In order to make optimal educational use of social spaces offered by thousands of international communities in the second generation web applications termed Web 2 or Social Web, ICT competences as well as social skills are needed for both teachers and learners. The paper outlines differences in competence structures of Net Natives (who came of age…

Cognitive apprenticeship is a teaching approach proponed by social constructivist educators that scaffolds upon students' "zones of proximal development" in authentic situations. It is an effective approach used by teachers of instructional technology when teaching student practitioners. Nevertheless, implementation of instructional design…

This paper sets out to review 14 years of developments in language policy and practice in South Africa under its new, democratic Constitution. The paper begins with an overview of language policy developments since 1994, with particular reference to the role of English, of indigenous African languages and the learner in the classroom. It examines…

The ever-expanding use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) is especially significant to professional education in relatively isolated nations such as Taiwan. Interaction with university faculties outside the country would vastly improve the Taiwanese education of architects, for example, and this is sufficient reason for the…

The ambiguous results of existing intervention programmes show the need for new ways in research on aggression among children. The present study focuses on the children's own perspective on their aggressive behaviour. Based on a constructivist approach, the inner logic of narratives about peer conflicts of 64 children in Dutch special education…

This article examines recent educational reforms in Tanzania by looking at the cultural politics of pedagogical change in secondary and teacher education. It presents an ethnography of a teachers college founded on the principles of social constructivism in a country where formalistic, teacher-centered pedagogy is the norm. Using data collected…

A long-standing debate in native and foreign language learning revolves around the use of computers to promote genuine social and professional communication. Webquests are a very common way of using Web resources to research a variety of topics, and if appropriately used can trigger the situations necessary to develop both written and oral…

As an alternative to dominant cognitive-constructivist approaches to educational technology, this article makes the case for what has been termed a discursive, or postcognitive, psychological research paradigm. It does so by adapting discursive psychological analyses of conversational activity to the study of educational technology use. It applies…

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of active learning on preservice teachers' dignity, energy, self-management, community, and awareness (DESCA) abilities, attitudes toward teaching, and attitudes toward science. Third year preservice teachers (n = 77) from two different classes were involved in the study. One intact…

This paper presents a comparative case study involving eight teachers from two Reggio-inspired schools that focuses on how teachers negotiate a Reggio-inspired approach in the American context. This study first identifies the struggles these eight teachers faced in applying the philosophical beliefs borrowed from this Italian-born approach. With…

The current research aims to explore and analyze the application and use of a wiki in a knowledge management academic course. The research will focus on the level of collaboration among students and on the kind of interaction that takes place during the learning process. The population of this study was composed of wiki pages gathered from a…

A Student Affairs Professional working at a community college applies constructivist pedagogy to potentially uncomfortable out-of-class experiences by converting them into "teachable moments" during one-on-one encounters with students.

The wider context of this article is the assumption in the social sciences regarding the existence of a dichotomy between truth and objectivity on one hand and constructivism, subjectivism and relativism on the other. The school subject of geography serves as an appropriate focus for examining this assumption. There are three issues facing the…

The epistemology of "relativism" that is featured by the theory of radical constructivism is addressed. In particular, I examine several objections, all based on this epistemic position of relativism, that are often raised by critics of the theory: the charge of "reality denial" (which, it is often claimed, must lead ultimately to the…

This review chronicles the origins of the use of the term "dispositions" in teacher education and highlights problems in its current definitions and applications, suggesting questions that need to be addressed in dealing with those problems and outlining necessary changes in teacher education programs to address development and assessment of the…