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Constructivism Versus Objectivism: Implications for Interaction, Course Design, and Evaluation in Distance Education.

Charalambos Vrasidas, Jul 28, 2004
Commentary by Stephen Downes

Good overview and introduction to the debate between constructivism and objectivism. Drawing from the description in this paper allows me to draw the distance between my own thought and constructivism.

Constructivist: "There is a real world that sets boundaries to what we can experience. However, reality is local and there are multiple realities." My position: there may be a real world, but my experience of it is personal and may be only partially commensurate with the experiences of others.
Constructivists: "The structure of the world is created in the mind through interaction with the world and is based on interpretation. Symbols are products of culture and they are used to construct reality." My position: my understanding of the world is not so much a product of interpretation as it is a reflection; I do not 'interpret' experience, I filter it and recombine it.
Constructivists: "The mind creates symbols by perceiving and interpreting the world." My position: symbols are the consequence of successive abstraction along one or more dimensions of experience; this abstraction is typically a passive process rather than an act of intention.
Constructivists: "Human thought is imaginative and develops out of perception, sensory experiences, and social interaction." My position: social interaction is only a subset of sensory experience and not a different kind of experience; imagination is the reflection and recombination of (filtered) experiences.
Constructivists: "Meaning is a result of an interpretive process and it depends on the knowers' experiences and understanding." My position: 'meaning' is the property assigned to observable communicative entities (such as words) and is exhibited (and understood) solely through one's use of such entities.

CRLFIn summary, from my perspective, constructivism is a kind of homonculus theory; instead of talking with the person outside, it posits a little person inside the mind who performs all those incredible intellectual feats that objectivism ascribes to the whole person. But it is no less miraculous to say that a person's mind 'constructs reality' than to say that a person constructs reality, and no more explanatorily potent. The mind isn't a little computer with pre-designed routines designed to build internal (symbolic) representations. More on constructivism.

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