The first keynote speaker at the ACEC2008 was Mitch Resnick from the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT- Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The focus of his dialogue was on enabling "creativity" quite timely as this is the focus for Education 2009.

He began by discussing the move from an ‘Information Society’ to a ‘Knowledge Society’ which he suggests requires an innovative economy dependent on creative thinking. He went as far as to say that being creative will be a basic need, a need that makes us happy.

He continued the rhetoric around moving away from the transmission model of teaching into different models for teaching and learning that were based on creativity. He suggested that the models we use in Kindy/prep/preschool are more able to develop creativity- when children are choosing their pathways to investigate and create using concrete resources such as building blocks, finger-paints. This idea then was drawn into later learning contexts- why are we moving away from this model as children progress through the school?

We don’t have the resources- building blocks and finger-paint are tools for this stage of development. However, when children get into primary and onto secondary school we don’t have the resources that support deep conceptual engagement. Or do we?

Mitch suggests then that ICT tools can become our conceptual facilitators. He puts forward a model for inquiry that would resinate throughout schooling and life- imagine-create-play-share-reflect-imagine.  Using ICT in this recurring sequence is in line with Piaget and Seymour’s active process of knowledge construction.

Early exemplars of this process were 20 years ago= teaching the turtle, lego TC logo, lego mindstorms.

He showed us examples of children working with these ICT construction tools. Children were inventing wearable digital devices, making household inventions, engaging in the process of design/make/appraise. His latest development has been a free program called scratch- http://scratch.mit.edu/

His intention for this program was for children to use this tool to express themselves in an online world, wanting children to be the designers of the games, programs because that is where deeper learning can occur rather then when just ‘interacting’ with game/software. Children are using the software to write programs. I experimented with the ‘turtle’ logo years ago but like everything it seems to have gotten easier now to program. What was presented to me in this keynote was a way to enter into programming easily and in a hands on ‘click and drop” fashion-like building blocks.

Mitch told us of the many ways (that he had not imagined) that Scratch has been used by children. One of the powerful things I took away was that children were sharing, collaborating and being critical of each others work and co-constructing programs through the scratch website. Scratch enables children to ‘share’ what they make.  Children are ‘remixing’ each others work, supporting each others learning with developing tutorials on how to do specific things, teams working together on projects, creating a Scratch community even with a TV series for weekly news updates on what is happening in their community. Check it out.
Would be great to hear your learning adventures with Scratch.