Technology is used to keep children actively engaged, constructive, collaborative, intentional, complex, contextual, conversational, and reflective.
Active Engagement: Children experience a learning process where they are responsible for the result. In natural learning situations, learners and performers of all ages, without the intervention of formal instruction, can acquire sophisticated skills and advanced knowledge about what they are learning. For instance, before playing sandlot baseball, do kids subject themselves to lectures and multiple choice examinations about the theory of games, the aerodynamics of orbs, and vector forces? No! They start swinging the bat and chasing fly balls, and they negotiate the rules as they play the game. Through formal and informal apprenticeships and communities and play and work, children develop skills and knowledge which they then share with other children with whom they learn and practice these skills. In all of these situations, children are actively manipulating the objects and tools of the trade and learning by reflecting on what they have done.
Constructive: Children integrate new ideas with prior knowledge in order to make sense or make meaning or reconcile a discrepancy, curiosity, or puzzle. They construct their own meaning for different phenomena. The models that they build to explain things are simple and unsophisticated at first, but with experience, support, and reflection, they become increasingly complex. It is impossible for children to know what the teacher knows. Children can only know what they know, and are supported in the process of coming to know.
Collaborative: Children naturally work in learning and knowledge building communities, exploiting each others skills while providing social support and modeling and observing the contributions of each member. Children naturally seek out others to help them to solve problems and perform tasks. Individualized, reproductive methods of instruction cheat children out of more natural and productive modes of thinking.
Intentional: All human behavior is goal directed. That is, everything that we do is intended to fulfill some goal. That goal may be simple, like satiating hunger or getting more comfortable, or it may be more complex, like developing new career skills. When children are actively and willfully trying to achieve a cognitive goal, they think and learn more. Learning environments need to support children in articulating what their goals are in any learning situation.
Complex: Children do not need to have concepts oversimplified to understand them. The world is not a simple place and problems have multiple components and multiple perspectives and cannot be solved in predictable ways. Unless children are required to engage in higher order thinking, they develop oversimplified views of the world.
Contextual: By creating adventures with mission tasks, children learn better. A great deal of research has shown that problem-based learning environments create transferable knowledge.
Conversational: Dialog is essential to learning. When children use technology such as computers it supports the conversational process. The children develop an awareness of many different views on a particular subject as they engage others, developing multiple ways of viewing and solving problems.
Reflective: When children describe what they have built or designed the whole learning experience is reinforced. Technology-based learning makes it easier for children to articulate not only what they are doing, but also their decisions, their strategies, and the answers they have found. When they reflect on the project and the process, they understand more and can apply the learning to new situations.
Links to independent sources of information on Constructivist Learning:
How to Improve Your New-Media Parenting Skills
Ghost in the Machine: Seymour Papert on How Computers Fundamentally Change the Way Kids Learn