Re-thinking Education in
the Digital Age
David Cavallo, MIT Media Lab
http://learning.media.mit.edu

Re-Thinking School
Modern educational paradoxes

The context of Brasil

Obsolete system globally

 Need to change
Content

 Practice
 Process
 Place
 Partners for learning
Hundred-dollar laptop and disruption

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A Cidade que a
Gente Quer
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Breaking
mindsets and
building hope
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Automatically cleaning a river
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Generating power for
streetlights
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Water filtration
Design a
system to
purify water
before it is
released into
the
environment
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Simulation of
automated pump and
alarm system
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Technological Fluency
Computational Thinking
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Making Sensors from
Simple Materials
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Water Use
How much water is
used in our school?
For what?
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Digital Literacies
Fluency

Users versus

builders
Expressiveness

Thinking

Tv and poaching

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Ban Samka
1 project: Learning

Many activities

Construction

Collective Efficacy

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A Different Math Class
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Patterns, Groups, Symmetries,
Geometry, Topology, Harmonics, ...
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Models of Growth: Going
Beyond Pilots
Volition

Appropriation and experimentation

Concrete exemplars

Community and communication

Feedback

Debugging

Materials

Language

Bottom-up and emergent

Time and continuity

Hope and expectation

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What to do?
[This space intentionally left blank]

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What to do?
Create exemplars

 Use exemplars as objects to think with
 Provide powerful personal experiences
 Moving between levels:
Concrete experiences

 High-level views
 Role of reflection and debugging
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