This is an article from Parents.com (America’s family magazine). It reminds me about some simple strategies to nurture the kind of kid who love to learn. I totally agree all of the points the author (Ginny Graves) made in the article. Here I extract some of the points for sharing and for my future reviewing. Read this article in Parents.com.

1. Share Your Passion: Talk to your child about interesting things you’ve learned. Explain in simple terms what happened and why you found it so interesting.
2. Surround Her with Books. Consistent access to books can increase a child’s motivation to raed.
3. Build on Your Child’s Natural Interests
4. Know When To Back Off. Those who have the most motivated children didn’t micromanage or pressure their kids. They let their children figure things out for themselves, while still showing their support.
5. Ask the Right Questions. If you want your child to stay excited about learning, it’s much better to engage him in an active inquiry than to ask him to spit out routine knowledge.
6. Avoid Rewards. Offering kids a prize for doing something can actually undermine their pleasure in the activity.
7. Focus on the Process, Not the Outcome.

I saw this term when I explored Moodle (a free, open source course management system for online learning) via Moodle.org.

The following are four main concepts behind it:

Constructivism: people actively construct new knowledge as they interact with their environment.

Constructionism: it asserts that learning is particularly effective when constructing something for others to experience.

Social Constructivism: this extends the above ideas into a social group constructing things for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings. When one is immersed within a culture like this, one is learning all the time about how to be a part of that culture, on many levels.

Connected and Separate: Separate behaviour is when someone tries to remain ‘objective’ and ‘factual’, and tends to defend their own ideas using logic to find holes in their opponent’s ideas. Connected behaviour is a more empathic approach that accepts subjectivity, trying to listen and ask questions in an effort to understand the other point of view. Constructed behaviour is when a person is sensitive to both of these approaches and is able to choose either of them as appropriate to the current situation.

It is claimed that the design and development of Moodle is guided by that “social constructionist pedagogy”. It suggests that “the job as a ‘teacher’ can change from being ‘the source of knowledge’ to being an influencer and role model of class culture, connecting with students in a personal way that addresses their own learning needs, and moderating discussions and activities in a way that collectively leads students towards the learning goals of the class.”

The following is an excerpt from the paper by Said Hadijerrouit, “Learner-Centered Web-Based Instruction in Software Engineering”, IEEE Transactions on Education, Vol. 48, No. 1, Feb 2005. It reminds me about the most basic instructional principles that the constructivist paradigm suggests for the design of learning environments. My thank goes to the author of this paper.

1. Knowledge must be actively constructed by learners, not passively transmitted by teachers.
2. Students’s prior knowledge must be taken into account by the construction of new knowledge.
3. In order to be useful for problem solving, knowledge components must be related to each other. The process of constructing inter-related knowledge requires higher order thinking skills, such as analysis and design skills.
4. To get students actively involved in knowledge construction, learning activities should focus around a set of intrinsically motivating problems that are situated in real-world tasks.
5. Learning should take place in a collaborative environment that involves social interaction and negotiation.
6. Assessment procedures should be embedded in the learning process, focus on authentic tasks, and consider learners’ individual orientations.
7. Teachers serve primarily as guides and facilitators of learning, not as transmitters of knowledge.

“Constructivism is a theory of learning that regards learning not so much as the product of passive transmission but as a process of active construction. Constructivism is learner-centered, assuming that learners learn better if they construct knowledge for themselves, rather than having it dictated by an instructor.”

This is an interesting article by Kathy Sierra on December 26, 2004. Read it at creating passionate users.

Knowledge cannot be pushed into someone’s head while they sit passively reading or listening. Knowledge is a co-creation… the learner must construct the new knowledge in his own head. And usually (or some say ALWAYS), the new knowledge must be mapped into something that’s already IN the learner’s head.

This article was written by Bill Pelz, a professor of Psychology at Herkimer County Community College, USA. It is about effective online pedagogy. I find it a good read. It contains some good examples of practice that I might follow in some day. Here is the brief summary about this article. The full article can be view at this URL .

Applied Online Padagogy

Principle #1: Let the students do (most of) the work.

Examples of practice include:

* Student Led Discussions
* Students Find and Discuss Web Resourses
* Students Help Each Other Learn (Peer Assistance)
* Students Grade Their Own Homework Assignments
* Case Study Analysis

Principle #2: Interactivity is the heart and soul of effective asynchronous learning.

Examples of practice include collaborative research paper and research proposal team project.

Principle #3: Strive for presence. This include social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence.

Please read the full article from the JALN (Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks) Volume 8, Issue 3, June 2004.