Design for Supporting Dialectical Constructivist Learning Activities

Dialectical constructivism considers that the source of knowledge comes from constant and complex interactions between the evolving individual and the developing environment (Moshman, 1982). Dialectical constructivism informs dialectical learning pedagogy, where students constantly interact with each other in developing and refining arguments over an issue from multiple perspectives. With the advancement of the Internet, it is possible to design dialectical learning activities with technologies that can be seamlessly integrated into curriculum and facilitate learning. In this paper, we designed a prototype of a dialectical learning system, CriticalThinker, that engages students with dialectical constructivist activities, with technology affordances such as anchoring the group discussion on top of screen to serve as a reference for following discussions, displaying multiple arguments in one screen, and visualizing relationships among the arguments as a structured way for students to argue with each other. We also presented the application scenarios of the system in order to concretize the features and the affordances of CriticalThinker.