Chapter 11: Re-situating Constructionism

JOHN W. MAXWELL
Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction, University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, BC, Canada

1. INTRODUCTION

Over the past few decades, much has been written and said about the use
of computers in education. But despite the incredible advances in computing
power and software sophistication in that time, the application and integration
of technology in educational settings have remained confused and troublesome
for many educators. For all the energy expended in creating and marketing
computing technologies, the ways in which educators have used technology
in teaching and learning have developed little over the past 20 years. While
there are certainly more computers in classrooms today than ever before, the
“big ideas” that shape how we interpret and use these technologies have been
few and far between.
One of these “big ideas” is the school of thought called constructionism,
which emerged from the Epistemology and Learning Group at the MIT Me-
dia Lab in the 1980s. Constructionist theorists hold that learning happens best
when children are engaged in creating personally meaningful objects and shar-
ing them with their peers. Probably, its most famous manifestation has been
the Media Lab’s work with children and the Logo programming language. The
computer was seen as an expressive tool that allowed children to manipulate
objects (the Logo “turtle” is the classic example) in a computer “microworld”,
and through exploration and reflection to come to more formal understand-
ings of relationships, say, in geometry. The constructionist researchers saw
educational technology in the sense of “objects to think with” that facilitate
novel ways of thinking.
Since the Logo research of the 1980s, the world of computers and high
technology has seen enormous—if not revolutionary—change. The personal
computer has become an integral part of how most people communicate, work,
write, learn, and play. The advent of global networks and ubiquitous connectiv-
ity has caused us to consider computing technology as a mass medium along-
side television and the press. The emergence of the “information economy”
and e-commerce spawned a new period of economic growth—one that has
looked at times like a gold rush. But this incredible social transformation
brings with it much confusion about what’s really going on, where things are
really heading, and what will really be important over the long run. A casu-
alty of this confusion has been, I believe, the field of educational technology,

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which is sorely fragmented and insecure today. This is not surprising, for how
can we hope to understand educational technology when our understanding
of technology itself is constantly being challenged?
I believe that it is worthwhile to re-examine constructionism as a guiding
philosophy in educational technology in the light of some significant recent
contributions in the fields of situated learning, media theory, and science
and technology studies. My aim here is to re-situate constructionism within
contemporary thought as a way of re-defining its relevance to the integration
of education and technology today.
This chapter is in three parts. In the first, I will examine the literature
on situated learning, situated cognition, and ecologies of knowledge. In the
second, I will explore some significant contributions to thinking about me-
dia, science, and technology. In the third and final part, I will focus on the
literature of constructionism itself, from the early 1980s to current works,
and attempt to trace some trends in the thinking around it. Ultimately, I will
attempt to elaborate an ecological approach to understanding educational
technology and educational media, an approach that brings together the three
areas covered in this chapter. By ecology, I mean a dynamic, evolving sys-
tem in which actor and environment are inseparable and mutually constitu-
tive, in which both people and cultural artifacts are considered, and in which
responsibilities and ethics are emergent and situated. In looking for these
qualities in approaches to knowledge, culture, learning, and technology, I be-
lieve, we can begin to develop a critical stance with respect to a confusing
world.

2. SITUATED LEARNING AND ECOLOGIES OF KNOWLEDGE

A good place to begin the examination of situated learning is an article by

Brown et al. (1996 [1989]) called “Situated Cognition and the Culture or
Learning”. This article, which largely introduced the concepts and vocabulary
of situated cognition to the educational community, expressed the authors’
concern with the limits to which “conceptual knowledge can be abstracted
from the situations in which it is situated and learned” (Brown et al., 1996:
19)—as is common practice in classrooms. Building upon the experiential
emphasis of pragmatist thinkers like John Dewey and on the social contexts
of learning of Russian activity theorists like Vygotsky and Leontiev, Brown
and his colleagues proposed the notion of “cognitive apprenticeship”. In a
cognitive apprenticeship model, knowledge and learning are seen as situated
in practice

The activity in which knowledge is developed and deployed, it is now

argued, is not separable from or ancillary to learning and cognition. Not
is it neutral. Rather, it is an integral part of what is learned. Situations

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