Learning to Solve Problems With Technology A Constructivist Perspective

The constructivist revolution in education is a decade or more old. It is an even newer idea to educational technology. It is so new to some educational circles that some perceive it as a fad. We think not. Constructivism is an old idea to sociology, art, and philosophy. As a way of understanding the learning phenomenon, it is ageless. People have always constructed personal and socially acceptable meaning for events and objects in the world. Since evolving from primordial ooze, humans have interacted with the world and struggled to make sense out of what they experienced; this is as natural to humans as breathing. The popular Chinese proverb about forgetting what you tell me and understanding what I do bears witness to the ageless belief that knowledge, meaning, and understanding do not exist outside of meaningful, intentional activity. People naturally construct meaning. Formal educational enterprises that rely on the efficient transmission of prepackaged chunks of information are not natural, yet they are pandemic. The modern age values understanding less than it does progress (i.e., efficient transmission of culturally accepted beliefs). It doesn't have to be that way. Modernism can support meaning-making as well. This book looks at how modern technologies such as computers and video can be used to engage learners in personal and socially co-constructed meaning-making and problem solving. For many, constructivism represents a new way of conceiving the educational experience. Yet constructivism as a philosophy and as a pedagogy is now widely accepted. This is a time of theoretical foment, where nearly all contemporary theories of learning (constructivism, situated learning, social cognition, activity theory, distributed cognition, ecological psychology, and case-based reasoning) share convergent beliefs about how people naturally come to know (Jonassen & Land, 2000). This book is not about theory, but it shares the beliefs of these theories. Learning to Solve Problems with Technology: A Constructivist Perspectiveis about how educators can use technologies to support constructive learning. In the past, technology has largely been used in education to learn from. Technology programs were developed with the belief that they could convey information (and hopefully understanding) more effectively than teachers. But constructivists believe that you cannot convey understanding--that can only be constructed by learners. This book argues that technologies are more effectively used as tools to construct knowledgewith.The point is that technology is a tool to think and learnwith. How can technologies be used as meaning-making tools? In this book, after contrasting different conceptions of learning, we elucidate our conception of meaningful learning. Meaningful learning is active, constructive, intentional, authentic, and cooperative. How do we engage students in active, constructive, intentional, authentic, and cooperative learning activities? By asking them td solve problems. In Chapter 2 we briefly contrast different kinds of problem solving and then describe how technologies can best engage and support problem solving in schools. Technologies can effectively support information searching, modeling, decision making, and designing. Each of these is either a kind of problem solving or an important process in problem solving. In Chapter 3 we show how learners who articulate a personally meaningful goal or intention can explore the Internet in search of ideas that help them construct their own understanding. Sharing their own understanding by constructing personal and group Web sites completes the knowledge construction cycle. Another problematic belief of schools is that learning is always an individual endeavor, so schools focus only on assessing the knowledge that resides in individual heads. Learning in everyday and professional (non-school) contexts is rarely individJonassen, David H. is the author of 'Learning to Solve Problems With Technology A Constructivist Perspective', published 2002 under ISBN 9780130484031 and ISBN 0130484032.