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Idit Harel

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Idit Harel

Idit Harel Caperton, Ph.D. (born September 18, 1958 in Tel Aviv, Israel) is an educational psychologist and epistemologist specializing in the study of the impact of computer-based new media technology on the social and academic development of children. Her research, along with that of Seymour Papert, has contributed to the development of constructionist learning theory, a hands-on approach to the use of technology as a tool in juvenile education and acculturation.

She is the founder and CEO of MaMaMedia.com, the executive director of the MaMaMedia Consulting Group, and founder and president of the World Wide Workshop Foundation. Additionally, Caperton is an advisor for several non-profit educational initiatives and is a regular featured speaker at universities and educational conferences worldwide.

Personal life

Born Idit Ron to Jewish parents from Poland and Czechoslovakia, Idit Harel Caperton was reared in Israel in a family that included several Holocaust survivors. Her parents, Rachel and Yehuda Ron, who were educators, authors, and book publishers, influenced her early life. Before turning to academics, Harel Caperton served in the Israeli Army. Additionally, as a high school student, she was a modern dance performer and was a member of the Israeli national rhythmic gymnastics team.

She was also strongly influenced by the development of the young Israeli state, often comparing the early years of the state to a business startup. Israel, a mere 10-year-old democracy when she was born, was in the process of building socio-political systems that combined leftist philosophies of cooperation and mutual reliance with free enterprise entrepreneurship. While a youth in the Levant, she experienced the Six Days War, the Yom Kippur War, and the 1982 Lebanon War. These events, along with other regional conflicts, such as the Gulf War, the First Intifada, and the Al-Aqsa Intifada, have led Caperton to actively support efforts to foster, build, and sustain peace in the Middle East and throughout the world.

In 2003, she married her second husband, Gaston Caperton, former Governor of West Virginia (1989-1997) and current President of the College Board, the organization responsible for the Advanced Placement (AP) programs and SAT examinations. They live in New York City and together have five children and five grandchildren. In addition, they continue to own a residence in West Virginia.

Academic career

Along with her first husband, David Harel (an Israeli investor, ex-fighter pilot, and Harvard MBA), she moved to the United States in 1982 for graduate study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts after having previously received a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Philosophy from Tel-Aviv University. She earned two graduate degrees from Harvard: an EdM in Technology in Education (1984) and a CAGS in Human Development (1985). In 1988, Harel Caperton was one of the first students to receive a Ph.D. in Epistemology and Learning Research from the new MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after helping to formulate a new, constructionist-inspired educational model called "Instructional Software Design."

Constructionism

During her time at MIT, Harel Caperton co-wrote and published several articles with Seymour Papert (creator of the Logo programming language), and in 1991 they co-edited and published Contructionism, the first book about constructionist learning. This book includes their articles and several other works by the first generation of MIT Media Lab researchers in the (then emerging) fields of Media Technology Arts and Sciences, and Epistemology and Learning. She continued to work at the Media Lab with Papert and Nicholas Negroponte until 1994.

Children Designers

In 1991, she published a book, Children Designers, which won the 1991 Outstanding Book Award from the American Education Research Association.[1] In her research, Harel Caperton introduced several disadvantaged fourth grade children from the Boston area to the Logo programming language. She then facilitated their use of the language to allow them to create their own mathematical software applications that would help third-graders learn fractions.[2] The students, who included children with different levels of mathematical prowess, worked on their own pieces of software for four to eight hours per week for 15 weeks.

Harel Caperton then observed and quantified the effect of the experience on their mathematical understanding and overall learning behavior. Her research indicated that children who learn fractions using a combination of Logo programming and the techniques of constructionist learning scored on average 8 to 18 percentage points higher on standardized post-test examinations than those taught using traditional techniques.[3] She identified the tendency of Logo-based programming to allow for individual variations in "learning, mastery, and self-expression" in children, and further called for an expansion of research into the nature of these differences by education scholars.[4]

With the publication of this book, she illuminated a new academic field of research that employs "eclectic implementation and research methodologies" for conducting and assessing "constructionist, technology-based design experiments" in order to actively reform education. Her mentor Seymour Papert described her work in this area as "a Trojan horse" in the field of education technology and cognitive psychology.

MaMaMedia

File:MaMaMedia logo.gif
Logo for MaMaMedia.com

Startup

In 1995, Harel Caperton moved to New York City, where she founded MaMaMedia.com (a playful variation of the Italian-American exclamation Mama Mia!), a pioneering Internet dot-com that focuses on the fostering of digital literacy and creative learning skills for children and their parents. Basing itself on the educational principles of constructionism, the site's goal is to allow children a vast selection of "playful learning" activities and projects. Therefore, MaMaMedia.com is the first technological adaptation using the Internet for some of the concepts originally espoused by educational theorists such as John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and Seymour Papert. In applying these theories, the site seeks to allow children worldwide the opportunity to grow creatively at their own pace from a young age. For example, children using the site can create, save, and share their own animations, cartoons, stories, digital art and games with dynamic tools provided on the website, thereby creating a global exercise in experiential education.

Development and expansion

After founding MaMaMedia, Harel Caperton was quick to develop the site's niche in the emerging Internet and print marketplaces. Between 1996 and 2000, the company published the first print magazine for children about the Internet, MaMaMedia: A Kid's Guide to the Net. Additionally, the company formed content distribution partnerships for both its magazine and its website with notable companies such as Time Warner (specifically AOL and Road Runner), Microsoft's Web TV, WGBH-TV, Netscape, Intel, and Scholastic; as well as advertising business with Minute Maid, Nintendo, Disney, and General Mills.

In particular, the deal with AOL, announced on December 29, 1997, [5] led to a dramatic jump in traffic for the main website of MaMaMedia.com. Before the site was linked from AOL's "Kids Only" channel, the MaMaMedia.com averaged 300,000 visits per month. After the deal, however, the URL had 450,000 visits in a twelve-hour period.[6] Approximately 10%-20% of visitors register to join the MaMaMedia community. At the end of 1999, MaMaMedia.com had about 300,000 registered members, and by early 2006 the figure had grown to over 5.7 million registered members.

As the company prepared for an initial public offering in 2001, the dotcom bubble popped and the company remained in private hands. By 2002, MaMaMedia, which had previously generated its revenue through advertising, became profitable after downsizing and restructuring; it transformed into the MaMaMedia Consulting Group, and has been hired for consulting on educational technology and global learning projects in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Awards for MaMaMedia

In 2001, Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel, recognized the MaMaMedia Peace Project – created 48 hours after the September 11, 2001 attacks – for its contributions to the "global information-technology revolution and its positive impact on society." In 2002, MaMaMedia received the coveted 21st-Century Achievement Award from the Computerworld Honors Program for visionary use of information technology in the category of Media, Arts & Entertainment: "Recipients of the Computerworld Honors 21st-Century Achievement Awards represent those organizations whose use of information technology has been especially noteworthy for the originality of its conception, the breadth of its vision, and the significance of its benefit to society", according to Daniel Morrow, Executive Director of the Computerworld Honors Program.[7]

MaMaMedia has also been awarded Computerworld's Award for Technology Innovation twice (1999 & 2002), and Yahoo! Internet Life's Best of the Net award twice (1999 & 2000). Most recently, MaMaMedia.com was selected as one of the best Web sites for elementary teachers and students on the Internet today by the International Society for Technology in Education[8], a worldwide, non-profit, professional organization for leaders in educational technology. ISTE is also the home of the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS), the Center for Applied Research in Education Technology (CARET), and the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC).

In 2002, the Network of Educators in Science and Technology and MIT also honored Harel Caperton "for devotion, innovation, and imagination in science and technology on behalf of children and youth around the world."

The World Wide Workshop Foundation

File:Worldwideworkshop logo.gif
Logo for World Wide Workshop Foundation

Idit Harel Caperton is also founder and president of the World Wide Workshop Foundation for Children's Media Technology and Learning, a 501(c)(3) non-profit company that collaborates with educators worldwide in order to incorporate new technologies into their curriculum. Much of the Foundation's work looks at ways to create new online educational applications or overhaul existing Internet programs.

Recent scholastic pursuits

Clickerati

Much of Harel Caperton's recent work has focused on what she calls the "Clickerati Generation" (a play on the term Literati) of young people who were born, or will be born, between 1991 and 2010. Caperton advances the notion that children born during this time will grow up immersed in new media, and cannot even imagine the world without Internet technology. Therefore, she contends that there is a need for a radical, global paradigm shift relating to education and acculturation of this generation in comparison to the methods used with the youth of bygone eras. In other words, where people of the past worked with print-based literature, current and future generations will click their way through technologically-based mediums of digital information and communication – and will need to be prepared adequately with digital literacy skills for their successful development, citizenship, and leadership within such physical-digital blended environments.[9]

Non-profit work

Harel Caperton has been active with consultation work for several non-profit educational entities. She has spent a great deal of time and effort with the Aspen Institute's FOCAS and Info-Tech policy programs and is a member of the board of directors for the ATLAS Institute. Furthermore, in 2004, she reunited with former colleagues Negroponte and Papert for One Laptop Per Child, the organization responsible for the oversight of MIT's $100 laptop project. OLPC seeks to ensure that every child in the world has access to inexpensive, hand-cranked computers that can operate in areas with little or no electrical utilities.

Other recent endeavours

Her primary focus during 2005-2006 has been the establishment of educational links between the United States and the rapidly growing technological infrastructure of China by working with individuals, corporations, and educational organizations (like Saybot, ECNU, BNU, and OLPC). In doing so, she has been a featured speaker and lecturer at numerous universities in Beijing and Shanghai. During the fall 2005 academic term, Caperton and her youngest daughter lived in Shanghai while she was a visiting professor and consultant at the Software Engineering Institute at East China Normal University, where she developed and modeled a student-centered, project-based curriculum for their graduate schools.

As an academic, scientist, and mother, Harel Caperton has combined her experience in these fields to analyze and critique parenting skills in the digital age. She recently partnered with iAmplify.com to create a new website that aims to assist today's parents and educators through a series of mobile audio content that can be downloaded onto a computer or any other audio playback device.

References

  1. ^ GirlGeeks.org. "Women who inspire us, internet: Idit Harel". Retrieved March 30. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  2. ^ Harel, Idit (1990). "Children as software designers: a constructionist approach for learning mathematics". The Journal of Mathematical Behavior. 9 (1): 4.
  3. ^ Harel, Idit and Papert, Seymour (1991). "Software design as a learning environment". Constructionism. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation. pp. 51–52. ISBN 0893917850.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. ^ Harel, Idit. Children Designers ((pbk.) ed.). Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation. p. 389. ISBN 0-89391-788-5. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |origdate= (help)
  5. ^ Template:Press release reference
  6. ^ "Rising interactive co. MaMaMedia signs agreement with AOL". Selling to Kids. 3 (1): 4.
  7. ^ MIT (2004). "OpenCourseWare wins IT in education award". Retrieved February 15. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  8. ^ Lerman, James (2005). "Excerpted from 101 Best Websites for Elementary Teachers by James Lerman" (PDF). Retrieved February 15. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  9. ^ Harel, Idit (2002). "Learning new-media literacy: a new necessity for the young clickerati generation". Telemedium. 48 (1): 17–26. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Profiles and interviews

Caperton's companies and projects

Affiliated organizations

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