TITLE: Blogging as "Loud Thinking"
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 11, 2017  3:17 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
This morning, I tweeted a quote from Sherry Turkle's
<A HREF="https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/02/24/sherry-turkle/remembering-seymour-papert/">
   Remembering Seymour Papert</A>
that struck a chord with a few people: "Seymour Papert saw that
the computer would make it easier for thinking itself to become
an object of thought."  Here is another passage that struck a
chord with me:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 At the time of the juggling lesson, Seymour was deep in
 his experiments into what he called 'loud thinking'.
 It was what he was asking my grandfather to do.  What
 are you trying?  What are you feeling?  What does it
 remind you of?  If you want to think about thinking and
 the real process of learning, try to catch yourself in
 the act of learning.  Say what comes to mind.  And
 don't censor yourself.  If this sounds like free
 association in psychoanalysis, it is.  (When I met
 Seymour, he was in analysis with Greta Bibring.)  And
 if it sounds like it could you get you into personal,
 uncharted, maybe scary terrain, it could.  But anxiety
 and ambivalence are part of learning as well.  If not
 voiced, they block learning.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

It occurred to me that I blog as a form of "loud thinking".
I don't write many formal essays or finished pieces for my
blog these days.  Mostly I share thoughts as they happen
and think out loud about them in writing.  Usually, it's
just me trying to make sense of ideas that cross my path
and see where they fit in with the other things I'm
learning.  I find that helpful, and readers sometimes
help me by sharing their own thoughts and ideas.

When I first read the phrase "loud thinking", it felt
awkward, but it's already growing on me.  Maybe I'll try to
get my compiler students to do some loud thinking this fall.

By the way, Turkle's entire piece is touching and insightful.
I really liked the way she evoked Papert's belief that we
"love the objects we think with" and "think with the objects
we love".  (And not just because I'm an old Smalltalk
programmer!)  I'll let you read the rest of the piece
yourself to appreciate both the notion and Turkle's
storytelling.

Now, for a closing confession:  I have never read
<EM>Mindstorms</EM>.  I've read so much about Papert and
his ideas over the years, but the book has never made it to
the top of my stack.  I pledge to correct this egregious
personal shortcoming and read it as soon as I finish the
novel on my nightstand.  Maybe I'll think out loud about it
here soon.
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