School Laptops Initiator Seymour Papert to Discuss $100 Laptops Worldwide
Contact: George Markowsky, 581-3940; George Manlove, 581-3756
Rescheduled for Wed. Nov. 15, 2:10 p.m., Corbett Business Building
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We apologize for any inconvenience that was caused by the cancellation of
the 11/14/05 lecture.
ORONO — Famed mathematician, author and computer science pioneer Seymour Papert will be on the UMaine campus Nov. 15 to discuss the implications of making cheap laptop computers available to children throughout the world – a concept that is well on its way to being implemented.
Papert is considered the first educator to advocate the use of personal computers in learning and was a motivational force in convincing former Maine Gov. Angus King to champion the Maine school laptops initiative several years ago. His talk is titled “The Hundred Dollar Laptop: How Every Child in the World Can Have a Laptop and What This Means for the Global Economy.”
At the invitation of the UMaine Computer Science Department, Papert, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and once named by Newsweek as one of ten national innovators in education, will speak at 2:10 p.m. in Room 105 in the D.P. Corbett Business Building, behind the Maine Center for the Arts. The talk is free and open to the public.
“His talks are always engaging,” says George Markowsky, professor of computer science and long-time colleague of Papert, who has served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of computer science at UMaine. “We really do want to encourage the public to come. It’s significant. It’s also significant to see what’s going on in the rest of the world.”
Papert lives in Blue Hill and consults with businesses and government agencies on projects to apply new computer technologies to education. He is one of the founders of the Media Lab at MIT and of several educational websites for children. He continues to conduct research with MIT and UMaine faculty members.
He is the author of: “Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas” (1980); “The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer” (1992); and “The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap” (1996).
Papert is internationally recognized as the seminal thinker about ways in which computers can change learning. In 1995, he testified before Congress on the need to change education through the use of technology.
“He’s a very knowledgeable person right in the middle of this very significant movement,” Markowsky says.
Papert has traveled the world consulting with education ministries in countries including Russia, China, Brazil, Cambodia, among others, about the prospects of government or institutional purchases of large numbers of laptop computers for school children worldwide. “He’s probably been in every major country in the world talking about laptops,” Markowsky says.
Markowsky expects Papert also to discuss some of the political developments that affect the availability of laptop computers for school children across the globe. Since the success of the Maine laptop initiative, through which all of Maine’s public school seventh- and eighth-grade students are assigned free laptops, other states are considering similar programs. The concept also is of interest in other countries at a time when the price of computers is coming down and benefits are rising.