Constructivist Learning Theory - 1

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The Origins of Constructivism

@joe_edtech

I am openly and unabashedly bi-platform. I even have my own support group on Google + Communities. However, I spent most of my professional life up until now primarily using and teaching with Apple products. As an Apple user it is impossible not to admire all that Steve Jobs was able to accomplish at that company. However, I read the Walter Isaacson book and can say with a great deal of confidence that Steve Jobs and I would not have been friends (although I maintain that The Great and Powerful Woz and I would get along famously, so Woz, if your reading, give me a call!).

Likewise, I am a constructivist, and as such I admire the extant learning theories of Lev Vygotsky. However, Vygotsky was a part of the Marxist establishment in the early Soviet Union and his real goal was to establish a unified Marxist theory of psychology and learning. Not surprisingly, he didn't achieve that impossible goal. And, as I concluded with Jobs, I doubt seriously Lev and I would have been friends. However his theories forced the world to think about children in realistic, scientific terms. Thanks to men of science like Vygotsky, people stopped thinking of children as the rough equivalents of botanical organisms, or developmentally equivalents of certain higher functioning mammals (Vygotsky, 1978).

Last Spring, I picked up Mind in Society, a collection of translated writings by Vygotsky, and I was quickly reminded why I admire his work so much. In just a few words, he says so much about how children frame and direct their own learning, and the importance of "social interaction" in that process. From just the first chapter of the book, Vygotsky explains why children shouldn't be compared to primates, or simply immature adults:

[T]he most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge. Although children's use of tools during their preverbal period is comparable to that of apes, as soon as speech and the use of signs are incorporated into any action, the action becomes transformed and organized along entirely new lines. (Vygotsky, 1978, Kindle Edition Loc 471 of 3148)

In other words, when the child begins to interact with his surroundings physically and socially, the child begins to construct theoretical frameworks that are purely human, and that is the beginning of real learning.
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If this is the learning theory we believe in, how does that affect the way we use mobile technology in the classroom? - (Sounds like a dissertation topic.)

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner & E. Souberman., Eds.) (A. R. Luria, M. Lopez-Morillas & M. Cole [with J. V. Wertsch], Trans.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. (Original manuscripts [ca. 1930-1934]). Kindle Edition.