Chapter 2: Searching for learner-centered, constructivist, and sociocultural components of collaborative educational learning tools
page 25--50. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, (1998)Abstract
As Bednar, Cunningham, Duffy, and Perry (1995) argued, instructional
strategies and tools must be based on some theory of learning and cognition.
Of course, crafting well-articulated views that clearly answer the major
epistemological questions of human learning has exercised psychologists and
educators for centuries. What is a mind? What does it mean to know something?
How is our knowledge represented and manifested? Many educators
prefer an eclectic approach, selecting “principles and techniques from the
many theoretical perspectives in much the same way we might select international
dishes from a smorgasbord, choosing those we like best and ending up
with a meal which represents no nationality exclusively and a design technology
based on no single theoretical base” (Bednar et al., 1995, p. 100). It is certainly
the case that research within collaborative educational learning tools
has drawn upon behavioral, cognitive information processing, humanistic,
and sociocultural theory, among others, for inspiration and justification.
Problems arise, however, when tools developed in the service of one epistemology,
say cognitive information processing, are integrated within instructional
systems designed to promote learning goals inconsistent with it. When
concepts, strategies, and tools are abstracted from the theoretical viewpoint
that spawned them, they are too often stripped of meaning and utility. In this
chapter, we embed our discussion in learner-centered, constructivist, and
sociocultural perspectives on collaborative technology, with a bias toward
the third. The principles of these perspectives, in fact, provide the theoretical
rationale for much of the research and ideas presented in this book.