Learning is Scaffolded Construction

Standard models of representation as encodings of what is represented yield models of knowledge as banks of such encodings. Learning, in such a view, is the transmission of new encodings into those storage banks in the mind. Technology, therefore, can be a wonderful aid in enhancing the accessibility and transmission of these encoded representations — in enhancing learning as viewed in this model. Every component and every step of this framework, however, is false, beginning with the central presuppositions about the nature of representation. This chapter outlines the fatal critiques of standard encoding models, introduces an alternative model of representation that solves and dissolves these aporia, and shows that this alternative model of representation forces a model of learning as construction, and a functional model of scaffolding that puts scaffolding, selfscaffolding, and the scaffolding of self-scaffolding, at the center of educational aims. This framework places technology at the center of an agentive and social process that participates in and nurtures such scaffolding, rather than just a high bandwidth storage and retrieval device.

[1]  Mark H. Bickhard,et al.  Why Children Don't Have To Solve the Frame Problems: Cognitive Representations Are Not Encodings. , 2001 .

[2]  M. Bickhard.  Critical principles: on the negative side of rationality , 2002 .

[3]  J. Fodor,et al.  Concepts: a potboiler , 1994, Cognition.

[4]  M. Litch,et al.  On Explaining Behavior , 2000 .

[5]  Mark H. Bickhard,et al.  Interactivism and genetic epistemology , 1989 .

[6]  John E. Smith.  The Reconception of Experience in Peirce, James and Dewey , 1985 .

[7]  J. Edwards.  Genetic Epistemology , 1971 .

[8]  G. Ferro-Luzzi.  On Evolutionary Epistemology , 1982, Current Anthropology.

[9]  M. Martin.  White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice , 1995 .

[10]  L. Mandolesi.  Physiology of Behavior , 2002 .

[11]  Mark H. Bickhard,et al.  Knowing Levels and Developmental Stages , 1986 .

[12]  G. Shields,et al.  Process Theories: Crossdisciplinary Studies in Dynamic Categories , 2005, Process Studies.

[13]  Jerry A. Fodor,et al.  Fodor's guide to mental representation: the intelligent auntie's Vade-Mecum , 1993 .

[14]  Jerry A. Fodor,et al.  1 A Situated Grandmother? Some Remarks on Proposals by Barwise and Perry , 1987 .

[15]  E. Gibson,et al.  On the Nature of Representation: A Case Study of James Gibson's Theory of Perception , 1983 .

[16]  R. L. Campbell,et al.  Types of constraints on development: An interactivist approach , 1992 .

[17]  M. Bickhard.  Some notes on internal and external relations and representation , 2003 .

[18]  J. Fodor,et al.  How direct is visual perception?: Some reflections on Gibson's “ecological approach” , 1981, Cognition.

[19]  Mark H. Bickhard,et al.  Foundational issues in artificial intelligence and cognitive science - impasse and solution , 1995, Advances in psychology.

[20]  J. Fodor.  The Modularity of mind. An essay on faculty psychology , 1986 .

[21]  R. Cummins.  Representations, targets, and attitudes , 1996 .

[22]  J. Piaget.  The construction of reality in the child , 1954 .

[23]  J. Fodor,et al.  Diffraction Theory , 2019, Asymptotic Diffraction Theory and Nuclear Scattering.

[24]  R. Kirk.  Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories , 1985 .

[25]  Mark H. Bickhard,et al.  PROCESS AND EMERGENCE: NORMATIVE FUNCTION AND REPRESENTATION , 2003 .