The new stage 6 science syllabuses draw on constructivism, a pedagogy based on educational research relating to teaching and learning. Teachers will need to employ appropriate strategies and use new resources to deliver the material effectively. UniServe Science has identified a number of useful alternate teaching strategies and associated resources. The following examples illustrate the applic...

This paper discusses a qualitative participatory action research study, which examined the nature of the cohort learning experience in an online master’s program, from both faculty and student perspectives. After describing this online master’s program in adult education designed from a social constructivist theoretical frame, this paper discusses two primary areas of findings related to cohort...

This paper reviews the body of research that addresses `the social shaping of technology' (SST) (MacKenzie & Wajcman 1985). In contrast to traditional approaches which only addressed the outcomes or 'impacts' of technological change, this work examines the content of technology and the particular processes involved in innovation. We highlight the growth of socio-economic research falling within...

Constructivism has emerged in recent years as a dominant paradigm in education and has had a major intellectual impact on the development of pedagogy, especially in mathematics and science. Rooted in the cognitive developmental theory of Piaget and in the sociocultural theory of Vygotsky, constructivist notions have had an impact on the development and application of technologically enhanced mi...

As a growing number of faculty use constructivist and constructionist approaches to teaching in SL, little research exists on the many ethical considerations and legal implications that affect course development. Following the experiences of the instructor and five students, their 12-week journey is documented through interviews, journals, blogs, weekly course activities, SL class dialogs, and ...

Constructivism is a learning theory that states that people learn by actively constructing their own knowledge, based on prior knowledge. A significant number of ICT-based constructivist learning systems have been proposed in recent years. According to our analysis, those systems exhibit only a few constructivist principles, and a critical problem related to the design and use of this kind of s...

The Network Workbench (NW) is a software environment for academic investigation of network protocol concepts. The structure and operation of NW has been described in detail elsewhere. This paper addresses the instructional design of NW with the intention of establishing that it represents`natural constructivism' in that it is strongly aligned with the constructivist approach. We begin with syno...

Constructivism is the idea that we construct our own world rather than it being determined by an outside reality. Its most consistent form, Radical Constructivism (RC), claims that we cannot transcend our experiences. Thus it doesn’t make sense to say that our constructions gradually approach the structure of an external reality. The mind is necessarily an epistemological solipsist, in contrast...