Educational technology is an instantiation of technical rationality. Technical rationality depends on an objectivist epistemology and a representational model of mind. Currently, a growing number of practitioners in the field of educational technology consider themselves constructivists. Because their epistemological position conflicts with that of technical rationality, these practitioners must currently find a warrant for their practice outside the field. However, a warrant for a strong form of constructivism (enactive constructivism) can be located in recent developments in systems theory, one of the foundational pillars of educational technology. These developments have the potential to provide practitioners a philosophical mooring within the field itself. One of these developments, autonomous systems theory, with its rejection of the representational model of mind, is described, and implications of its application to educational technology are discussed.

Constructivist educational principles suggest that educational environments should provide learners with personal control, authentic learning contexts, and diverse personal interactions including collaboration. How can such constructivist values be applied to mass Higher Education? Traditional methods cannot achieve it with large student numbers but computer‐based media are scaleable and may support constructivist learning. A new course for non‐science undergraduates provided an opportunity for a constructivist design using the World Wide Web, email, and video. The design of the course, its implementation and evaluation are described. Authentic assessment was critical. Web forms and e‐mail supported some necessary personal interactions, but collaborative work was problematical.

Excerpt: The label “constructivism” is ubiquitous and sometimes insidious and certainly means different things to dissimilar people. To explain why I am not a constructivist, we must start by attempting to clarify the term and analyze its scope. Constructivism is a very broad field: in the educational sector alone (not including the philosophical nor the social areas) there are as many as 25 different varieties. As one constructivist has remarked, “…the term ‘constructivism’ appears to be fashionable, mostly used loosely with no clear definition of the term, and is used without clear links to an epistemological base” (Featherston, 1997). Michael Matthews says that while there are “…countless thousands of constructivist articles, it is rare to find ones with fully worked out epistemology, learning theory, educational theory, or ethical and political positions” (Matthews, 2000).

Constructivist learning theory predicts that knowledge encoded from data by learners themselves will be more flexible, transferable, and useful than knowledge encoded for them by experts and transmitted to them by an instructor or other delivery agent. If this prediction is correct, then learners should be modeled as scientists and use the reasoning and technologies of scientists to construct their own knowledge. However, it cannot be taken for granted that the prediction is correct, or correct in every knowledge domain. The present study attempts to establish conditions in which the prediction can be operationalized and tested. It reports on the adaptation of constructivist principles to instructional design in a particular domain, second language vocabulary acquisition. Students learning English for academic purposes in the Sultanate of Oman followed one of two approaches to vocabulary expansion, learning pre-encoded dictionary definitions of words, or constructing definitions for themselves using an adapted version of the computational tools of lexicographers. After 12 weeks, both groups were equal in definitional knowledge of target words, but lexicography group students were more able to transfer their word knowledge to novel contexts.

Examines the history, characteristics, and value of designed instruction that is grounded in behaviorist, cognitive science, and constructivist theory. Changes that have allowed developmental phases of instructional design are considered, including instructional design methodology, physical technology, and programing mechanisms used to develop instructional software.

Key words: behaviorism, instructional design, constructivism, conceptual frameworks, computer software, cognitive models, machine learning, computer based instruction, cognitivism, learning modules.

What follows is my attempt to explore some of the issues that emerge out of the constructivist perspective related to the issue of assessment. I have chosen the form of a “Galilean Dialogue” modeled after Galileo’s famous “Two Major Systems of the World” [see Jauch, 1973, for a more recent incarnation of this format]. The topic of Galileo ‘s dialogue was the comparison of the Ptolemaic and Copernican views of the universe. To some, a discussion of objectivist and constructivist views of assessment may seem trivial in comparison, but I would disagree. The issues raised here go to the heart of our world view, to the core of what we believe It means to be human. I have retained the names of the original participants (Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio), although their role in the dialogue is transformed to accommodate the issue at hand.

There is no question that the major principles of instructional design have been derived from Skinnerian psychology and Gagne ‘s conditions of learning. These theories have been integrated, along with other principles, into systematic models for designing instruction. Instructional designers are now being challenged by constructivists to reconsider the theories they use in their design work. That challenge is well represented in the papers by Perkins, Bransford, Cunningham, and Spiro that appear in this issue of Educational Technology. The purpose of this paper is to review the work of each of these authors from the point-of-view of an instructional designer and to explore several general reactions that emerge from a review of all of the papers.

Excerpt: Constructivism provides an alternative epistemologica! base to the objectivist tradition. Constructivism, like objectivism, holds that there is a real world that we experience. However, the argument is that meaning is imposed on the world by us, rather than existing in the world independently of us. There are many ways to structure the world and there are many meanings or perspectives for any event or concept. Thus, there is not a correct meaning that we are striving for.