Review_Author: Jie Yan
Book_Author: Y. Kafai, M. Resnick (Eds.)
Book_Title: Constructionism in Practice: Designing, Thinking, and
learning in a Digital World
Reference: Y. Kafai, M. Resnick (Eds.)(1996). Constructionism in
Practice: Designing, Thinking, and learning in a Digital World. Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, Publishers. Mahwah, New Jersey.
Date: 5/11/2002
Time: 3:48:42 PM
Remote Name: 128.175.50.126
Published in 1996, “Constructionism in Practices” was based on 30 years of research on technology for learning and thinking. The majority of the contributors are from or originated from the former Epistemology and Learning Group at the Media Lab of MIT. It provided a rich and comprehensive description of constructionist educational theories and practices. The authors claim that constructionism is both a theory of learning and a strategy for education. Building on the “constructivist” theory of Jean Piaget, Constructionism asserted that knowledge is not simply transmitted from teacher to students, but actively constructed by the mind of the learner. Children don’t “GET” ideas, they “MAKE” the ideas. Moreover, constructionism suggests that learners are particularly likely to make new ideas when they are actively engaged in making some type of external artifact, such as be it a robot, a poem, a sand castle, or a computer program, which they can reflect upon and share with others.
The two editors, Kafai and Resnick, both are among the key researchers in this field. The have integrated ideas from the studies of learning, design, computer sciences, education, psychology, and epistemology, and presented a comprehensive theoretical framework for technologies in education. One researcher (Dr. Alison Druin at UMCP) in this field has stated about her research as “a weird ” combination of education and technology. Weird as it is, this field is becoming more and more important as computer and network is penetrating into our homes and schools. This book included a lot of pioneer research that has been done even before the “digital age” has “officially “ arrived in the mid 90s. It is divided into four interrelated sections: Perspectives in Cosntructionism, Learning through Design, Learning in communities, and Learning about Systems. In each section, the editors introduced some representative studies in each sub-area, including Kafai and Resnick’s own research on children's development of design strategies in the creation of a computational artifact and on new paradigms for computing and thinking through a programming language called StarLogo.
Specifically, Perspectives in Constructionism develops the intellectual understandings of constructionist theory. In constructionist learning, forming relationships with knowledge is as important as forming new presentations of knowledge. In A Word for Learning Papert vividly described how his learning disability of “flower literacy” was successfully overcome when the knowledge of flower became important to his life. Some knowledge can be so easily acquired without deliberately teaching. He suggested that the time to build personal connections to the knowledge is an essential ingredient strikingly absent from many of our school learning situations.
The section of Learning through Design analyzed the relationship between design and learning, and discussed ways that design activities can provide personally meaningful context for learning. It is emphasized that constructionist theory goes beyond Piaget’s constructivism in its emphasis on artifacts, asserting that meaning- construction happens particularly well when learners are engaged in building external and sharable artifacts.
Learning in Communities focused on the social aspects of constructionist learning, recognizing that how people learn is deeply influenced by the communities and cultures with which they interact. It exams the nature of learning in classroom, inner-city, and virtual communities. Amy Bruckman’s developed a professional community for researchers in education and technology. This community is called the MediaMoo, a MUD constituted by members of similar interests in research topics. Later when she became a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Bruckman extended her research into different kinds of online communities for learning and general social communicaion. Papert’s idea of comparing learning communities as the Latin Samba School best implied the nature of online learning communities in these studies.
The last section “Learning about Systems ” exams how students make sense of biological, technological and mathematical systems. Resnick developed StarLogo based on the famous Logo language first developed by Parpert. With StarLogo, as Resnick claimed, students will have an opportunity for students to move beyond the centralized mindset, “suggesting an expanded set of models and metaphors for making sense of the world”.
Generally, this book gave us a very good outline of what was going on in the research on education and technology from a constructionism point of view, exactly as the title stated: “Constructionism in Practices: designing, thinking, and learning in a digital world.” They did have presented many provocative ideas. Not only learning theories are provided, but also empirical research in many sub-areas based on real life experiments. I high recommend this book to those who are interested in education and technology, also those who are interested in educational reform in the digital age. Teachers and parents could benefit from the provocative ideas about learning and teaching, and how one’s relationship with knowledge would affect the learning and teaching results.
Review_Author: Kansas City
Book_Author: Premera
Book_Title: Massachusetts
Reference: Wyoming
Date: 2/25/2007
Time: 2:10:34 PM
Remote Name: 206.117.32.31
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