EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING THROUGH CONSTRUCTIVIST LEARNING TOOLS

摘要

As computer-based visualizations like those in virtual reality and modelling for design and idea generation become more common, research interest may shift into a new and highly intriguing field: the question of how to promote a new type of visualization that is based on human conceptual imagination rather than the conventional perception of the 3D world around us. This is not an essentially new step, as we have already extended our naturalistic way of displaying what we saw into the more or less abstracted indication of what we take as crucial behind the meaning and impact of the issue, as in, for example, quantitative graphs, schematic displays of complex functioning, not to forget the topographical map itself. Maps may suggest that you see a landscape from a bird's-eye perspective. However, we soon perceive that without filtering and articulation there is no conveyance of thought and navigation. As visualization techniques develop, we attempt to display conceptual entities rather than reminiscences to objects and physical space. Concept mapping is the most salient exemplar in this new line. The paradigm is that any mental entity or process may appear in a spatial configuration of both concrete and abstract ideas. The further formalisms―how to control expressiveness and topology by pruning and zooming―are a matter of conventions that should fit in the contract between a task, its user, and the concrete representational device like a white board or a computer screen. Some tasks inherently aim at configurational awareness, such as planning and decision-making. Some tasks address the more intuitional stages of human thinking, like learning, persuasion, or worship. Concerning learning and teaching, the so-called instructional approach has almost become synonymous with effective cognitive growth. Over more recent years we have seen, however, that the cybernetic aspiration of the 1960s and 1970 has mainly led to an over-organization of study programmes and to students complaining that the school is like a factory and at the same time like a hospital. The term existential learning attempts to indicate the complement to this, in which the student is the main character in his or her longer-term development. Here we again start to accept that learning has lot to do with mental and emotional growth in which information access plays only a subordinate role.