributed cognition. It focuses particularly on the use of computer networks to support students working together on design and construction activities, and it argues that these types of activities are particularly effective in supporting the development of knowledge-building communities. The paper describes three main categories of distributed constructionist activities: discussing constructions, sharing constructions, and collaborating on constructions. In each category, it describes ongoing research projects at the MIT Media Lab and discusses how these projects support new ways of thinking and learning.
End User Programming for Scientists: Modeling Complex Systems - http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2007/1077/ - Andrew Begel - Microsoft Research - In: End-User Software Engineering - Dagstuhl Seminar - Summary - http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=2007081 - Margaret M. Burnett, Gregor Engels, Brad A. Myers and Gregg Rothermel - From 18.01.07 to 23.02.07, the Dagstuhl Seminar 07081 End-User Software Engineering was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl.
Hackety Hack - http://hacketyhack.net/ - In this century, you may have dozens of programming languages lurking on your machine. But how to use them?? A fundamental secret! Well, no more. We cannot stand for that. Hackety Hack will not stand to have you in the dark!!
Hamburg University - http://www.erzwiss.uni-hamburg.de/Sonstiges/Logo/logofaqx.htm - LOGO Frequently asked Questions (FAQ).
MIT Logo Foundation, What is Logo? - http://el.media.mit.edu/Logo-foundation/logo/index.html - What is Logo.
Mitchel Resnick - http://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/.
Planet Papert - http://www.stager.org/planetpapert.html - Articles by and About Seymour Papert - Gary S. Stager.
Seymour Papert - http://www.papert.org/ - Works by Papert.
Situating Constructionism - http://www.papert.org/articles/SituatingConstructionism.html - The following essay is the first chapter in Seymour Papert and Idit Harel's book Constructionism (Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1991) - It is easy enough to formulate simple catchy versions of the idea of constructionism; for example, thinking of it as "learning-by-making." One purpose of this introductory chapter is to orient the reader toward using the diversity in the volume to elaborate--to construct--a sense of constructionism much richer and more multifaceted, and very much deeper in its implications, than could be conveyed by any such formula.
University of the West of England - UWE Student Project - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Web%20Semantic/Index.html - Investigating and implement the idea of 'ModConsWest' (Modelling and Constructionism with Web based E-Learning Semantic Tools)" - Lee Ediagbonya and Awaab Eltahir.
Welcome to StarLogo! - http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/ - StarLogo is a programmable modeling environment for exploring the workings of decentralized systems -- systems that are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. With StarLogo, you can model (and gain insights into) many real-life phenomena, such as bird flocks, traffic jams, ant colonies, and market economies.
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_programming_language - Logo programming language.
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert - Seymour Papert.
E-Learning - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/ELearning.htm.
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