20011126: Roschelle, Learning in Interactive Environments: Prior Knowledge and New Experience

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Roschelle, J. (1995). Learning in Interactive Environments: Prior
     Knowledge and New Experience. _Public Institutions for Personal
     Learning: Establishing a Research Agenda_.  John Falk and Lynn
     Dierking, Editors. Washington: American Association of Museums.
     Retrieved November 26, 2001 from
     http://www.astc.org/resource/educator/priorknw.htm

An extensive review of the impact of prior learning on new learning
experiences from the perspective of Piaget, Dewey and Vygotsky. In
this review prior learning, often viewed as a challenge to be
overcome, is seen as a crucial part of the process forcing a shift
away from viewing learning as the accumulation of information to a
process of conceptual change. For the author this implies change for
designers:

   First, designers should seek to refine prior knowledge, and not
   attempt to replace learners' understanding with their own. Second,
   designers must anticipate a long-term learning process, of which the
   short-term experience will form an incremental part. Third, designers
   must remember that learning depends on social interaction;
   conversations shape the form and content of the concepts that learners
   construct. Only part of specialized knowledge can exist explicitly as
   information; the rest must come from engagement in the practice of
   discourse of the community.

These changes are supported by Piaget, Dewey and Vygotsky:

   Piaget emphasizes psychological changes to schemata, Dewey
   emphasizes the transformative possibilities in experience, and
   Vygotsky emphasizes the role of social interaction in reconstructing
   the relationship of structures to experience.

Piaget's thoughts are reminescent of Zerubavel's fine lines:
encountering conceptual boundaries leads to learning.


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