Searching for Learner-Centered, Constructivist, and Sociocultural Components of Collaborative Educational Learning Tools

As Bednar, Cunningham, Duffy, and Perry (1995) argued, instructional nstrategies and tools must be based on some theory of learning and cognition. nOf course, crafting well-articulated views that clearly answer the major epistemological questions of human learning has exercised psychologists and neducators for centuries. What is a mind? What does it mean to know something? How is our knowledge represented and manifested? Many educators nprefer an eclectic approach, selecting “principles and techniques from the nmany theoretical perspectives in much the same way we might select international dishes from a smorgasbord, choosing those we like best and ending nup with a meal which represents no nationality exclusively and a design ntechnology based on no single theoretical base” (Bednar et ai., 1995, p. 100). nIt is certainly the case that research within collaborative educational learning ntools has drawn upon behavioral, cognitive information processing, humanistic, and sociocultural theory, among others, for inspiration and justification. nProblems arise, however, when tools developed in the service of one epistemology, say cognitive information processing, are integrated within instructional systems designed to promote learning goals inconsistent with it. When nconcepts, strategies, and tools are abstracted from the theoretical viewpoint nthat spawned them, they are too often stripped of meaning and utility. In nthis chapter, we embed our discussion in learner-centered, constructivist, and nsociocultural perspectives on collaborative technology, with a bias toward nthe third. Th~ principles of these perspectives, in fact, provide the theoretical nrationale for much of the research and ideas presented in this book.