Jean Piaget (1896-1980) and Implications for ICT in Education

The Swiss psychologist Piaget is best known for reorganizing cognitive development into a series of stages- the levels of development corresponding roughly to infancy, pre-school, childhood, and adolescence.The four stages, are the Sensorimotor stage, which occurs from birth to age two, (children experience through their senses), the Preoperational stage, which occurs from ages two to seven (motor skills are acquired), the Concrete operational stage, which occurs from ages seven to eleven (children think logically about concrete events), and the Formal Operational stage, which occurs after age eleven (abstract reasoning is developed here).

In Summary:
Stages of Development:
Sensory Motor Period(0 - 24 months) [More on this stage]
The Preoperational Period(2-7 years) [More on this stage]
Period of Concrete Operations (7-11 years) [More on this stage]
Period of Formal Operations(11-15 years) [More on this stage]
http://www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/development/piaget.shtml


The concepts of schemes, assimilation, accommodation and equilibration are important in understanding Piaget.
Schemes describe the patterns of behaviour or thinking that people use in relating to the world.
Assimilation is where an object or experience is incorporated into a new scheme.
Accommodation is the reordering of schemes taking into account new experiences.
Development from one stage to the next is caused by the accumulation of errors in the child's understanding of the environment, which brings about a state of cognitive disequilibrium,and the reorganisation of existing thought structures.

Although Piaget's thoghts have been overhauled and expanded upon, he was undoubtedly a brilliant and inspired thinker who made a huge impact on educational practice. Time magazine ranked him among one of the most important individuals of the twentieth century.Through his keen observation of human development, he sought to gain a new basis for inspired learning.

In Conversations with Jean Piaget, he says: "Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators—not conformists," (Bringuier, 1980, p.132) (Wikipedia)


...is ICT education really aiming to create innovators, not conformists???
Are we fulfilling our duty of care in giving children a solid basis for ethical and moral decisions?...
....some critical reflections from:
www.allianceforchildhood.org.

Today’s children will inherit social and ecological crises that involve tough moral choices and awesome technological power, Tech Tonic warns. To confront problems like the proliferation of devastating weapons and global warming, children will need all the “wisdom, compassion, courage, and creative energy” they can muster, it adds. Blind faith in technology will not suffice.
“A new approach to technology literacy, calibrated for the 21st century, requires us to help children develop the habits of mind, heart, and action that can, over time, mature into the adult capacities for moral reflection, ethical restraint, and compassionate service”

We as educators have the task of facilitating the child's understanding of the world, to help the child find sense and meaning. Is the desperate scramble to introduce ICT to children based on sound educational philosophy? Surely an innovative, use of technology can only come about when children are brought up in conducive environments for true creativity. Are we currently on the right path? Some critical reflections:

Tech Tonic proposes seven reforms in education and family life. These will free children from a passive attachment to screen-based entertainment and teach them about their “technological heritage” in a new way, rooted in the study and practice of technology “as social ethics in action” and in a renewed respect for nature.

The seven reforms:
1: Make human relationships and a commitment to strong communities a top priority at home and school.
2: Color childhood green to refocus education on children’s relationships with the rest of the living world.
3:Foster creativity every day, with time for the arts and play.
4:Put community-based research and action at the heart of the science and technology curriculum.
5:Declare one day a week an electronic entertainment-free zone.
6:End marketing aimed at children.
7:Shift spending from unproven high-tech products in the classroom to children’s unmet basic needs.

“To expect our teachers, our schools, and our nation to strive to educate all of our children, leaving none behind, is a worthy goal,” Tech Tonic says. “To insist that they must at the same time spend huge amounts of money and time trying to integrate unproven classroom technologies into their teaching, across the curriculum with preschoolers on up, is an unwise and costly diversion from that goal. It comes at the expense of our neediest children and schools, for whom the goal is most distant.”

The Implications for Education, According to Talbot
(The Future does not Compute):
Children in today's world need to be familiar with computers, don't they?
What should we teach high-school students about computers?
Isn't the Internet irreplaceable as a source of information?
Why not use the Internet to bring world-class science into the schoolhouse?
Can't we use the Internet to help students become world citizens?
Do CD-ROMs and nature videos instill a love of nature in children?
Why not use the Internet to help children learn foreign languages?
Must we get school children onto the Net in order to prepare them for 21st century jobs?


Also see Mander: "In the Abscence of the Sacred"
http://carbon.cudenver.edu/stc-link/weblink/water/materials/mander.html
We don't really know how to assess new or existing technologies. It is apparent that we need a new, more holistic language for examining technology, one that would ignore the advertised claims, best-case visions, and glamorous imagery that inundate us and systematically judge technology from alternative perspectives: social, political, economic, spiritual, ecological, biological, military. Who gains? Who loses? Do the new technologies serve planetary destruction or stability? What are their health effects? Psychological effects? How do they affect our interaction with and appreciation of nature? How do they interlock with existing technologies? What do they make possible that could not exist before? What is being lost? Where is it all going? Do we want that?

...if we are to use technology to influence learning effectively, to lead to a creativity based on human and environmental ethics, these questions need assessing.