ABSTRACT

THE ACCRETION of several decades of inquiry into the ecology of education has drawn attention not only to the interpersonal dimension of learning, but also to its cultural context and the material features contained therein. The constructivist metatheory that most educators have adopted makes claims not merely about social influences on thinking (as some information-processing cognitivists grudgingly speak of them), but, in addition, argues that mostperhaps all-higher level mental processing is social processing, and, as such, is susceptible to the vagaries of everyday collaboration with others whom we undertake to participate in the activities that comprise what we call living. For this reason, we have seen that the metatheory, in its various guises, has been interpreted as a clarion call for making learning authentic-a call that has been heeded by many educators in a variety of fields and subspecialties (Jonassen, Mayes, & McAleese, 1993). Constructivism’s mandate for authenticating learning is clearly observed in the field of educational technology where even basic technological dimensions and modalities such as interactivity, networking, and multimedia are re-envisaged and recast as features that further the constructivist goals of making school learning correspond, to as great a degree possible, to the learning that results from everyday social interaction (Jones, Knuth, & Duffy, 1993).