Seymour Papart Lifetime Achievement Award

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In 2006, CoSN created the Lifetime Achievement Award. This CoSN award recognizes an individual whose lifetime has been dedicated to improving the use of technology and education and have shaped the course of history. In 2008, the award was renamed Seymour Papert Lifetime Achievement Award.

Honorees

2008

Charlie Garten, posthumous honor
Charlie Garten was a technology pioneer driven by a single goal: helping kids learn. As director of education technology and information services, his innovative work implementing and developing data warehouses and assessment testing for schools gave his teachers the tools they needed to tailor instruction to their students. Garten’s achievements, in turn, made Poway United School District near San Diego a national model, its tools and methods widely adopted. Garten himself became a state and national technology advocate and adviser, serving on many boards, including two terms with CoSN. Garten helped CoSN articulate how the organization needed to change as technology evolved from hardware and wires to integration and, finally, to a transformative third generation that is now altering every aspect of educational delivery. Garten’s counsel to schools and vendors alike “shaped the marketplace.”

Beyond his achievements, it was Garten the man, tall of stature and huge of heart that touched people so deeply. Although he quietly battled leukemia for just over 20 years, Garten always focused on other people, making them feel at ease and showing us all how to live.

Garten died on July 3, 2007, at the age of 57.

Past Honorees

2006

Dr. Seymour Papert

CoSN is proud to present its inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award to Dr. Seymour Papert, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in honor of Dr. Papert’s early contribution and ongoing commitment to the education technology community.

Long before there was any appreciable recognition of the role of computers as a resource for learning in schools, he understood the potential of computers to enrich learning opportunities for children. In the 1960s, at a time when computers were seen as an devices for elite academicians, he created the Logo programming language which was one of the first uses of computers as a learning resource for children.

Papert played a key role in the establishment of the nation’s first one-to-one computer project at the state level and he is deeply involved in the development of the “100 dollar” computer. His involvement in both of these projects does not stem from his desire to get more computers into the world but to transform the environment for learning for children.

He is a tireless advocate of the position that access to the learning opportunities that computer technology provides for children should not be contingent on parental affluence.