Contructivism and Online Education, Doolittle, 1999

Constructivism argues that learners construct their own knowledge and meaning from experiences. While reality exists it can only be known through the filter of someone’s experience, meaning that everyone sees reality differently.

Von Glaserfield (1984, 1990) put forward three points:

1. Knowledge is not passively accumulated, but the result of cognitizing.


2. Cognition’s function is to make behaviour more viable in an environment.


3. Cognition tries to make sense of ones own experiences, and is not necessarily a true representation of reality.

Doolittle adds:

1. Knowing has biological construction and social based interactions.

Doolittle identifies 3 types of constructivism, which accept various combinations of these 4 points:

1. Cognitive constructivism – Focuses on information processing (1 and 2), and sees knowledge as an accurate interpretation of reality. This has led to developments in understanding how the mind works. [This pedagogy could be used for subjects where “accurate mental constructions of reality” are important to build?]


2. Radical constructivism – This argues that we make mistakes in constructing understanding and sensing the world around us. Therefore we cannot know reality, and it is constructed through both our experience and social interactions. This adds considerations about our understanding of meaning to cognitive constructivism. [This could be use in subjects or areas of teaching in subjects where we need to discuss meaning. It is looking at the construction of an experiential reality.]


3. Social constructivism – This gives the social side of developing knowledge and understanding a larger role in constructing an “agreed upon socially constructed reality”.

Finally he chooses 8 core design principles that will be valid whatever form of constructivism you choose.

1. Experience needs to be in real world environments.


2. Learning needs to involve social negotiation and mediation.


3. Content and skills must be relevant to the learner to build into existing knowledge.


4. If the learning facilitator can understand the learner’s prior knowledge and understanding, mistakes in understanding can be corrected better.


5. Assessment should be formative.


6. Metacognition: Students should be encouraged to be self-aware and be able to plan and evaluate their own learning.


7. Teacher is a guide not an instructor.


8. Multiple perspectives must be involved.

Relating some of these to my Camtasia teaching:

1. The vocal guidance should allow students to follow while they are doing rather than just watching. The instruction needs to be good enough that you guide them where to click verbally.


2. Social negotiation – this relates more to the eliteracy sections, and could involve the instructors sharing their own experience and thought processes.


3. Relevant – Existing knowledge… we are assuming that the students have all the skills in the earlier categories. If they are watching this they should have watched all the earlier videos or have those skills anyway.


4. Mistakes – These will have to be presumed related to mistakes in thinking and understanding of IT that we have come across previously.


5. Assessment – This will really be “can the students do this”. If not they will watch again, but we might need somewhere for students to give feedback and we might need to think hard about assessment and how we could make it formative? Perhaps the skills audit before and after will play a part?