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Goldman-Segall is examining and promoting a way of learning that takes into account the stories of the students themselves so that they can interact deeply with others engaged in the same learning process and come to new understandings together. Perhaps you don't need technology for all of this. But technology may be particularly suited to facilitate this process.
It seems to me that Goldman-Segall's work is more about consciousness than it is about curriculum and it's more about humanity than it is specifically about middle-school kids. Goldman-Segall herself says, "I'm hoping that technology will help to build a more empathic community of learners."
Ricki Goldman-Segall has created a new method of making manifest to others the richness and excitement of the minds of children. She does this through a unique and personal methodology that draws from a literature ranging from Ivan Illich to Clifford Geertz and on a marvelous sensitivity that has been cultivated by contact with filmmakers as much as with more formal social scientists. Goldman-Segall is probably the first researcher to use digital media as a tool for ethnographic research and communication of children's thinking. She will not be the last.
Seymour Papert
LEGO Professor of Learning Research, MIT Media Lab
Author of Mindstorms and The Connected Family
This book by Dr. Goldman-Segall affords one of those rare experiences of thoughtfulness infused with feeling, causing us to care for the young people she portrays even as we come to understand through this book how they are putting the world together, and how our best researchers into youthful learning -- and this writer is surely one of the best -- are finding new ways of inquiring into the complexity of that learning. Goldman-Segall's breakthrough integration of text and website exemplifies the intellectual adventure that she offers with this engaging and artful journey into what we can learn from the meeting of children and scholars amid new and old technologies.
John Willinsky
Professor, University of British Columbia
Author of Learning to Divide the World
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