<div dir="ltr"><br>On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 2:15 PM, Seth Woodworth <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:seth@laptop.org">seth@laptop.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div dir="ltr"><h3><font size="2">Inspired by Sameer's recent conversations with a pair of Montessori Kindergarden teachers.  I went to talk to Cynthia Sol</font>omon of the OLPC Learning team.  We got to talking about the theory of Activities and a few other topics.  Eventually she showed me this snippit from the Media Lab's Future of Learning Group:</h3> <h3>Constructionism</h3> <p>We are developing "Constructionism" as a theory of learning and education. Constructionism is based on two different senses of "construction." It is grounded in the idea that people learn by actively constructing new knowledge, rather than having information "poured" into their heads. Moreover, constructionism asserts that people learn with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful artifacts (such as computer programs, animations, or robots).</p><p><a href="http://learning.media.mit.edu/projects.html" target="_blank">http://learning.media.mit.edu/projects.html</a></p><p>I thought that this explanation was concise and really interesting.  I would love to explain this to people who want to design activities, just to give them a little snapshot of the concept.  Does anyone have a problem with this definition? Does anyone have an improvement?</p> </div></blockquote></div>Me likey!  I'm not in the classroom, nor well-versed in academic jargon, but that captures the spirit of what I gleaned from my first encounter with the word here on these lists.  It also syncs well with how I think I came to love working with computers in educational settings.  That, and as you've mentioned: concise.<br clear="all"> -- <br> ". ! 1 |" -- Rene Magritte's computer<br><br> </div>