Hermeneutic researchers fall into the hermeneutic cycle (see figure 1) in which an artifact is interpreted in light of the culture and then the culture is reinterpreted in light of the emerging understanding of the artifact. This cycle between the whole of the culture being reconstructed and the parts of the culture embodied in the Read More
Sherry Turkle, a sociologist from MIT studied computer users’ sense of identity early in the days of Internet-mediated communication. She observed that many users at the time were creating multiple online identities and that many users were exploring different senses of identity through those online spaces, and Turkel (1995) began her book Life on the Read More
141: Rogers’ Stages of Adoption Everett Rogers’ (2003) influential work on the diffusion of innovations explains much that we see on how new idea and practices spread throughout populations. This excerpt from my book Efficacious Technology Management which was released under a Creative COmmons license about a year ago is one summary I use when Read More
When I was working on my master of arts in education two decades ago, my mentors introduced me to qualitative research methods, especially interviewing. One of the lessons I learned early in that work was that the term and concepts we usually apply to the quality of quantitative data do not accurately describe the expectation Read More
Scarmelia and Bereiter (2006) contrasted 20th century instruction that as supported by ICT (in which ICT was assumed to be equivalent to print-based information) to knowledge building. For Scarmelia and Bereiter, ICT can support knowledge building as a social endeavor in which ideas are improved, and the community comes to more clear understanding of ideas Read More
Many species live in social groups and interaction within those groups is well-known. In humans, however, social life takes on a level of complexity and sophistication that far exceeds what is observed in other social species. Michael Gazzaniga (2008), a noted neuroscientist who has studied human brains for decades, concluded “the shift to becoming highly Read More
The learning science is a relatively new field of study. The major journals in the field began publishing in the early 1990’s and the first conferences recognizing this field also date to that time. Learning science emerged out of the cognitive sciences as field dedicated to the problem of designing classroom and other learning spaces Read More
Appropriate Proper Reasonable Most technologies are local creations. Members of a population will identify a need, find naturally occurring phenomena that can be controlled and applied to meet that need, and then design a new hard or soft technology based on the phenomena or they will exapt an existing technology to meet a need. Different Read More
A final epistemological assumption that affects who teachers approach their work with students is the innateness of learning. Clearly, there are individuals who have different abilities to learn, and those are grounded in physical and developmental aspects of the learner as well as social aspects of the learners’ experience. Some extend these differences to the Read More
Continuing to examine the effects of epistemology on how teachers approach their craft, this post considers the speed at which learning is assumed to occur. For some, once information has been been transferred to a brain, we can assume the person in whom that brain exists has “learned” the information and can use it in Read More