Net Results: Any opportunity to hear the views of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prof Seymour Papert, the famed educationalist, mathematician, creator of the Lego Mindstorms robots and passionate advocate for bringing together children, schools and technology, is one to be seized.

Few people can so gently yet vigorously challenge your assumptions about education in general and technology and education in particular. So a lecture at St Patrick's College in Drumcondra, Dublin, by Prof Papert - who has returned here regularly through his association with the late Media Lab Europe project in the Liberties - was always going to be good.

And so it was. Speaking on "Fuelling the Flames of the Creative Process" as part of the college's Seamus Heaney lecture series (the Nobel laureate, who has written about and takes a strong interest in children and education, was there too), Prof Papert managed to politely savage the assumptions behind modern school curricula and argue against the growing use of standards testing, which he feels dumps many able learners into special needs classes where they continue to sink. And all in the presence of some Irish National Teachers' Organisation luminaries.

At the centre of his lecture was the notion that technology enables an active learning that, until now, has been nearly impossible within schools. Take a Mindstorms robot - by being left to figure out how to make it move using a computer, motors, sensors and Lego, a child learns complex ideas about maths, physics, programming and logic.

All this in a creative soup of learning, where adults are not needed to say what is right and what is wrong, and in Prof Papert's view, shouldn't. The "resistance" the child meets with from the real world as he or she tries to make this little Lego object do as it wants presents endless challenges to be overcome - and the child learns through gradually getting it right.

This, he argues, is "hard fun", the kind children love and learn from most but rarely encounter in a school setting.

He challenged the teachers in the room to start thinking about new visions of teaching and learning - a model of active learning through technology that he believes could be spearheaded here because the country is small and the education system a strong one.

Speaking the day after the lecture, Prof Papert said this type of learning should not be thought of as one that excludes the importance of the teacher.

"Self-reinforcement, self-validation [for the student], yes; but there's room for the teacher."

Making sure the learning process is deep and enriching - and hard - rather than shallow is an important teacher's role.

Hard fun also isn't restricted to science subjects but incorporates the arts, he says. He was involved in a project at MIT that brought together a famous dancer and children, who learned formal dance but also experimented with using sensors, switches and computer graphics to allow them to weave coloured lights and sounds and images into their movements.

"Kids were using science and engineering principles in the pursuit of their own artistic design," he says.

He mentioned how the use of programs like PowerPoint or film-editing programs on the Macintosh, and the internet itself, make it too easy for children to create presentations and videos that impress only because the format was once far too complicated for children to use - but often the content remains "a millimetre deep".

So, as he told me later, he empathises with critics of technology and computers in the classroom as, too often, they are used in ways that do not enhance learning. "The intelligent critics catch on to very widespread weaknesses in the way it is used. The attacks are justified, except for the conclusions," he says.

"If schools use the computer badly, whose fault is that - the school's, or the computer's?"

For most kids, he says, "the place where they are most creative is on the edge". Technology - used well - lets them explore that place in ways that have not been possible within traditional education until now, he says.

The lecture gave the opportunity to reflect on a side of Media Lab Europe that most people forgot about: projects supported by MLE and its research community that went into Irish schools.

Working with Ms Deirdre Butler, a lecturer at St Patrick's, Prof Papert was involved in one such project that has taken on a life of its own in new school districts. Called Empowering Minds, the project has, over many years, given children the chance to work with Mindstorms robots, motors and sensors. I went to see the results in the Liberties last year. The children were excited at getting the chance to explain their projects to visitors and see what other classes had created during a large (and cacophonous) exhibit.

Prof Papert said the project is a model for the kind of change he'd like to see across education as a whole.