Chapter 11:Re-situating Constructionism
John W. Maxwell · 2006
Over the past few decades, much has been written and said about the use of computers in education. But despite the incredible advances in computing power and software sophistication in that time, the application and integration of technology in educational settings have remained confused and troublesome for many educators. For all the energy expended in creating and marketing computing technologies, the ways in which educators have used technology in teaching and learning have developed little over the past 20 years. While there are certainly more computers in classrooms today than ever before, the “big ideas” that shape how we interpret and use these technologies have been few and far between. One of these “big ideas” is the school of thought called constructionism, which emerged from the Epistemology and Learning Group at the MIT Media Lab in the 1980s. Constructionist theorists hold that learning happens best when children are engaged in creating personally meaningful objects and sharing them with their peers. Probably, its most famous manifestation has been the Media Lab’s work with children and the Logo programming language. The computer was seen as an expressive tool that allowed children to manipulate objects (the Logo “turtle” is the classic example) in a computer “microworld”, and through exploration and reflection to come to more formal understandings of relationships, say, in geometry. The constructionist researchers saw educational technology in the sense of “objects to think with” that facilitate novel ways of thinking. Since the Logo research of the 1980s, the world of computers and high technology has seen enormous—if not revolutionary—change. The personal computer has become an integral part of how most people communicate, work, write, learn, and play. The advent of global networks and ubiquitous connectivity has caused us to consider computing technology as a mass medium alongside television and the press. The emergence of the “information economy” and e-commerce spawned a new period of economic growth—one that has looked at times like a gold rush. But this incredible social transformation brings with it much confusion about what’s really going on, where things are really heading, and what will really be important over the long run. A casualty of this confusion has been, I believe, the field of educational technology,