#Having balanced the individual and social perspectives to constructivism# we recognized tha Constructivism has been a dominant epistemology gradually replacing the objectivist and positivist paradigm in the last one to two d ecades. Constructivism, like objectivism, holds that there is a real world that we experience, however, the argument is that meaning is imposed by our interpretation (or meaning - making) of the world. There are many ways to structure and interpret the world , and there are many meanings and perspectives for any event or concept. Hence the constructivist view is opposed to the one correct objectivist meaning that we strive for (Duffy & Jonassen, 1992). The purpose of this paper is to clarify the main ‘faces’ of constructivism and to formulate a possible working constructivist framework for e - learning. Having balanced the individual and social perspectives to constructivism, we recognized that e - learning environments should be situated in both the social commun ity of teaching practice and in the individual minds of students. Constructivism – Balancing the Individual and Social Perspectives The two dominant roots of constructivism are the radical constructivist and the social - cultural views. Arising from Piaget and von Glasersfeld is the radical constructivist view where learning is defined as a predominantly individual self - organization of the mind – an active cognitive reorganization through processes such as assimilation, accommodation, and equilibrium. The so cial - cultural view, on the other hand, argues that mind is a by - product of external culturally organized phenomena such as practices in the context of artifacts, tools, and language. Such a view is attributed to Vygotsky, Leont’ev and other Marxist orienta tions. Recent notions such as cognitive apprenticeship, legitimate peripheral participation, or the negotiation of meaning in stipulated construction zones are notions arising from the social - cultural perspective. It is important to realize that proponen ts of the above two views did not deny the presence of either the social or individual dimensions. For example, although von 145 Glasersfeld defines learning as self - organization, he attributes this constructive activity as the cognizing individual who interac ts with other members of the community (Cobb, 1994). von Glasersfeld elaborates that knowledge refers to “conceptual structures that epistemic agents, given the range of present experience within their tradition of thought and language, consider viable ” (1 992, p. 381); and contents that “the most frequent source of perturbations for the developing cognitive subject is interaction with others” (1989, p. 136). In the same vein, the social - cultural view as dominated by the Vygotskian perspective also did not deny the individual view. The oft - quoted Vygotskian cultural law of development emphasizes the view of internalization from the social intermental to individual intramental level. However, there still remains much research on how this internalization proce ss from then social to individual occurs. The Vygotskian view claims that cognition begins at the social level – social interactions, situated contextual practices, signs, tools, etc. – yet there is now ample evidence from Piagetian and neo - Piagetian studi es that young children work out a substantial knowledge of the physical world, well before they could have gained much of it from the surrounding culture (Carey & Gelman, 1991). In other words, social learning plays a significant role, but it cannot be sai d that all of conceptualization and learning must originate from the social plane. Stripped to their essentials, constructivism tells us to pay close attention to the active learner’s mental activities (organization of his / her mind) and social - culturali sm tells us to pay close attention to the cultural practices of the learner’s milieu. Except for the practical difficulty of doing both at once, there is nothing incompatible in these two proposals. Neither one rejects the other. Thus, from a pragmatic poi nt of view, we should consider what the two perspectives have to offer. Learning should be a process of active individual construction and a process of enculturation into the practices of the social society , of which, the immediate wider society of our tra inee - teachers is the teaching community. Brown and Duguid (2000) elegantly describe learning as demand driven, a social act, and an identity formation. By demand - driven, the learning context should create the active need for reorganization of cognitive p rocesses; by social act, learning is embedded in the larger community beyond the individual; and by identify formation, learning creates the personality of the learner affiliated to the community of practice – for example, the teaching community – through internalization and appropriation of knowledge, skills, beliefs, and norms. These terms are similar to the ASK model where the emphases are on Attitudes, Skills, and Knowledge. Attitudes are acquired through appropriation of exemplary behaviors, and skills through the internalization and application of knowledge. The ASK model complements both the constructivist (internalization) and social - cultural (appropriation) perspective. Finally, in comparing the two views, it can be noted that the social - cultural v iew as enculturation via guided participation (for example within Vygotskian notion of the Zone of Proximal Development) assumes an active constructing learner. Conversely, the constructivist view of learning as cognitive self - organization implicitly assum es that the learner is participating in cultural practices. In effect, active individual construction constitutes the background against which guided participation in cultural practices comes to the fore for the social - cultural view, and this participation is the 146 background against which self - organization comes to the fore for the radical constructivist view. Each of the two perspectives tells us what we should do in our instructional and learning ‘story’ and they can be used to complement each other. For example, a young newly trained teacher gets enculturated in the school practice and acquires all the rules of the cultural practice as he or she progresses from a novice learner to a mature teacher - practitioner – the strengths of legitimate peripheral part icipation through observations and guided participation. On the other hand, the newly trained teacher reflects upon what he or she had learned and encounters self - reorganization – refining her theoretical knowledge in relation to his / her practical experi ences. In this regard, there is a need for a similar culture in terms of norms and practices (for example the constructivist practice) between institutions and schools. Otherwise we may not be fostering the creation of a teacher - identify in real practice. In the next half of this paper, we illustrate a practical approach to this complement of the individual and social perspective of constructivism through the design of two models of e - learning. The first model is the traditional instructional cum learning approach where we complement the best use of media to facilitate both the individual and social process; and the second approach is a newer and more exciting direction of e - learning environments focusing on personalization (individual) and its relationshi ps to the larger community of practitioners (social).
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 12:26:32 +0000
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