Do You have a book that you highly regard for virtual world practitioners? Please send us your thoughts and recommendations.

Patrick McKercher reviews and recommends:

CONSTRUCTIONISM IN PRACTICE: Designing, Thinking and Learning in a Digital World.
Eds. Yasmin Kafai (UCLA) and Mitchel Resnick (MIT)
Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc, Mahwah NJ USA, 1996
UCSC call #: LB 1590.3 C666 1996 "...

I want to insist that I offer no rules to make anyone a poet...such rules simply don't exist. A poet is a person who creates these very rules." V. Mayakovsky (74)

Constructionism grows out of the work of Seymour Papert's work at MIT in the 1960's which tried to establish how children really think and to create an appropriate new way of education. One of the most fruitful ways of exploring this was his creation of the LOGO programming language which was designed to have "no floor and no ceiling," meaning it could be used immediately with little training but still had enormous flexibility and potential; this language is used in "programmable bricks" (sensors and motors that can be snapped into Lego constructions. These ideas are grounded in the "constructivist" theory of Jean Piaget (and parallels those of Paolo Friere and Vygotsky) that children are not repositorries of information transmitted from the teacher, but actively construct knowledge. "Children don't GET ideas, they MAKE ideas" (1). Constructionism take this a step further in claiming that learners are more likely to make ideas when "actively engaged in making some sort of external artifact--be it a robot, a poem a sand castle or computer program--which they can reflect upon and share with others" (1). These artifacts are personally meaningful, but the shared aspect has importance for those of us who are creating learning communities. Also note that constructionism, often involving group projects, allows for different learning styles. The first of four sections explores the definition and theory, beginning with an article by Papert in which he uses an anecdote of his own learning which informs and illustrates constructionism. He notes that mental abilities that are not strong or well-developed actually improve when brought into contact with strong skills.

Edith Ackernan's article adds that learning is essentially situated (in a place and a community), a construction and maintenance of mental eqilibrium, an understanding of the world which becomes more complex over time (27).

The second section is comprised of teacher's accounts of various projects in which students designed projects such as video games, which are informative and useful for anyone making forays into this way of teaching. Students who are asked to construct learning tools (games) for others, according to Kafai, have their learning become "instrumental to a larger intellectual and social goal. In this context, students are in a continuous dialogue with their own ideas and with the ideas of users and co-designers" (74).

The third section examines community aspects of constructionism. Students are often highly involved with peers, so this aspect would be appealing. A model often looked to is the Brazillian samba schools, in which generations work together to prepare for an annual festival. Our schools had to be segregated from the community in general and the workplace in particular because of the inherent dangers of factories; clearly we now need to rethink this. Shaw points out that the complexity of our lives in cities makes systemic thinking more difficult but more essential (185). Shaw's experiences with inner city students has imporant implications, since the trend he points out in his introduction of attempting to force school improvment by finger pointing may worsen in the present standardized testing emphasis. His project was to assess the skills of young people, enhance them (e.g., learning to repair small appliances for the neighborhood) and then marketing those skills. In the process of doing this, he created user-friendly computer network, which was adopted by the comunity and its institutions like the church. We also have articles about MediMOO, and an article which traces the step-by-step progression of a female eight-year-old Black student who does very sophisticated kinds of problem-solving using LOGO.

The final section investigates the importance of systems thinking, which computers make more comprehensible. The editors point out that the kind of mathematics that is currently taught is not the most useful, but merely best suited to pencil and paper. The first article deals with college students studying probability, making it concrete. The final article follows a team of student through several iterations of robot design, analyzing the assumptions that student typically start with (and sometimes stick with, such as assuming an ideal or abstract situation, and not thinking like a robot, accounting for the real-life glitches and factors).

These articles will vary in appropriateness and utility to any given teacher 's situation, but they all have valuable lessons that can be extracted. Moreover, the reader gets a good introduction to the theory, and a good mix of cautionary and inspriational tales. Strongly recommended.