Modeling and Visualization Across Learning Contexts

Dewey's (1956) insight that the "impulses" of the learner are the real foundation of the curriculum is more relevant today than it was when he first formulated it nearly a century ago. As the objects of learning become more complex and the applications more demanding the notion that schooling is about the imparting of simple schemas for knowledge appears less and less tenable. In particular, the opportunities that new technologies afford, coupled with the challenges they imply, mean that learning must be conceived more explicitly, as it has always been in fact, as a process of constructing meaning out of ill-structured data. When we conceive learning in this way, it becomes clear that it occurs through a process in which the learner progressively expands on prior interests and knowledge to create new knowledge. As Dewey wrote much later in his life (Dewey & Bentley, 1949), we need to understand knowing, rather than knowledge.