Excerpt: The members of this group share the belief that one can and must attempt communication across the boundaries, and often chasms, which separate the various sciences. The participants have come from many fields; they are physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, physiologists, neurologists, experimental psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists. That such a gathering failed to produce the Babylonian confusion that might have been expected is probably the most remarkable result of this meeting and of those which preceded it.

The present paper is devoted to the description of a model that may support the theoretical integration and the clinical advance of current psychotherapy. On one hand, it reports a narrative review of the common trends of the so-called Third Wave of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy and other modern approaches. On the other hand, it defines epistemological tools that may help therapists in understanding such trends. The model comprises five main principles that are explained in terms of theoretical and clinical implications. Further studies are needed in order to prove its clinical effectiveness and extensively report the subsumed therapeutic mechanisms.

Constructivism has recently aroused more and more interest in the scholarly debate with two opposing stances: advocates of constructivism and those who remain skeptical. Despite its faults, constructivism exerts significant impact on foreign language pedagogy and offers promising teaching prospects due to the paradigm shift (construction instead of instruction). The paper asks the question whether this revolutionary change is a real breakthrough or rather yet another buzzword and next attempts to answer it.

Key words: constructivism, construction, instruction.

In this paper, we start exploring the affective and ethical dimension of what De Jaegher and Di Paolo (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6:485–507, 2007) have called ‘participatory sense-making’. In the first part, we distinguish various ways in which we are, and feel, affectively inter-connected in interpersonal encounters. In the second part, we discuss the ethical character of this affective inter-connectedness, as well as the implications that taking an ‘inter-(en)active approach’ has for ethical theory itself.

Key words: Participatory sense-making, enaction, emotion, empathy, ethics

One of the fundamental notions offered by Humberto Maturana is that of the ontology of observing, in which the notion of (objectivity), or objectivity-in-parentheses is presented. This, in my view is not a singular notion, rather it is a matrix of coherent ideas that he often presents in a figure (Fig. 1) that he himself considers the equivalent, in the domain of his work, to the well known equation E=MC2 in the domain of Einstein’s work. In the sense that both are abbreviations that represent a collection of abstract concepts that are not fully understood by many who refer to them, this is indeed the case.

This paper proposed the application of the constructivist approach in virtual university where learners can learn based on their learning style, information and skills to succeed in life and also in their job. Constructivist learning and the strategies in constructivist learning can foster in-depth learning and practical application. Integration of communication and information technologies into curricula offers significant potentials for designing new learning environments, and advancing research and development in learning theories. Based on the main aspects of the constructivist approach, traditional universities and classroom cannot provide the conditions for learners to construct the knowledge for themselves, for this reason virtual university with the communication and information technologies (ICT) can implement constructivist strategies in the process of teaching and learning. In virtual university, constructivism promotes the learner’s skills to solve real-life problems and practical problems.

Key words: virtual university, constructivist learning, constructivist approach in virtual university.

Excerpt: When one creates a constructivist learning opportunity or lesson, the goal is for the created situation to have the property that it stimulates the learner to solve a problemortakesomeactionandthentoreflectonwhathashappened,connecting the situated experience to prior knowledge. This goal presupposes that we know the learner’s prior knowledge state. Perhaps we will not know all of it, but we need to know enough to have confidence that the learner will notice and make connections between the situation experienced and his or her prior knowledge and that those connections will be sufficient to achieve the learning goals of the lesson.

Excerpt: Anyone who has seen Monty Python’s Life of Brian will probably remember the scene where a heated and hilarious argument breaks out between the Judean Liberation Front and the People’s Front for the Liberation of Judea. Although both have a common enemy – the Romans – they cannot make common cause because of their differences (small to us, but huge to them). One can sometimes be reminded of this when seeing the disputes between constructivists and social constructionists. Yes, there are differences between them, but might it not be better to focus on what they have in common? In a world dominated by objectivist psychology, would it not make more sense to build bridges and look for commonalities? This book sets out to do just that, and its aim is to build bridges between personal and social constructionism. It is divided into four sections: The Personal Meets the Social, The Personal and Social in Psychotherapy, The Personal and Social in Research, and Dialogue, Reflection and Anticipation: Future Directions. The chapters come mainly from two North American conferences (an APA and a NAPCN conference in 2002), although there are also two from the XV International Congress on Personal Construct Psychology held in Huddersfield, UK in 2003 as well as a further two prepared specially for this volume.