[Grassroots-l] Concise explanation of Constructionism from the Learning Team

[Kevin Cole]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 14:15, Seth Woodworth <seth at laptop.org> wrote:
> Inspired by Sameer's recent conversations with a pair of Montessori
> Kindergarden teachers.  I went to talk to Cynthia Solomon of the OLPC
> Learning team.  We got to talking about the theory of Activities and a few
> other topics.  Eventually she showed me this snippit from the Media Lab's
> Future of Learning Group:
>
> Constructionism
>
> We are developing "Constructionism" as a theory of learning and education.
> Constructionism is based on two different senses of "construction." It is
> grounded in the idea that people learn by actively constructing new
> knowledge, rather than having information "poured" into their heads.
> Moreover, constructionism asserts that people learn with particular
> effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful
> artifacts (such as computer programs, animations, or robots).
>
> http://learning.media.mit.edu/projects.html
>
> I thought that this explination was concise and really interesting.  I would
> love to explain this to people who want to desige activities, just to give
> them a little snapshot of the concept.  Does anyone have a problem with this
> deffinition? Does anyone have an improvement?

Me likey!  I'm not in the classroom, nor well-versed in academic
jargon, but that captures the spirit of what I gleaned from my first
encounter with the word here on these lists.  It also syncs well with
how I think I came to love working with computers in educational
settings.  That, and as you've mentioned: concise.
-- 
". ! 1 |" -- Rene Magritte's computer