Constructionism vs. Constructivism

The two articles I have read this week are " Small Group Collaboration in Peer-Led Electronic Discourse: An Analysis of Group Dynamics and Interactions Involving Preservice and Inservice Teachers"( Ikpeze,  2007) and "Mad City Mystery: Developing Scientific Argumentation Skills with a Place-based Augmented Reality Game on Handheld Computers" (Squire & Jan, 2007). Besides the interesting researches on computer-and-network-aided science education and teacher education, the theoretical mechanism underlying these researches also attracts my attention. Just like Seymour Papert's chapter "Situating Constructionism" in the book Constructionism from last week's reading, they both mention constructivism, and one of them explicitly refers to it as its theoretical framework of analysis. Thinking back, constructivism does seem to serve as the most  mature theoretical foundation for the new technology-aided and learner-oriented shift which is taking place in schools worldwide, and the discussion about it.

Baffled by these two terms, constructionism and constructivism, I tried to find an explanation about their similarities and differences by taking a closer look at them. According to Vygotsky (1978), social constructivism posits that knowledge is constructed by people, in context, based upon interpretation of experience and knowledge. In other words, learning involves both a personal construction of meaning and a socially negotiated meaning. Compared to Papert's simple definition of constructionism as "learning-by-making", the basic tenet of social constructivism is that knowledge is constructed through social interaction  and collaboration with others, generated, established, and maintained by a community of knowledgeable peers (McDonald & Gibson, 1998). Therefore, I agree that constructionism is more of an educational method which is based on the constructivist learning theory (Guzdial, 1997), and according to my understanding, constructivism looks at the general process of knowledge formation and the environment  in which it takes place, while constructionism places more emphasis on how each individual learn, what factors are involved, and how he/she could be facilitated. Constructivist learning theory focuses on the interaction and construction process of learners, and constructionists look at the crucial determining function of each learner's characteristics, participation, and commitment in this process. In this sense, these two terms are interrelated, and any exploration of pedagogical significance of new technology embedded in a constructivism background cannot go without a discussion from the constructionist point of view.