Marvin Minsky, the pioneer of artificial intelligence, once said that “the problem with Logo is that it has a grammar but no literature,”

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new products and technological interventions without considering their ecological, social, and network effects has passed.

When we talk about learning—as opposed to education—we’re really talking about replacing the traditional, one-way, top-down model of knowledge transmission with an active, connected system that teaches people how to learn. Education is what other people do to you. Learning is what you do to yourself.

“The way we wrote about computers at Business-Week, the way most people talked about computers, were as tools, a way to get jobs done,” he says. “But Papert saw computers as something that could help you see the world in new ways and as a medium for kids to express their ideas.”

This simple proposal—the standardization of that most modest of industrial components—inspired the development of interchangeable parts.14 “He helped spark the second Industrial Revolution,” says Tom Knight, the MIT synthetic biologist. “You can’t overstate the importance of standardization to the creative process. An inventor wants to invent, not

Nobody has ever won a Nobel Prize by doing what they’re told,

Piaget spent much of his eighty-four years striving to understand how children—and by extension, adults—develop an understanding of the world.

This is the power of pull over push—it leverages modern communications technologies and the decreased cost of innovation to move power from the core to the edges, enabling serendipitous discoveries and providing opportunities for innovators to mine their own passions. At its best, it allows people to find not only the things they need, but also the