This paper reviews the body of research that addresses `the social shaping of technology' (SST) (MacKenzie & Wajcman 1985). In contrast to traditional approaches which only addressed the outcomes or 'impacts' of technological change, this work examines the content of technology and the particular processes involved in innovation. We highlight the growth of socio-economic research falling within...

Constructivism has emerged in recent years as a dominant paradigm in education and has had a major intellectual impact on the development of pedagogy, especially in mathematics and science. Rooted in the cognitive developmental theory of Piaget and in the sociocultural theory of Vygotsky, constructivist notions have had an impact on the development and application of technologically enhanced mi...

As a growing number of faculty use constructivist and constructionist approaches to teaching in SL, little research exists on the many ethical considerations and legal implications that affect course development. Following the experiences of the instructor and five students, their 12-week journey is documented through interviews, journals, blogs, weekly course activities, SL class dialogs, and ...

Constructivism is a learning theory that states that people learn by actively constructing their own knowledge, based on prior knowledge. A significant number of ICT-based constructivist learning systems have been proposed in recent years. According to our analysis, those systems exhibit only a few constructivist principles, and a critical problem related to the design and use of this kind of s...

The Network Workbench (NW) is a software environment for academic investigation of network protocol concepts. The structure and operation of NW has been described in detail elsewhere. This paper addresses the instructional design of NW with the intention of establishing that it represents`natural constructivism' in that it is strongly aligned with the constructivist approach. We begin with syno...

Constructivism is the idea that we construct our own world rather than it being determined by an outside reality. Its most consistent form, Radical Constructivism (RC), claims that we cannot transcend our experiences. Thus it doesn’t make sense to say that our constructions gradually approach the structure of an external reality. The mind is necessarily an epistemological solipsist, in contrast...

There has been a strong link between computermediated education and constructivism learning and teaching theory.. Acknowledging how well the constructivism doctrine would work online, it has been established that constructivist views of learning would agreeably correlate with the philosophy of open and distance learning. Asynchronous and synchronous communications have placed online learning on...

Constructivism is the dominant paradigm in educational psychology at present. According to this theory, learning is an active process of sense-making, which occurs in the mind of the learner as she or he attempts to construct a meaningful representation of new information (Phillips 1995). As a result, instruction aimed at transmitting (intact) a knowledge structure from the instructor to the st...

Dialectical constructivism considers that the source of knowledge comes from constant and complex interactions between the evolving individual and the developing environment (Moshman, 1982). Dialectical constructivism informs dialectical learning pedagogy, where students constantly interact with each other in developing and refining arguments over an issue from multiple perspectives. With the a...

With the emergence of the so-called knowledge economy, knowledge has become one of the mostfashionable terms in the political and managerial sphere. The present paper presents different views onknowledge, focusing mainly on the literature derived from management studies. The main focus is onknowledge management approaches, since this field of study has been very much involved in rel...