Powerful Ideas
Revision as of 17:16, 10 September 2009 by Tonyforster (talk | contribs) (→What is a powerful idea?)
Seymour Papert told us in the 1960s that education should be about powerful ideas, in Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. This is a short list of ideas, divided into the feeble and the powerful. There are many more.
Feeble Ideas
- Teaching
- Facts
- Dates
- Right answers
- Testing
- Curricula
- Learned Helplessness, inability to learn on one's own
- Nationalism
- Specialization
Powerful Ideas
- Ideas
- Children
- Learning
- Tools
- Truth, including how we decide what is true (Epistemology)
- Reality, including how we decide what is real (Ontology)
- Ethics, specifically what we should do even if we don't want to, and what to do next
- Fun
- Possibility and necessity
- Fruitful questions
- Discovery
- Scientific method--Conjecture, hypothesis, theory, prediction, experiment, observation, error analysis, insight, falsification.
- Connections
- Collaboration
- Gears and linkages
- Math: Patterns, structures, conjectures, theorems, theories, interconnections, equivalences
- Logic
- Programming paradigms
- Maps
- Symbols
- Human rights
- Society: politics, government, services, oppression, war
- Design
- Unanswerable questions
- Resilience
What is a powerful idea?
An idea is powerful if it is reusable in generating more ideas, in solving future unanticipated problems? Bloom's Taxonomy is an attempt to classify types of learning from lower order to higher order.