For millennia people have wondered what makes the living different from the non-living. Beginning in the mid-1980s, artificial life has studied living systems using a synthetic approach: build life in order to understand it better, be it by means of software, hardware, or wetware. This review provides a summary of the advances that led to the development of artificial life, its current research topics, and open problems and opportunities. We classify artificial life research into 14 themes: origins of life, autonomy, self-organization, adaptation (including evolution, development, and learning), ecology, artificial societies, behavior, computational biology, artificial chemistries, information, living technology, art, and philosophy. Being interdisciplinary, artificial life seems to be losing its boundaries and merging with other fields. Relevance: Artificial life has contributed to philosophy of biology and of cognitive science, thus making it an important field related to constructivism.

The authors point out the difference between the theory of constructivism and its practical application, and they argue that the consequences of implementing constructivism in the classroom will be considerably more challenging than might be anticipated from the simple slogans that advocates repeat.

Over the past decades many teaching strategies have been proposed by various educators to improve education of all students including students with special needs. No single one of these proposed teaching strategies meets the needs of all students. The new Every Student Succeeds Act, successor to No Child Left behind Law, which transfers oversight from federal level back to states, could be a benefactor for constructivism and special education. Educators are also optimistic that the new Every Student Succeeds Act will be better for vulnerable students in special education because it will introduce more flexibility in how individual states carry out evaluation of students and teachers. In addition, it will provide more flexibility on testing and adapt the curriculum to student’s needs. It would further reduce time and energy for students preparing for standardized tests or statewide exams. It will also end “Adequate Yearly Progress” – a measure that required schools to show test score gains. Constructivist teaching philosophy is all about accepting student autonomy where student thinking drives the lessons, where dialogue, inquiry, and puzzlement are valued and assessing student learning is in the context of teaching. It helps teachers to draw on new ideas as they make decisions about which teaching techniques are most appropriate for all students to learn. Now is the time to revisit the great debate of constructivism versus teacher-centered instruction and special education. Time has come to effectively explore our educational system and examine the core unit of the whole enterprise, the textbook, the classroom, a setting that is often dominated by teacher talk and students listen.

Key words: constructivist teaching strategies, student with special needs, academic outcomes, students with learning disabilities, positive learning, policy makers, indirect instruction, every student succeeds act.

Excerpt: The first challenge we face in this endeavor is to define two philosophies which provide the basis for most teaching practices: positivism and || constructivism. Next, we intend to familiarize teachers with the influences these philosophies have had on teacher education programs and the classroom. Our final task is to help teachers identify these philosophies within their own practice so they may determine whether or not their teaching style actually reflects their personal beliefs.

This article offers a brief response to Hine’s article, “On Reading the Stamford Papers on Constructivism: A Physicist’s Reactions” (1993, pp. 45–47).

Excerpt: Education has failed to show steady progress because it has shifted back and forth among simplistic positions such as the associationist and rationalist philosophies. Modern cognitive psychology provides a basis for genuine progress by careful scientific analysis that identifies those aspects of theoretical positions that contribute to student learning and those that do not. Radical constructivism serves as the current exemplar of simplistic extremism, and certain of its devotees exhibit an antiscience bias that, should it prevail, would destroy any hope for progress in education.

A number of observations are made about the nature of constructivism, with the suggestion that it is a less revolutionary development that has been claimed, and that some accounts imply an unwarranted disregard of the environment. The presentation is meant to be provocative and to invite discussion that may clarify the issues.

Key words: Cybernetics, Variance, Reality

This paper used phenomenological constructivism to demonstrate and evaluate a mixed method approach for conducting information systems research. It evaluated the implementation and implications of mixed methods approach as an exploratory and inductive research method. A case study which made use of indepth interviews was used to provide the dominant qualitative (QUAL) method. Following this, a questionnaire survey was used to provide the results for the less dominant method which is the quantitative (QUAN) data. The mixed method approach was adopted to enhance the completeness and accuracy of the interpretation of the study. It provided a number of recommendations for the use of mixed methods approach for IS projects.

Key words: case study, information systems, mixed methods, phenomenological constructivism.

An important tenet of constructivism is that learning is an idiosyncratic, active and evolving process. Active learning, operationalized by cognitive, metacognitive, affective and resource management learning strategies, is necessary for students to effectively cope with the high level of demands placed on the learner in a constructivist learning environment. Case studies of two students detail contrasting passive and active learning behaviours. Examples of their strategic learning behaviours illustrate that having students involved in activities such as discussions, question answering, and seatwork problems does not automatically guarantee successful knowledge construction. The nature of students’ metacognitive knowledge and the quality of their learning strategies are seen to be critical factors in successful learning outcomes.

Key words: resource management, learning environment, active learning, learning outcome, learning strategy.

In the following text I propose a certain view of historiography of philosophy. My starting point will be the analysis of Richard Rorty regarding the historiography of philosophy. The first part will discuss Rorty’s text and the differences between various ways of approaching the history of philosophy. Rorty’s text is important because it reveals a lack of unitary vision when we are speaking about the best way in which we can write history of philosophy. This lack of unity implies that there are different frames of thinking historiography so we are entitled to say that the clashes between visions constitutes a whole new area of inquiry which we can call “the philosophy of historiography.” The following step is to distinguish the philosophy of historiography from the philosophy of history. We will see then, that one of the most important questions of philosophy of historiography is: what is philosophy? Before we start writing the history of philosophy, we should ask ourselves what is our view about the nature of philosophy. Following the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, my view is that philosophy is essentially “the art of creating concepts.” Viewing the philosophy in this way implies that the history of philosophy is a history of concepts. Since the concepts are constructed entities, and not discovered things, it follows that viewing the history of philosophy in this way, forces us to adopt a constructivist approach.

Key words: historiography of philosophy, philosophy of historiography, philosophy of history, constructivism, art of concept creation