Eric McCauley's List: E-Learning

• The stated philosophy of Moodle^[12] includes a constructivist and social constructionist approach to education, emphasizing that learners (and not just teachers) can contribute to the educational experience. Moodle supports an outcomes-oriented learning environment.^{[citation needed]}

• Constructivism is a theory of knowledge (epistemology)^[1] that argues that humans generate knowledge and meaning from an interaction between their experiences and their ideas.
• Constructivism is not a specific pedagogy, although it is often confused with constructionism, an educational theory developed by Seymour Papert, inspired by constructivist and experiential learning ideas of Jean Piaget.
• Today, constructivist theories are influential throughout much of the non-formal learning sector.

• Social constructivism views each learner as a unique individual with unique needs and backgrounds. The learner is also seen as complex and multidimensional. Social constructivism not only acknowledges the uniqueness and complexity of the learner, but actually encourages, utilizes and rewards it as an integral part of the learning process (Wertsch 1997).

   
• Whereas a teacher gives a didactic lecture that covers the subject matter, a facilitator helps the learner to get to his or her own understanding of the content
• According to the social constructivist approach, instructors have to adapt to the role of facilitators and not teachers (Bauersfeld, 1995).
• The emphasis thus turns away from the instructor and the content, and towards the learner (Gamoran, Secada, & Marrett, 1998). This dramatic change of role implies that a facilitator needs to display a totally different set of skills than a teacher (Brownstein 2001).
• A teacher tells, a facilitator asks; a teacher lectures from the front, a facilitator supports from the back; a teacher gives answers according to a set curriculum, a facilitator provides guidelines and creates the environment for the learner to arrive at his or her own conclusions; a teacher mostly gives a monologue, a facilitator is in continuous dialogue with the learners (Rhodes and Bellamy, 1999)
• Learning is an active, social process
• knowledge is first constructed in a social context and is then appropriated by individuals
• According to social constructivists, the process of sharing individual perspectives-called collaborative elaboration (Meter & Stevens, 2000)-results in learners constructing understanding together that wouldn't be possible alone (Greeno et al., 1996)
• Social constructivist scholars view learning as an active process where learners should learn to discover principles, concepts and facts for themselves, hence the importance of encouraging guesswork and intuitive thinking in learners (Brown et al.1989; Ackerman 1996).
• for the social constructivist, reality is not something that we can discover because it does not pre-exist prior to our social invention of it. Kukla (2000) argues that reality is constructed by our own activities and that people, together as members of a society, invent the properties of the world.
• environment
• Knowledge is thus a product of humans and is socially and culturally constructed (Ernest 1991; Prawat and Floden 1994).
• Vygotsky (1978) also highlighted the convergence of the social and practical elements in learning by saying that the most significant moment in the course of intellectual development occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge.
• Constructivist ideas have been used to inform adult education. Where pedagogy applies to the education of children, adults educators often speak instead of andragogy. Methods must take account of differences in learning, due to the fact that adults have many more experiences and previously existing neurological structures
• Several cognitive psychologists and educators have questioned the central claims of constructivism. It is argued that constructivist theories are misleading or contradict known findings.^{[8][9][10][11][3}
• In the neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development it is maintained that learning at any age depends upon the processing and representational resources available at this particular age. That is, it is maintained that if the requirements of the concept to be understood exceeds the available processing efficiency and working memory resources then the concept is by definition not learnable. Therefore, no matter how active a child is during learning, to learn the child must operate in a learning environment that meets the developmental and individual learning constraints that are characteristic for the child's age and this child's possible deviations from her age's norm. If this condition is not met, construction goes astray.^[13][14]
• Several educators have also questioned the effectiveness of this approach toward instructional design, especially as it applies to the development of instruction for novices ^[3](Mayer, 2004; Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark, 2006).
• little empirical evidence exists to support this statement given novice learners
• Sweller and his colleagues argue that novices do not possess the underlying mental models, or "schemas" necessary for "learning by doing" (e.g. Sweller, 1988).
• Mayer (2004) reviewed the literature and found that fifty years of empirical data do not support using the constructivist teaching technique of pure discovery; in those situations requiring discovery, he argues for the use of guided discovery instead.
• Instead Mayer proposes learners should be "cognitively active" during learning and that instructors use "guided practice."
• In contrast, Kirschner, et al. (2006)^[3] describe constructivist teaching methods as "unguided methods of instruction." T
• Kirschner et al.<^[3] group a number of learning theories together (Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based learning)and stated that highly scaffolded constructivist methods like problem-based learning and inquiry learning are ineffective. Kirschner et al.^[3] described several research studies that were favorable to problem-based learning given learners were provide some level of guidance and support.
• Evidence for learning by studying worked-examples, is known as the worked-example effect and has been found to be useful in many domains [e.g. music, chess, athletics (Atkinson, Derry, Renkl, & Wortham, 2000)^[16]; concept mapping (Hilbert & Renkl, 2007)^[17]; geometry (Tarmizi and Sweller, 1988)^[18]; physics, mathematics, or programming (Gerjets, Scheiter, and Catrambone, 2004)^[19]].
• The reasoning for this grouping is because each learning theory promotes the same constructivist teaching technique -- "learning by doing."
• While they argue "learning by doing" is useful for more knowledgeable learners, they argue this teaching technique is not useful for novices. Mayer states that it promotes behavioral activity too early in the learning process, when learners should be cognitively active (Mayer, 2004).^[20]

  • I think this is a key aspect in theological education.  When praxis or "learning by doing" this does not help. Novices need input and process the input before they can start having solid output that they can then learn from.
• ^ ^{a b c} Mayer, 2004 Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning? American Psychologist, 59(1), 14–19
• Mayer, R. (2004). "Should there be a three-strikes rule against pure discovery learning? The case for guided methods of instruction". American Psychologist 59 (1): 14–19. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.14. PMID 14736316.

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• The zone of proximal development (зона ближайшего развития), often abbreviated ZPD, is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help.
• Vygotsky and other educational professionals believed education's role was to give children experiences that were within their zones of proximal development, thereby encouraging and advancing their individual learning.^[2]
• The concept of the zone of proximal development was originally developed by Vygotsky to argue against the use of academic, knowledge-based tests as a means to gauge students' intelligence. Vygotsky argued that, rather than examining what a student knows to determine intelligence, it is better to examine his or her ability to solve problems independently and his or her ability to solve problems with an adult's help.^[3]

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• Adobe’s Live Media Encoder – Price: FREE
   website: http://www.adobe.com/products/flash-media-encoder.html
• It is slightly hampered by its limit of only 3 stream outputs
• The down side is you need to provide your own hardware and a typical laptop won’t be good enough to crunch the program.

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