ICT in Education

Thoughts on: Assumptions about Learning – Jonassen, Peck & Wilson (1999)

August 14, 2007

Assumptions about Learning
Jonassen, D. H., Peck K. L. & Wilson, B. G. (1999). Learning With Technology: A Constructivist Perspective. New Jersey: Merril. pp 2-11.

This is the first thing I’ve read that has given me any kind of real appreciation of the philosophy and theory underpinning Constructivism.

Until now it has all seem far too vague and airy-fairy but this introductory chapter to what seems like a very interesting book is able to clearly explain the learning concepts at the heart of this educational philosophy.

Here are some of the essential points made and some of my thoughts in response to them:

“We learn from experiencing phenomena (objects, events, activities, processes), interpreting those experiences based on what we know, reasoning about them and reflecting on the experiences and the reasoning. Jerome Bruner (1990) called this process meaning making”

“Constructivists believe that knowledge is constructed, not transmitted. Individuals make sense of their world and everything with which they come in contact by constructing their own representations or models of their experiences”

“We believe that teaching is a process of helping learners to construct their own meaning from the experiences they have by providing these experiences and guiding the meaning-making process”

“Knowledge construction results from activity, so knowledge is embedded in activity” Do all facts need “meaning” to be remembered or to make sense – I’ve never stuck a knife in a powerpoint but I know it’s bad. (How do I know this?) What if the urgency with which information is passed on affects our learning of it? – This would be much more about teaching than learning per se.

“Knowledge is anchored in and indexed by the context in which the learning activity occurs… Information about the context is part of the knowledge that is constructed by the learner in order to explain or make sense of the phenomenon” – does this give the learner too much credit? does the learner always do this – or always want to do this? Might they see it as too much work?

Relevant activity enhances information – but is it just another form of info?
Is it just like saying it twice but better (repetition) – reframing/contextualising – like making food easier to digest by pre-chewing it.

Motivation is still of vital importance

“The knowledge that a learner constructs consists of not only the ideas (content) but also knowledge about the context in which it was acquired, what the learner was doing in that environment and what the knower intended to get from that environment” This defines knowledge as a set of unique combined elements

“So the more directly and interactively we experience things, the more knowledge about it we are likely to construct”

“What we really understand about skills and knowledge is the application of them. When we learn how to use a skill, we store that use as a story, which is a primary medium of conversation and meaning making among humans (Schank 1986). ”
Oh, so how do something in WebCT – I guess I have more of a visual physical conception of it – is that a story?
This part is about both relevance and transferance.

“Meaning is in the mind of the knower”. We can share parts of our reality “by socially negotiating shared meanings. That is, we converse with others and agree on the relative importance and meanings for things.”
Everyone’s knowledge is different but if one apprentice chef burns their hand on a pot, it’s very much the same as if another one does

“Therefore, there are multiple perspectives on the world. Since no two people can possibly have the same set of experiences and perceptions of those experiences, each of us constructs our own knowledge, which in turn affects the perceptions of the experiences that we have and those we share”

“Making meaning is prompted by a problem (GAMES?), question, confusion, dissonance (a need or desire to know) and so involves personal ownership of that problem… Meaning making often starts with a problem, a question, a discrepant and inexplicable event, a curiosity, wonderment, puzzlement (Duffy and Cunningham 1996), a perturbation (Maturana and Varela 1992), expectations violations (Schank 1986), cognitive dissonance, or a disequilibrium. We can memorize ideas that others tell use but to actively seek to make meaning about phenomena involves the desire to make sense of things”

My model for the Constructivist approach:

{Context (Information + relevance) Activity} + (Past experiences) => meaning + reflection => knowledge

“Knowledge-building requires articulation, expression or representation of what is learned… For usable knowledge to be constructed, learners need to think about what they did and articulate what it meant. Usually that articulation process is verbal, but learners can construct a variety of visual or auditory representations of their experiences or understandings”
Reflection offers evidence => assessment items

“Meaning may also be shared with others, so meaning making can also result from conversation… Social constructivists believe that meaning making is a process of negotiation among the participants through dialogues or conversations.”

“So meaning making and thinking are distributed throughout our tools, culture and community. As we interact with others in knowledge-building communities, our knowledge and beliefs about the world are influenced by that community and their beliefs and values”

“Just as the cognitive properties of individuals vary, the cognitive attributes and accomplishments of communities also vary, depending on differences in the social organisation of the groups (i.e., the ways in which members distribute cognitive responsibilities) (Hutchins 1991)”. Collective wisdom/shared knowledge depends on how smart the members of the group are.

“Learning can also be conceived of as changes in our relation to the culture(s) to which we are connected (Duffy and Cunningham 1996). As we spend more time in a club, we become more influenced by its beliefs and culture, because the group’s knowledge is distributed among the participants (Saloman 1993)” If this is the case, where does new knowledge, innovation and ideas come from – if everyone becomes like everyone else?

“Within any knowledge-building community, share ideas are accepted and agreed upon. That is, meaning is reflected in the social beliefs that exist at any point in time. If individual ideas are discrepant from community standards, they are not regarded as viable unless new evidence supporting their viability is provided” Oh, that’s where it comes from
So something is only right as long as enough people believe it and no viable alternatives are proven

“Assessing the viability of anyone’s knowledge involves many criteria” Checks and balances system of knowledge in the group

“In order to engage different types of thinking, we must rethink the ways that we teach and the ways that we use technology in our teaching”

“When learning about things in natural contexts, humans interact with their environment and manipulate the objects in that environment, observing the effects of their interventions and constructing their own interpretations of the phenomena and the results of the manipulation”
Doing gives meaning but it only goes so far.

“Through formal and informal apprenticeships in communities of play and work, learners develop skills and knowledge that they then share with other members of those communities with whom they learned and practiced those skills”
Someone generally shows them what to do and the rules of the game. This reminds me of the paper about experienced people mentoring newbies in MMORPGS at http://users.bigpond.com/colsim/edugames/simpson3/annotate.html#Steinkuehler

“Real learning requires active learners ; people engaged by a meaningful task (not just pressing the space bar to continue) in which they manipulate objects and the environment in which they are working and then observe the results of their manipulations ” Games – but then again, why use a game when reality is available? Well, because it’s not always there or affordable or easily repeatable

“Activity is necessary but not sufficient for meaningful learning. Learners must reflect on their activity and observations to learn the lessons that their activity has to teach… By reflecting on on the puzzling experience, learners integrate their new experiences with their prior knowledge about the world, or they establish goals for what they need to learn in order to make sense out of what they observe… The active and constructive parts of the meaningmaking process are symbiotic. They both rely on the other for meaning making to occur.”

“When learners are actively and willfully trying to achieve a cognitive goal (Scardamalia and Bereiter 1993/94), they think and learn more because they are fulfilling an intention… Technologies need to engage learners in articulating what their learning goals are in any learning situation, and then support them. Technology based learning systems should require learners to articulate what they are doing, the decisions they make, the strategies they use and the answers that they found” And WHY they are doing something. This reminds me of Bronwyn Hegarty’s critical reflection model. Can problem based learning be prescriptive as well as democratic (levels of direction/guidance) 

“A great deal of recent research has shown that learning tasks that are situated in some meaningful real-world task or simulated in some case-based or problem-based learning environment are not only better understood but also are more consistently transferred to new situations… we need to teach knowledge and skills in real-life, useful contexts and provide new and different contexts for learners to practice using those ideas” – ok but then we should point out the base, underlying ideas. 

“And we need to engage students in solving complex and ill-structured problems as well as simple problems (Jonassen 1997) -  like levels/progress in games. 

“Humans naturally work in learning and knowledge-building communities, exploiting each others’ skills and appropriating each other’s knowledge”

“Often, educators will promote collaborative methods of learning, only to resort to independent assessment of learning… We cannot forget that most learners are strategic enough to know “what counts” in classrooms, so if they are evaluated individually, collaborative instruction may fail because students realize that group outcomes are not important” This strikes me as a VERY valid point – perhaps collaborative approaches need collaborative assessment to validate the process

Some very interesting explanations of the underlying philosophies of Constructivism here – I think I got more out of this than I have from anything else I’ve read to date.

There was one more interesting point made in the extract about collaboration that seems worth mentioning:

“Collaboration most often requires conversation among participants. Learners working in groups must socially negotiate a common understanding of the task and the methods they will use to accomplish it… When learners become part of knowledge-building communities both in class and outside of school, they learn that there are multiple ways of viewing the world and multiple solutions to most of life’s problems. “

Entry Filed under: 913, constructivism, democratic, e-learning, pedagogy. .