Reiser and Dempsey (2007) defined epistemology as, “the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge and understanding.”(p. 54). This work argues against the positivism perspective about knowledge being independent of the learner and the claim that there is an absolute truth. Our believe is that knowledge is constructed by the learner through an open-ended and learner centered environment. The traditional hegemonic classroom environment allows teachers to transmit information to the learner instead of facilitating their learning experience. We embrace the relativism epistemological perspective whereby the environment fosters a self-regulated learning environment to educate and empower students with skills to transform and enhance their educational experience. The constructional design provides an avenue for students with different learning styles. Keefe (1989) defined learning styles as “cognitive, affective, and physiological behaviors that serve as relatively stable indicators of how learners perceive, interact with, and respond to the learning environment.”
In an open-ended and collaborative environment students develop their problem solving skills and nurture their independence of thought through experiential learning. Learners have been on the receiving end for a long time and in some cases even today they are still treated, as pupils not even students, yet knowledge uniquely constructed. Even though Reiser & Dempsey (2007) claim that positivism has been a cornerstone perspective of the instructional design, still suffers from lack of direct engagement and involvement of learners to construct knowledge. The learner should negotiate the meaning in an effort to construct knowledge, which will empower them for the rest of their lives. The purpose of the classroom should be to empower global citizens instead of making them a bank of information. Learners should be treated like living organisms that grow and making decisions about their future.
Transforming knowledge from the outside to inside the learner could cause memory overload. Educators should embrace constructivism theorem and take the learner-centered environment as an alternative pedagogical strategy to reach out to all students with different learning styles so that all students can reach their full potential instead of being receivers. Especially today there are different “multi-user virtual environments (MUVE)” that has “the ability to leverage the authentic learning conditions that are hard to cultivate in a traditional classroom settings.” (Griffin, 1995). Sheingold & Frederiksen(1994) state, “MUVEs open up a new world of possibilities for creating learning experiences that not only are authentic, situated, and distributed, but also provide a context to change our standards by which student achievements are judged and the methods by which students’ accomplishments are assessed.”
The processes of constructing constructivist learning environment are no systematic, they value the fact that learning is not a linear process. Our understanding is that learning is interdisciplinary, thus most educators have valued liberal arts education. The only concern with it is the failure of academician to explain explicitly the importance of taking a history class while in an engineering school, taking a language while in the physics department. The constructivist learning environment support active learning, learned-centered environment, and problem-based learning, collaborative environment, and a space to socialize and build relationships. Collaborative environments accommodated the limits of the working memory as they encourage engagement and management of load on working memory. The problem of overloading students working memory is the loss of interest and the active cognitive processing is affected greatly (Sweller, 1988; Sweller, 1989; Mousavi at al., 1995). Having open-ended environments that supports constructivists design activities provide multiple point of communication thus creating a community of learners as learning and construction of knowledge occurs when learners interact with some content to construct shared meaning (Damer, 1997; Damer et al., 1999; DiPaola & Collins, 2002).
The objectivists believe that knowledge exists independently of the learner is a misleading concepts because learning involves human reasoning and decision-making. There is no way that knowledge can be built from outside then transferred to the learner. As learners are becoming more involved with social networks there is a great need to even engage those virtual environments in creating interactive activities to facilitate learning. The constructivists ideology of objects and events having no absolute meaning is correct, as interpretations and meaning depends on individuals’ experience (Reiser & Dempsey, 2007). Through the collaborative environment learners share different perspectives, which may cause conflict among each other as learners go through the process of resolving cognitive conflict learners advance their cognitive development (Rogoff, 1990). Learners could be empowered with a new method of solving a problem or even understand it different.
In conclusion we truly believe the constructivist learning theory covers a lot of ground and provide learners a platform construct knowledge and meaning through their different experiences. Experience definitely plays a major role in knowledge construction as learners try to make sense of new information. Learning is an active and non-linear process rather than passive process. Kanuka and Anderson (1998) asserted that we construct knowledge based on what we know. The role of an educator should be to facilitate the process, by helping learners to organize information in order to engage student’s interest (Hanley, 1994). Overall the constructivist environment is learner-centered and makes students to participate in their cognitive development.
Brooks and Brooks (1993) suggested the following characteristics of constructivist teacher:
• Become one of many resources that the student may learn from, not the primary source of information.
• Engage students in experiences that challenge previous conceptions of their existing knowledge. 1
• Allow student response to drive lessons and seek elaboration of students' initial responses. Allow student some thinking time after posing questions. 1
• Encourage the spirit of questioning by asking thoughtful open-ended questions. Encourage thoughtful discussion among students. 1
• Use cognitive terminology such as "classify," "analyze", and "create" when framing tasks. 1
• Encourage and accept student autonomy and initiative. Be willing to let go of classroom control. 1
• Use raw data and primary sources, along with manipulative, interactive physical materials. 1
• Don't separate knowing from the process of finding out. 1
• Insist on clear expression from students. When students can communicate their understanding, then they have truly learned.
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