Psychotextual Notations of Constructivistic Distance Education/ Jonassen

Jonassen(1991) notes that many educators and cognitive psychologists have applied constructivism to the development of learning environments. From these applications, he has isolated a number of design principles:

1. Create real-world environments that employ the context in which learning is relevant;

2. Focus on realistic approaches to solving real-world problems;

3. The instructor is a coach and analyzer of the strategies used to solve these problems;

4. Stress conceptual interrelatedness, providing multiple representations or perspectives on the content;

5. Instructional goals and objectives should be negotiated and not imposed;

6. Evaluation should serve as a self-analysis tool;

7. Provide tools and environments that help learners interpret the multiple perspectives of the world;

8. Learning should be internally controlled and mediated by the learner (pp.11-12).

Jonassen (1994) summarizes what he refers to as "the implications of constructivism for instructional design". The following principles illustrate how knowledge construction can be facilitated:

1. Provide multiple representations of reality;

2. Represent the natural complexity of the real world;

3. Focus on knowledge construction, not reproduction;

4. Present authentic tasks (contextualizing rather than abstracting instruction);

5. Provide real-world, case-based learning environments, rather than pre-determined instructional sequences;

6. Foster reflective practice;

7. Enable context-and content dependent knowledge construction;

8. Support collaborative construction of knowledge through social negotiation (p.35).



One of my goals may be to address these comments from the psychocontextual notations of the Humanist list of practitioners.
These steps would elucidate the application processes and possibly, when applied to the context of my work in the course
sections, affirm or dissuade from the possibilities of confirming the integration of the practice of the conjoinedness of
the Humanistic and Constructivistic approaches in Distance Teaching and Learning.