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Posts Tagged ‘Tools’

Just-A-Tool Fallacy (Seymour Papert quote)

In Imported, Uncategorized, Weblog on 16 November 2004 tagged Design, Quotes, Software, Tools with no comments

In the foreword to Mitchel Resnick's Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams, Seymour Papert identifies the "just-a-tool" fallacy. He says:

By this I mean the failure to distinguish between tools (reasonably described as "just tools") that improve their users' ability to do pre-existing jobs, and another kind of "tool" (of which this book offers an excellent example) that are more than "just tools" because of their role in the creation of a job nobody thought to do, or nobody could have done, before.

Another quote for del.icio.us/TomC/quotes.