Hi everyone,
I've never had to make the big changeover from believing that knowledge and know-how can be transmitted from one person's mind to another's by presenting content. I was brought up to believe that we all have work things out for ourselves in order to create our own skills and our own understanding of the world around us. However elegantly a teacher presents content: orally, in a book, on the blackboard, in a PowerPoint, a video presentation or whatever, it doesn't just jump into the learner's mind without them carrying out mental and often physical actions to integrate new skills.
I'm not trying here to argue in favour of the constructivist theory, but one of the points I've heard made in relation to the new file picker system in Moodle is, given that it is based on constructivist and socio-constructivist principles, Moodle's main objective is not to be a file repository.
My question is, has anyone actually moved from a transmission mode teacher to a (mainly) constructivist teacher because of having used Moodle? I know of Martin's 10 stage Progression, which is intuitively attractive, but is there any evidence that people actually move through these stages?
I have only anecdotal evidence, but the constructivist teachers I know often describe quite a rather different process. They get more and more dissatisfied with the results they're getting from using the transmissive mode and start searching from something different. One day they stumble upon a demo or walk into a colleague's classroom and see something that makes them exclaim: "That's what I was looking for!"
Did Moodle give you a "Ah, ha!" moment like that? Or did it gradually change the way you functioned?
Cheers,
Glenys