"Learning happens as a consequence of experience, that it's based on mental structures built within-side your head and Papert suggests that constructionism tells us that the best way to insure that that construction inside our head takes place is through the active construction of some artifact that is sharable outside of the computer or outside of our heads...the making of something tangible is the best way to insure that we learn something by concretizing experiences.” - Gary Stager,TEDxASB, Seymour Papert, Inventor of Everything (Good in Education), YouTube Video published March 24, 2014
As an educator constant recurring questions of meaning bounce around in my mind. Does what I'm experiencing as a teacher, in the current teaching process, have meaning? Is my learner, within the current learning process, creating meaning? How do I know? If not, why not? It's by one's expelling of an object from the subject that I have the assurance that meaning exists - that there is purpose in our exchange as teacher and learner. As Stager put it "the making of something tangible is the best way to insure that we learn something by concretizing experiences.”
While I fully agree with Stager, it is also possible to concretize experience without creating something tangible - it can also be something metaphorical: Martha, in a video clip of Seymour Papert's work at MIT on the LOGO programming language for children, was using LOGO and happened upon a problem, "Oh no, when it was doing it in his mind, the little turtle, the little triangle thing, was on an angle so it drew the picture on an angle. So now I'll go back and have it draw it in its mind again while its in the right position.” Martha uses the "mind" as an expression of her making meaning of the program. She has expelled the notion of a "mind" (the object) in reference to programming (the subject) in such a way as to concretize the experience. As Papert said, in reference to this act, "Martha is getting mathematical knowledge in a meaningful context for use now.”