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What is learning & how does it occur?

The question; "what is learning?" seems simple enough. However, philosophically it is a very hard question to "answer", and this is why it has been a challenging topic for philosophers for centuries. The schools of thought on the nature of learning have been many and varied, but at the most basic level they differ on only a limited number of fundamental questions. These are questions like; "How does learning occur?", "What are the properties of knowledge? (absolute, relativistic..)" etc.. We will not try to provide a comprehensive overview of all the views of learning and knowledge that can be found, but will concentrate on the dominant ideas and views of our century.

Our century; From behaviourism to Cognitivism to Constructivism;

If we speak in very broad terms about the trends in our century, we can identify three fundamentally different ideas about the nature of learning and what the properties/ nature of knowledge are. In other words the approaches not only include a view of how learning occurs, but also a view of what knowledge actually is (i.e is knowledge given and absolute or constructed and relativistic? etc...). These three basic approaches or psychological theories are referred to as behaviorism, cognitivism and constructivism.

As stated above the reason that we include a section specifically on these psychological theories is that they lie at the heart of much of the change that can be observed in the use of technology in education during our century. It is important to note that there is a lot more to these theories than what we present here. To reiterate the important point for us and what we focus on here is that "changes" in the dominant psychological theories of learning have resulted in changes in the use of computers in education. We will get back to the specific aspects of this in the next main-section where we deal with the traits and background of CSCL as a research paradigm.

Brief overviews of behaviorism, cognitivism & constructivism follows. The overviews concentrates on the main differences between the theoretical positions and are very general. There is a lot more to these "fields" than we present here;
· Behaviourism
· Cognitivism
· Constructivism
· Summary of important differences

Summary of the main points in Timothy Koschmann's; "CSCL; Theory and practice of an emerging paradigm";
Within pedagogic information science (Instructional Technology) it may be fruitful to distinguish the various computer based learning systems according to which learning theory and pedagogical principles they were inspired by/ built on. In an attempt to do so, Timothy Koschmann (1996), identifies what he believes to be four competing paradigms within the field of computer based learning systems (Instructional Technology). All the paradigms he identifies are still important today, and are called;

Computer assisted instruction (CAI) systems,
Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS),
Logo-as-Latin and
Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) systems

The first three approaches (that Koschmann refers to as paradigms) are older than CSCL, and it is thus likely that they have had a profound impact on the development of CSCL even though their theoretical frameworks are very different. Koschmann's article presents short summaries of the various approaches, and in the end he compares them with the emerging CSCL paradigm. The table below contrasts the approaches on some of the most fundamental questions like; view of knowledge, theory of learning, model of instruction etc. All the information below is taken from Koschmann (1996).

.	CAI	ITS	Logo-as-Latin	CSCL
Meaning of acronym	Computer assisted instruction	Intelligent tutoring system	.	Computer supported collaborative learning
Paradigmatic event	The release of IBM's courswriter I (1960)	Imigration of workers from artificial intelligence (AI) (Carbonell's dissertation) 1970	Publication of Mindstorms (1980 )	CSCL NATO workshop (1989)
Underlying learning theory * Footnote 1	Behaviorism	Cognitivism	Cognitive constructivism	Socially oriented constructivism, Soviet sociocultural theories, situated cognition
Epistemological frame	- Realist (knowledge is viewed upon as given) - Absolutist (the teacher is viewed upon as the final authority)	- Realist (knowledge is viewed upon as given) - Absolutist (the teacher is viewed upon as the final authority)	- Relativistic (nothing is absolute, but varies according to time and space) - Fallibilist (nothing can be taken for granted) - "knowledge is acquired through a process of subjective construction on the part of the experiencing organism rather than a discovery of ontological reality."	- Relativistic (nothing is absolute, but varies according to time and space) - Fallibilist (nothing can be taken for granted) - Construction of knowledge is an essentially social process
Learning is	"...the passive acquisition or absorption of an established (and often rigidly defined) body of information."	The process in which the learner acquire a proper understanding of the problem space.	New information interacts with prior knowledge and triggers a process of assimilation and accommodation.	"a reculturative process that helps students become members of knowledge communities whose common property is different from the common property of the knowledge communities they already belong to"
View of mind	A phenomenon residing within the head of the individual	A phenomenon residing within the head of the individual	A phenomenon residing within the head of the individual	A number of competing views that place the mind within the surrounding sociocultural environment
Research methods in use	Traditional methods of Psychological experimentation	Traditional methods of Psychological experimentation	Traditional methods of Psychological experimentation	Methods from the social and humanistic scienses
Research focus	Instructional efficacy	Instructional competence	Instructional transfer	- Process rather than outcome - A central concern is with grounding theories in observational data - Descriptive rather than experimental - Expressed interest in understanding the process from a participants's viewpoint (therefore, a focus on participant's talk, the artifacts that support and are produced by a team of learners, and the participant's own accounts of their work
Model of instruction	"Instruction becomes a process of transmission or delivery; teaching as delivery."	"Instruction consists of activities designed to facilitate the acquisition of such a representation by the learner."	Learning by discovery	Collaborative learning
Role of technology	"Applications ... tend to be straightforward and practical instructional tools designed around the identified needs of the classroom."	"the designed application serves instruction by posing problems and by providing feedback to the learner."	The computer creates some kind of an environment in which the learner becomes the teacher, and the computer becomes the "tutee"	The significance of technology will vary according to factors like distance, software implementation etc. The importance will vary on a scale from being the very prerequisite in order for collaboration to take place, unto merely providing for instance an image on a screen which two persons or more discusses face-to-face.
Focus of applications	Identify learning goals and implement these in the application by decomposing the goals into component tasks and by developing a sequence of activities that leads the learner through the whole subject domain.	Identification of learning goals, decomposing of tasks and interactive presentation of subject according to learners current knowledge, in order to facilitate a process that will help the learner in reaching the learning goals.	Learning how to program in order to accommodate cognitive benefits beyond simply learning how to code	Collaboration in order to facilitate learning
Common background of developers	Teaching	Artificial intelligence	.	Social sciences.

* Footnote 1- For a brief summary of the psychological theories underlying these paradigms see the previous section

TILBAKE