Constructivism Pt.3: The principles of constructivism

Bruner’s 1966 text Toward a Theory of Instruction described the key principles of constructivism (p.225):

Table 1 Principles of constructivism

Principle		Definition
Readiness		Instruction must be concerned with the experiences and contexts that make the student willing and able to learn
Spiral organisation	Structure.	The content must be structured so that it can be grasped by the learner.
	Sequence.	Material must be presented in the most effective sequences.
Generation		“Going beyond the information given” - Instruction should be designed to facilitate extrapolation and or fill in the gaps

Extending from these basic constructivist principles as well as from the work of other key figures in the constructivist school, Driscoll (1994) outlines five conditions for learning (p.382-3). Very much like the multiple approaches and interpretations that exist in constructivism, a number of conditions must be met for the approach to be implemented. It is useful to elaborate briefly on these conditions, as they are relevant to the learning approach discussed in the rest of this part of the blog.

1. Providing complex learning environments that incorporate authentic activity. Constructivists argue that learners should learn to solve the types of complex problem they will face in real life. Learning how to do this is difficult unless complex and authentic learning environments are available to the learners.
2. Providing for social negotiation as an integral part of learning. Bruner (1986) explains that learning is a cultural interchange between group members. Collaboration creates an opportunity for learners to share their understandings with others and to have others do the same with them. This provides multiple perspectives to each learner, and this negotiation process between peers should lead to enhanced understanding.
3. Support multiple perspectives and the use of multiple modes of representation. Because learning skills, behaviours and knowledge can be diverse and complex, constructivists believe that to achieve complete understanding the learner must examine the material from multiple perspectives. If they are not supported in this endeavour, the learner will achieve only a partial understanding of the material. Multiple modes of representation allow the learner to view the same content through different sensory modes.
4. Nurture reflexivity. Duffy and Cunningham (1996) characterise reflexivity as “the ability of students to be aware of their own role in the knowledge construction process.” (p.172). It could also be described as the learner taking ownership of their own thinking and learning processes. Driscoll (1994) assets that reflexivity and by extension critical thinking are central attributes in the constructivist methodology, as it enables learners to understand how and why cognition creates meaning. This enables learners to attain goals such as reasoning, understanding multiple perspectives, and expressing and defending their own beliefs.
5. The last condition Driscoll describes is to “emphasise student-centred instruction.” Bruner (1966) calls this “discovery learning”. By obtaining knowledge by themselves, learners select and transform information, construct knowledge, and make decisions in the context of a cognitive structure that provides meaning and organisation to experiences and allows the individual to “go beyond the information given”. Students are actively engaged in determining what and how they will study or gain understanding.

These principles and conditions position the constructivist approach to learning as an appropriate orientation for learning sans frontiers; using technologies like the Internet, websites and virtual learning environments, applying collaborative learning, problem-based learning and goal-based mechanisms, making Open Source Software and Course- and Content Management Systems accessible to learners, and using e-learning applications like online conferencing and collaboration tools could be the foundation for these multiple constructivist conditions for learning. (Duffy & Jonassen 1992, Driscoll 1994; Schank 1994)

These characteristics provide an appropriate framework for knowledge workers to learn (and for the learning intervention), given that their ongoing development is based in the context of already-established cognitive schemata (from the learners’ perspective), the knowledge and skills are applied to solve real-world problems, and their expertise (behaviours) are typically used in collaboration with their peers to enhance the performance of organisations.

References

Bruner, J. S. (1966) Toward a Theory of Instruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. S. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Driscoll, M. P. (1994). Psychology of learning for instruction. Boston, MA. Allyn & Bacon.

Duffy, T. M. & Cunningham, D. J. (1996) Constructivism: Implications for the design and delivery of instruction. IN: Jonassen D. H. (Ed) Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology (pp.170- 198). New York: Simon & Shuster Macmillan.

Schank, R. (1994) Active Learning Through Multimedia, IEEE Multimedia, 1(1), pp.69-78.

Merry to Christmas to all...

Nollaig Shona daoibh go léir agus Athbhliain faoi shéan is faoi mhaise daoibh, agus go mba seacht fearr sinn go léir ag an am seo ar an bhliain seo chugainn!

[A peaceful Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year to you, and may we all be seven times better off at this time next year!]

Constructivism Pt.2: The Cognitive Revolution

Jerome Bruner was an advocate of the so-called ‘Cognitive Revolution,’ an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences – “an interdisciplinary study of the cognitive processes underlying the acquisition and use of knowledge” (“Cognitive Science”, 2007). Following on from the work of Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget, he developed a number of cognitive & constructivist psychological approaches “not to ‘reform’ behaviourism, but to replace it” (1990, p.3). Bruner demonstrated that a learner’s actions are less constrained by immediate environmental stimuli, and that cognitive processes mediate the relationship between stimulus and response. He asserted that learning could occur without an observable manifest behaviour and that it was possible to undertake a task or acquire knowledge ‘mentally’ rather than through a purely positivist or behaviourist methodologies phenomenology. By emphasising the importance of teaching as a means of enhancing cognitive development, Bruner saw the role of the instructor as one who mediates the information to be learned, delivering it in a format appropriate to the learner's current state of understanding. The instructor was responsible for encouraging learners to discover principles by themselves, and both learners and instructors should engage in an active dialogue: “practice in discovering for oneself teaches one to acquire information in a way that makes that information more readily viable in problem solving” (Bruner, 1961, p.26). To enhance this process he maintained that learning and curricula should be organised in a learning spiral, where content is structured and distributed in a format that is appropriate for the learner’s current level of knowledge. The content must also be sequenced in such a fashion that the learner is appropriately challenged and stimulated by the content so that the information being mediated by the instructor continually builds upon what the learner has already assimilated (see Figure 1).




Figure 1. Bruner's Learning Spiral (adapted from Harvard Project Zero)

References:

Bruner, J. S. (1961). The act of discovery. Harvard Educational Review 31(1): 21–32

Bruner, J. S. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press

Cognitive Science. (2007). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopaedia. [Internet] Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Science [Accessed 1st May 2007]

Constructivism Pt.1

In her comprehensive reference text Psychology of learning for instruction, Marcy Driscoll describes constructivism as having

…multiple roots in psychology and philosophy, among which are the cognitive and developmental perspectives of Piaget, the interactional and cultural emphases of Vygotsky and Bruner, the contextual nature of learning, the active learning of Dewey, the epistemological discussions of von Glasersfeld and the paradigm and scientific revolutions of Thomas Kuhn.

(1994, p.375)

Constructivism is an approach to learning based on the premise that cognition, or learning, is the result of mental construction: it is an active process in which learners construct new ideas, skills and behaviours based upon their prior and current knowledge, behaviour and skill assets. The learner transforms information, constructs knowledge, and makes decisions based upon extant cognitive structures or mental models. These cognitive structures - what Roger Schank calls “scripts” in his Dynamic Memory Model (1982) - provide meaning and organisation to experiences and allow the individual to go “beyond the information given” (Bruner, 1974). Even though there are numerous interpretations of constructivism, several central concepts inhabit all constructivist theories. Cunningham and Duffy (1996) identified two major similarities that are the foundation of all constructivist thought. They are that “learning is an active process of constructing rather than acquiring knowledge” and “instruction is a process of supporting that construction rather that communicating knowledge” (1996, p.172).

References:

Bruner, J. S. (1974) Going Beyond the Information Given. New York: Norton.

Cunningham, D. J. & Duffy, T. M. (1996) Constructivism: Implications for the design and delivery of instruction. IN: Jonassen. D. H. (Ed.), Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology (pp. 170- 198). New York: Simon & Shuster Macmillan.

Driscoll, M. P. (1994). Psychology of learning for instruction. Boston, MA. Allyn & Bacon.

Schank, R. (1982) Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Reminding and Learning in Computers and People. Cambridge University Press.

Learning Theory: Back to school for Christmas

As I've got some holiday time at my disposal over Christmastime , I've decided to refresh my knowledge on Learning Theory in the context of how I use the various learning models and methodologies. So that means that there will be a large amount of information concerning Cognitivism and its offshoots, and much less about the Behaviourist track . So, let's start at the beginning…

What is learning?

In the field of organisational development, the terms ‘training’ and ‘learning’ are often used interchangeably: both broadly refer to the acquisition of new or enhanced knowledge, skills, attitudes or behaviour through the medium of instruction whether delivered by a source of information such as a text or a computer application, a teacher, or a mentor. The key difference between the two terms is in the reflexive nature of learning and the integration of the knowledge, skill, attitude or behaviour into the individual’s cognitive constructs - a process Lev Vygotsky called “internalisation” and elegantly described as “an internal reconstruction of an external operation (1978, p.56).

References

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in society. Edited by Cole, M. John-Steiner, V. Scribner, Souberman, E. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press

Best wishes Terry Pratchett

Not a learning entry in the true sense of the word, other than I was deeply saddened to read today that the author Terry Pratchett is suffering from early-onset Alzheimers.
Best wishes Terry, you aten't dead yet...

Elliott Masie: The Voice of the Learner Survey

Just received an e-mail from The Masie Center about a new initiative to be completed by thousands of employees around the world, gathering information about Learner Preferences for Learning Methods.

If you're interested in taking part, click here:

Voice of the Learner Survey
http://www.masieweb.com/learners

The results of this survey will be distributed without charge and available within several weeks on The MASIE Center website.

What ever happened to Kevin Kruse?

Where is Kevin Kruse these days?
Just this morning I was searching for some info on managing e-learning implementations and one of the results returned was a document authored by the E-Learning Guru entitled Technology-Based Training: The Art and Science of Design, Development, and Delivery. It started me thinking about the role he has played in my (and I dare say many others) development as an e-learning professional.
As far back as 1998, when I first started working for an Irish e-learning start-up called Prometheus, right through to about 2006, Kevin's E-Learning Guru website was required reading if you wanted to keep up with the latest and greatest innovations, processes, developments, and technologies used in the e-learning industry.
So anyway, I'm there reading the PDF, and I decide to drop over to to K's website to see what's new, only to find that the most recent post is dated December 16th 2006, and that his e-learning news section is currently not available. One search on the Web later, the most recent dialogue I could find with Kevin was an interview on Kineo's website.
Where are you Kevin?
Get back in touch; we miss you!

It's Employee Learning Week at the ASTD...

...find out more here:

Rapid Elearning: Strategies to get SMEs up to speed on e-learning authoring tools

I had a fantastic time discussing the benefits (and otherise) of Rapid E-Learning with the National College of Ireland's Higher Diploma in Computing & Education students last week. I'll get back to the lecture proper in another post; today I want to talk about the Lab we carried out in the second part of the lecture.
One of the key aspects of developing content using a rapid e-learning apporach is for learning professionals to manage the disintermediation of the producer role to the SME.

What is disintermediation? Ted Cocheau defines it in his seminal article Rapid E-Learning: Disintemdiate or Die:

Wikipedia has the following definition: “In economics, disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain: cutting out the middle man” (schitt aus dem Zwischenhandler). Shopping on the Internet is a great example—rather than driving to a store (the middleman) and paying the additional profit to the merchant, you can now purchase goods online directly from the producer.

What does that mean for training and learning? In the learning process, the subject matter expert (SME) is the source of the knowledge—the producer. Instructional designers are the middlemen who extract that knowledge from the SME, develop it into courseware, and finally make it available to the learner—the consumer. Disintermediation enables SMEs to make their valuable knowledge more directly available to learners by eliminating the intermediate designers and the courseware development process. It reduces the time and cost significantly, is much more scalable to deal with the tidal wave of new knowledge (by eliminating the courseware bottleneck), and is more authentic (coming directly from the source). This is the only answer in a world where speed is king, knowledge is exploding, and budgets are not keeping pace.

So the challenge for my lecture last week was: "How do I give rookie learning specialists a taste of the rapid e-learning approach?" I had to take into account such elements as their relative lack of experience in the e-learning industry, that they had only 9 weeks experience using multimedia apps like Flash and Dreamweaver, a similar introduction-level set of skills using LMSs, and were just beginning to come to grips with the core concepts of learning theory, starting as they were right at the beginning with behaviourism and cognitivism, and moving forward from there into constructivism, applied, active, holistic and more modern interpretations about how humans learn.

The first section of the lecture was a presentation; this component provided context for the students. To reinforce this, I set a practial exercise using the rapid e-learning approach - in essence, they would become the SMEs, using the authoring tool I chose (Adobe Captivate 3):

The Task

• Create a learning object using Captivate
• Objective: develop a demonstration to instruct a learner how to format and print a document in Microsoft Word
• Guidelines:
• Your demo must contain the following elements
• Onscreen text
• Animation
• Interactivity
• Transport controls and progress bar
• Format
• The published file must be a Shockwave Flash (SWF) file
• SWF must play back in a browser such as IE or Mozilla

Task Breakdown

• Capture your content
• Launch MS Word (your target application) and enter some text in a Word doc. Save the file.
• Launch Captivate
• Select Software Simulation >> Application >> OK
• Select your Word doc from the drop-down list
• Set record mode to demonstration
• Click on Record
• Record your demo
• Change the layout from Portrait to Landscape
• Change the paper size from A4 to US Letter
• Preview and “print” the document
• When you’re done, end and save your Captivate file

Edit Your Content

• In Captivate, open your recording
• Click on the Edit tab
• Your demo is displayed
• Select the first slide
• Select Insert >> Blank Slide
• A new slide will appear in position #2
• Drag and drop it above the first slide
• Select Insert >> Text Caption
• Enter some introduction text outlining the objectives of the lesson and position the text on the page
• Review your captured demo, editing out any extraneous slides
• Add a conclusion slide at the end of the demo
• Save your demonstration

Tip: You can preview your demo at any time by selecting File >> Preview >> [option] from the list

Publishing your content

• Select Project >> Resize Project
• In the Size panel chose Width: 1024 Height: 768
• In the If New Size is Smaller pane, select the Rescale radio button and check the checkbox
• Click on Finish and click on OK on the warning dialog
• Click on File >> Publish
• Select Flash (SWF) as the output option
• Give your project a name and save location
• Check Export HTML and Flash 8 as the output options
• Review the information in the Project Information pane
• Choose a look and feel for the demo
• Click on the Preferences button
• Choose options from the tabs
• When done, click on Publish

Some Things To Try Yourself

• Add some audio to your demo
• Try adding narration to your demo
• Try adding sound effects to give learners feedback
• Questions
• Add in a progress test half-way through the demo
• Add a lesson test at the end of the demo
• Interactivity
• Add in Back and Next buttons
• Create branching – what happens is a learner give a wrong answer to a test question?
• Publish Options
• Try generating a lesson plan
• Try creating a CD-based version of your demo

The purpose of this approach is to introduce new tools and ways of working to SMEs who may feel initially overwhelmed at the thought of transferring their skills and knowledge (in a format suitable for e-learning). By introducing a rapid e-learning approach through an application they are familiar with (in this case MS Word), as well as a task they are comfortable carrying out (i.e. printing a document), the SME is introduced to the e-learning authoring tool in a manageable fashion. You can begin to orient them to use the tool in a context that does not have the cognitive load of carrying out a more complex task, such as they will probably have to undertake when creating content "for real."