if (conformity=1, playfulness=1)
then subject=”fan”
if (conformity=0, playfulness=1)
then subject=”geek”
if (conformity=1, playfulness=0)
then subject=”consumer”
if (conformity=0, playfulness=0)
then subject=”activist”
What do you think, sirs?
I’m trying to come to a grand unified theory of geekdom. Having spent the semester marinating in the Frankfurt School and its descendants; recently made the acquaintance of someone doing his dissertation on the rationalization of fiction and the stigmatization of fantasy; heard from kids in my thesis research that fantasy games “are for nerds;” wrangled over the finer points with Jess and Austin; and just yesterday returned to literature on fan cultures on the hunch that someone was already saying what I wanted to say, I sketched out the pseudocode above. Still a work in progress.
* * *
Apropos of something else entirely, I had breakfast this morning with TC’s math department and Seymour Papert, developer of the LOGO programming language, having seen a talk of Papert’s last night. He has the most wry, amused-looking eyes I’ve ever looked into, and a gentle voice. He appeared prepared to have a bagel for breakfast, or maybe he already had; by the time I got to him, he was eating cream cheese off a plastic knife, the tip of it popping in and out of the mouth within his beard, like a child with one of those summer plastic tubs of ice cream and a tiny wooden spoon. I asked him what his take was on using video games in education, and he retorted that was rather like asking whether you should use books in education. Score one for our team.
He talked about learning from Paolo Freire. He told us how, as a child in South Africa, he lived for months at a research station with his father, who was an entomologist, and a number of Black Africans involved in the study of tsetse flies. As a result, he said, he didn’t grow up accepting apartheid. He eventually fled the repressive police state of South Africa to study at Cambridge, only to find Cambridge was “the training ground for the British Empire,” fleeing it in turn for Paris, where the convivial culture of academic backtalk seems to have been more to his liking.
He talked last night as well as this morning about how education is divorced from reality, how the solution to what he called the “math wars” could be the teaching of computational mathematics: it is more rigorous than the standards we’re operating under now, and yet can also be more applied and fun. Showing us brief LOGO demonstrations, he demonstrated the construction of polygons, and claimed a second grader had once tried to argue with a circle he’d just had the turtle draw was actually a polygon with a lot of tiny little sides. Score another for the constructivist team; Papert is certain we can teach basic algebra and calculus as early as first grade if we maintain hands-on methods like these.
He talked more than once about the $100 computer initiative. He admonished us, as I assume he’s admonished its developers, not to think of this computer on the computer industry’s terms; it need not be fragile, nor massively networked, nor reliant on electricity, nor closed source. When I asked if he found it problematic that kids don’t have as much access to the guts of a computer as the used to, he replied that so long as we don’t teach the computer as a black box, kids still have the kinds of opportunities they used to back when we had to learn BASIC just to manage at the command line. But such an education “is almost illegal” today, he said; with standards taking up all of educators’ time, and science standards not insisting that students understand computers, teachers can hardly take the time out to cover this topic.
Standardization of education doesn’t get him down as much as it does me, though. In discussing educational theorists like Rousseau and Dewey, he referred to Leonardo’s drawings of flying machines. Leonardo didn’t have the technology to test if they worked, Papert said, but if he had, Papert was pretty confident he would have worked out the bugs. The implication, it seems to me, was that we’ve got the technology to test out constructivist educational theories now. The bug comes in the social, not the technological, setup of education, of course, but Papert remains an optimist, god luv’im. I described to him Neal Stephenson’s Primer, and he wrote the name of the book down for future reference.
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