A Constructionist approach to education and blogging
Constructionism – a reformulation of Piaget’s constructivism – developed by Papert and his colleagues at MIT’s Media Lab, highlights the personalised production of “knowledge artefacts” as well as the social nature of the learning process.
Constructionism – the N word as opposed to the V word – shares constructivism's connotation of learning as "building knowledge structures" irrespective of the circumstances of the learning. It then adds the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it's a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe. (Papert 1991)
Edith Ackerman emphasises that Papert’s theory concentrates on the transformation of ideas in particular contexts, through particular tools by particular minds. It shifts the epistemological emphasis from universals to “individual learners’ conversation with their own favorite representations, artifacts, or objects-to-think with.”
To Papert, projecting out our inner feelings and ideas is a key to learning. Expressing ideas makes them tangible and shareable which, in turn, informs, i.e., shapes and sharpens these ideas, and helps us communicate with others through our expressions. The cycle of self-directed learning is an iterative process by which learners invent for themselves the tools and mediations that best support the exploration of what they most care about. Learners, young and old, are “worldmakers,” in Nelson Goodman’s sense. (Ackerman nd. pdf download)
Pentland another Papert colleague suggests that constructionism is particularly useful in understanding new ways of thinking that emerge from a consideration of the internet as an ecological environment or series of interacting ecosystems.
The ecologies of the Internet could be a particularly fertile ground for the development of ecological thinking because they can be designed, manipulated, and analysed much more easily than ‘natural’ ecologies. As Papert has argued, people learn with particular effectiveness when they are actively engaged in the design and construction of personally meaningful artefacts. The Internet enables people to design and play with ‘ecological artefacts’ to a far greater extent than ever before. (Pentland 2004)
Papert and colleagues thus present a vision of learning that encourage us to think of learning as an integrated suite of personal meaning making processes, content or artefact construction and ecological relations. This set of processes fits well with Lowe’s (2004) typology of blogging as occurring across three modes: personal; knowledge management and social. A constructionist approach would encourage us to ensure that each of these modes are developed in an integrated way in educational blogging projects and would discourage approaches which highlight blogs as merely communicative devices.
From: O’Donnell, M., 2005, "Blogging as pedagogic practice: artefact and ecology," Blog Talk Downunder, 19-21 May 2005, Sydney, Australia. (Download pdf)
