Social Constructivisim
14 03 2006Although I’ve taught and talked a lot about the idea of constructivism in higher education, I’ve never quite made the obvious jump in terminology to Social Constructivisim (even though talking about constructivisim goes hand-in-hand with flagging the importance about making links with the existing knowledge and everyday experience of learners. Leigh Blackall summed it all up rather neatly in his post on “Learner generated content, or the best way to learn is to teach“:
There are 2 key things I think are an important for teaching and learning today:
1. To learn through the production of content = constructionism
2. To learn through engagement with real and existing communities of practice = social constructivism
So a teacher today, or should I say facilitator is someone who focuses on building and maintaining a strong learning network around their topic, and assigning learners to create content based on what their learning, to feed back into that network.
Leigh’s thoughts were, in turn, partially built on Will Richardson’s thoughts which directly link to my usual themes of blogging and podcasting as participatory pedagogy:
One of the themes that’s been running through my brain a lot of late is the idea that with blogs and podcasts and screencasts and others we really have an opportunity to ask our students to become more than just receivers of knowledge. They can become transmitters of that knowledge, teachers of it in easy, meaningful ways.
Student podcasts, as I’ve said before, are one of our most cutting edge tools for social constructivism, using the ubiquity of iPodness and the iGeneration to built learning and teaching strategies for and with a new generation of university learners.
[...] though talking about constructivisim goes hand-in-hand with flagging the importance about making links with the existing knowledge and everyday experience of learners. [link] [...]
Hi Tama,
When you used podcasting last year, you mentioned that you thought learners could come to grips with Audacity with a 1-2hr workshop. I was wondering if you’d be willing to post/share the activites/steps that you used in your workshop?
Thinking of doing something similar in a few weeks.
BTW: I love the idea of learners creating podcasts, more for the ‘constructionism’ than the social constructivism – the fact that learners create/construct a learning experience of their own… As for the social constructivism – how many of your students listened to all the other students podcasts? Were you able to encourage this? Or did you end up being the main audience? I reckon that could be hard?
Hi Michael,
I didn’t actually work from any notes with regard to introducing Audacity but rather did a quick demonstration (about 15 minutes) of recording, basic editting, and tweaking volume/quality and then got the students to ask questions (in an ideal world I would have asked them to make a 2 minutes recording and edit it, but we didn’t have a computer lab to work in at the time). So, sadly, I don’t have any notes as to how I ran the session. (Also, these students had already done some basic video editing in previous courses, so it was introducing the program not the processes. If I were to do a broader introduction, I’d probably use the “official” Audacity tutorials as a starting point and direct the students attempting more advanced use to the Audacity Wiki.
As for the student podcasts, I think most of the students listen to most of each others (with one exception due which was to do with a topic choice which didn’t appeal to most of the group). I suspect because they all covered areas which appealled to each other (The Simpsons, video games, and a humourous parody of Australiana) there was little challenge in encouraging them to engage with their peers. That said, it was quite a small class so there wasn’t a lot of listening required.
I think if I was doing podcasting with a large class of, say, thirty or more, I’d probably make a 10% assignment where they listen to two other podcasts and offer constructive feedback to each other to encourage a least a minimum of engagement (and I still think they quite enjoy listening to each other, so I’d imagine far more would listen to a wider selection than required by assessment).
With or without notes, your comment gives me lots of help, so Thanks
.
Great idea getting students to choose a topic that will interest others… here I was thinking of encouraging students to create podcast about something related to their course… it’s hard to let go of old ideas!
Here’s an idea too: the assigment could actually be “handed out” as a podcast… that way the facilitator gets to demonstrate the end result as part of the introduction (as well as learn themselves
).
Giving the assignment via podcast certainly would work as a demo!
Of course, it might pay to have a written version too, handed out a bit later … assignment rules are one of those things I can imagine being “misheard” by a few people! 