Q:
In the book Les technologies de l'Intelligence, Pierre L¨¦vy, the french philosopher,  says that the new technologies are changing the way man think. I believe it, but how to explain that this fact doesn't invallidate the construction of intelligence? Assimilation and accomodation will continue to act in the direction of adaptation. Or not?

A1:
How are the new technologies asserted to change the way people think?  Not necessarily by changing the basic underlying mechanisms.....brains are, after all, still brains  and ditto for basic psychological processes.

A2:
In my own opinion, technology act as support for stage transition a la Kurt Fischer.  Google provides support for assimilation and also for challenging material at stages beyond.  It also provides lots of explanation which is also a form of support. 

Think of trying to do mathematics without symbols and just sentences.  The introduction of symbols made it much easier to understand to a much broader audience.

Think of the printing press and how it brought education to an extremely large number of people. 

If you mean, does it change the stages, that is not possible if you believe the tasks that stage assements are based upon are ordered by their hierarchical complexity.

So thinking is raised in stage by technology but the stages are not altered.  The content of those stages are.

Q:
Tthe invariant functions - assimilation and accomodation - will be the same. But how to explain that there is also surely another vision of the world, another weltangschauung. Different technical suports interfering with development. Like once the invention of writing, there is another representation of reality, ressignification of objects.

A:
The analogy to concrete and formal operations seems to be tenuous. New computer learners are working at a very specific operation level of do this, do that, etc. as contrasted with someone who has a set of principles from which to infer and organize operations....this is true of expert vs. novice comparisons in any domain. The data presented don't seem to be particularly pertinent..i.e. generally positive correlation doesn't prove a more causal connection.

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(This article is from email discussions through owner-piaget-list@interchange.ubc.ca)