I have a personal interest in the benefits of student multimedia authoring (e.g., web design, blogging, video production). The idea is that students author products associated with their content area study and I assume they benefit from such activity. To me, this idea is not a huge leap of faith. Educators have been promoting and researchers have been evaluating writing to learn and writing across the curriculum for years. Large scale multimedia projects might be viewed as an alternative to a term paper. Smaller scale projects are more the equivalent of other less utilized writing to learn tasks.
Our interest in student authoring is not unique – many interested in K-12 technology applications have encouraged multimedia projects. Often, this approach has been identified as constructivist. The difficulty I have with this label is that it appears to mean different things to different people. When I think of a learning theory, I assume the theory is an effort to describe how learning happens. To me, the idea that a theory is about a technique is misguided. It seems possible that different technqiues might result in better or poorer learning, but inappropriate to label some technigues as constructivist and some not. So I see theories as constructivist (i.e., learning requires the integration of what is known with new experiences) or not, but not experiences. My professional training involved a focus on information processing theory – I understand info processing theory as an attempt to explain some of the details of constructivism (which to me lacks attention to the specifics of learning).
Anyway, my wife sent me a reference to a blog entry summarizing an Educational Psychologist article (Kirschner, Sweller, Clark – 2006) critical of constructivism, discovery learning, experiential learning, etc. A draft of the Kirschner, et al. article can be found using a link from the blog (the journal publication date listed on the draft is incorrect and should be 41(2) – I suppose the journal got a little behind). The article argues that learners inexperienced in an area of study do poorly when allowed too much freedom in their approach to learning (hence the references to some of the very early critics of discovery learniong – e.g., Ausubel). Perhaps recognition of this reality is why some constructivists are careful to recognize the need for scaffolding. This is a good analysis and understanding such issues is important.Some of these topics remind me of political controversies – i.e., your approach is boring and meaningless, students can’t learn about topics for which they have no background.Comments on the Kirschner, et al paper seem to be rippling through the educational blogs. The day after the original version of this post the Connectivism blog commented on the same article. If the distinction between constructionism and constructivism is of interest to you the connectivism post has much more detail (too many isms for me to explain).
What I like about Kirschner’s approach is the connection (pardon my use of this term) with the empirical literature. Those taking a contrasting position seems to rely on philosophy, anecdote, and personal reflection. The Kirschner article, Mayer’s Ed Psychologist article, and a historical series of similar complaints (e.g., Ausubel) seem to beg for engagement in a “scientific” debate. If no data exists to counter their concerns, perhaps the first step would be admit this problem and then at least outline the types of demonstrations and the data types that could be used to argue for a different position.
