# CSCL-intro week 1: Constructivism


It is very exciting to see the [CSCL-intro
course](http://bit.ly/cscl-intro) come to life!
[Monica](http://reganmian.net/monica/) and I have been imagining this
for many months, and been discussing and planning intensely for the last
few weeks. Suddenly, people are doing the readings, writing blog posts,
and engaging! Which means we have to do it too, because one of the basic
premises of this course was that we would participate in exactly the
same way as everyone else - after all, I'm not organizing this course
because I am an expert, and want to teach what I know, but because I
need to learn, and want a group to learn together with!

So during [the first
week](http://new.p2pu.org/en/groups/introduction-to-the-field-of-computer-supported-co/content/w1w2-intro-to-course-and-to-field/),
we intended to have a soft startup, with some background readings, and
more focus on getting to know each other, establishing the play rules,
etc. We proposed a few readings on constructivism, and Communities of
Practice:

Readings:

-   [Constructivism](http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Constructivism) on
  EduTechWiki (feel free to explore sublinks)
-   [Communities of
  Practice](http://www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm)
  on infed - the encyclopedia of informal learning

I began with constructivism, and quickly got sucked down the rabbit
hole... That's the dangerous thing about wikis after all, you start
reading, and there are a bunch of links you want to explore, and before
long, you are reading about [[Ernst von Glasersfeld]], [[radical
constructivism]], and much more.

**Relationship between epistemology and instructional approach**

One of the things that struck me when reading the initial [Edutech
page](http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Constructivism), was the
differentiation between constructivism as an epistemology - how can we
know, how can we learn, how does the brain process and store data, how
is knowledge represented internally with the learner - and the choice of
instructional approaches. I think today we often link the two
automatically and assume that if somebody is using a constructivist
approach, then their teaching will include group projects, expressive
writing, debates and the production of artefacts.

But the text states:

Constructivist learning theory does not necessarily imply that one must
follow a "constructivist" pedagogical strategy. In other words, most
researches firmly believe that knowledge is constructed, but some (e.g.
main stream instructional designers) do not adopt an instructional
design that is labelled "constructivist".

and indeed, there is no doubt that we can learn "constructively" from a
one-way stream of information. What I just did when researching this
topic was a great example - I read a bunch of different wiki pages and
articles, while taking notes for this blog post, and also adding
information to different pages on my own [[about this wiki|wiki]].

So, while reading, I am constantly processing the information, plotting
it in to different parts of my notes, or wiki, comparing it with other
things I've read, other experiences, etc. Although the wiki did not have
an instructional design, and certainly wasn't a collaborative learning
experience, I learnt a lot. (And now I am hoping to learn even more, by
sharing my ideas with others, and reading their ideas... And even the
existence of this group is a great motivator for me. But there is no
doubt that even without this, I could have learnt from these readings).

It's interesting that [Stephen Downes](http://downes.ca) is [very much
in favor of the lecture](http://www.downes.ca/presentation/272).
Obviously not as the "best" way of teaching, but as one way of many,
which can be efficient if used well.

**Granularity of collaboration/sharing**

I have done quite a bit of thinking about the "granularity" of
collaboration - for example the idea of maintaining a private wiki,
rather than contributing to a public one (I think both are very useful),
or the way we do in this course - spending significant amounts of time
on our own with texts and lectures, taking notes, thinking it through,
maybe even creating mindmaps and outlines - before we share our ideas
with the others in the course. An alternative to this would be to have a
shared environment where we do our brainstorming, and immediately share
our smallest thoughts. This is kind of what Knowledge Forum is all
about, which we will read about later in this course.

(And of course, scientists "knowledge build" at a very low granularity -
sharing the results of maybe years of research, experimentation,
reading, synthesizing, experimentation, etc. But of course, there is
hopefully much more high-granularity sharing within individual research
groups, with advisors, etc).

**Assessment**

Assessment is a topic that comes up very frequently when discussing
new ways of teaching and learning. I already wrote [one blog
post](http://reganmian.net/blog/2011/04/26/grading-evaluative-or-coercive/)
today about grading, although it was focused on a different topic.

According to the [web page on constructivism at
UMass](http://srri.umass.edu/topics/constructivism):

"Constructivism calls for the elimination of grades and standardized
testing. Instead, assessment becomes part of the learning process so
that students play a larger role in judging their own progress."

There isn't much justification given for this view, and I am not quite
sure why that follows automatically. We talked a fair bit about group
assessment, etc. I think my fundamental issue with it, and also the
concept of "group cognition" (which we will also discuss later in this
course), was the same thing
that [Martin](http://kaffeikampala.blogspot.com/2011/04/i-want-individual-accreditation.html)
echoes today: this group is only temporary, and in the end, a company is
going to decide to hire or not this specific person. And this specific
person will have to do a certain job.

An interesting counter-argument would be to say that when you hire
someone, you're also hiring their network. This has long been true in
lobbying and other contexts where personal networks are important, but
with the growth of PLNs, perhaps you are not only hiring one person in
isolation, but also the access that person has to knowledge and people
distributed over that person's social network?

(This still won't help a doctor who needs to make a split-second
decision in an emergency, but it's something to think about, which
hadn't occurred to me before just writing these lines, which says
something about the power of producing artefacts for learning, I guess
:))

More about Communities of Practice later this week.

Stian