One of the chapters that was most interesting to me in Weller’s 25 Years of Ed Tech is the focus of chapter 4 on constructivism. Weller looks at the integration of constructivism into the education technology realm that he says started in 1997. I do find it surprising that this theory, which actually has its inception in the 1950s has its own chapter here and that it is related to this time period and why.
I think about what 1997 was like and how I was living in northern, rural Canada. Internet was available but slow and sometimes almost non-existent. I had an email address for the first time in 1995 and I could log onto it if I sat in the library for a long time trying to get the modem to connect. I remember printing every email out which makes me laugh now. Weller says that at this time educators were seeking pedagogical approaches as web-based learning expanded our possibilities and the low bandwidth pushed us away from transmission approaches and towards constructivist approaches including resource based, problem based and communities of practice.
Right now constructivism seems to make a lot of sense in web based learning because we are in an era of choices in terms of technological tools and more often than not high bandwidth. If we are really engaging in constructivism, which is where “learners construct their own knowledge, based on their experience and relationship with concepts, often through some form of social interaction” (Weller, 2020) student have many choices available to them in web based learning but it’s not really what we do. We create pathways through learning management systems, learning outcomes and lesson plans and guide students through their learning, and as Jesse Stommel suggests in the Between the Chapter podcast (2020) perhaps we are being too prescriptive still with these tools. We say we believe in the power of constructivism but we don’t really give the space for it even with increased bandwidth. Even with our web based tools we cannot quite get to a place of true constructivist approaches. This was clear in how we responded to online teaching during the pandemic.
Even though we were starting to look at constructivism as a sound and exciting pedagogy with web based learning in 1997, based on looking at the pandemic teaching practices of my colleagues and myself we are still not all in. We seem to only be ankle deep. Possibly because constructivism requires giving up some control to students or perhaps the nature of assessment does not really match constructivist approaches or maybe we need more time to consider how this works well and be learners ourselves in integrated web based constructivist approaches. The pandemic revealed many instructors resorted to transmission approaches that we used pre-1997, that we shifted away from at one time due partially to low bandwidth and seeking learning that matched the web based spaces that were available but now we have shifted back to pre-1997 methods even with our increased band width and technology tools.
Weller, M. (2020). 25 Years of ed tech. AU Press.