Lesson 3

The roles of Educational technology in learning

Traditional role of technology delivery vehicles for instructional lessons and traditional way technology serve as a teacher. 

Constructivist role:

Partners in the learning process.

Technology is a learning tool to learn with not from.

From a constructivist perspective, the following are the roles of technology in learning: jonassen 1990

Learning to solve problems with technology.

Technology as tool to support knowledge construction:

·     for representing learner’s ideas, understandings and beliefs.

·     For producing organized, multimedia knowledge bases by learners.

Technology as information vehicles for exploring knowledge to support learning-by-constructing:

·     For accessing needed information.

·     For comparing perpectives, beliefs and world views.

Technology as context to support learning-by-doing:

·     For representing and stimulating meaningful real-world problems, situations and context.

For representing beliefs, perspectives, arguments and stories of others

·     For defining a safe, controllable problem space for student thinking.

Technology as a social medium to support learning y conversing:

·     for collaborating with others.

·     For discussing, arguing, and building consensus among members of community.

·     For supporting discourse among knowledge-building community.

technology  as intellectual partner( jonassen 1996) to support learning-by-reflecting:

·     For helping others to articulate and represent what they know.

·     For reflecting on what they have learned and how they came to know it.

·     For supporting learners internal negotiations and meaning making.

·     For constructing personal representations of meaning for supporting mindful thinking.