Learning Sciences theories and Elearning

Hoadley, C. (2007). Theories and methods from learning sciences for e-learning. In R. Andrews & C. Haythornthwaite (Eds.), Handbook of E-Learning Research (pp. 139-156). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.


Goals of  Elearning Research: to provide theories, tools, activities and design models.


Scope and goals of Learning Sciences: To understand what makes learning environments work and how to design better ones.


History of the Learning Theories
Freud's psychoanalysis is the beginning of psychology. Then comes behaviorism, by Skinner, as a reaction to Freud's psychoanalysis. Behaviorism thought learning was a simple conditioning . Learners are conditioned to perform correctly by using feedback and conditioning. According to Ragan and Smith (1999), behaviorists look at learning as  the acquisition of a new behavior based on environmental conditions.


Then something similar but not identical to behaviorism, instructivism, which holds that people learn things through simple transmission of messages. However, in behaviorism, people learn by being conditioned to respond to a certain stimuli. Radical behaviorists reject the mental state, thoughts, feelings, etc., and consider mind as a black box. 


Contrast to behaviorism,  Dewey developed progressive education theory, which is based on more practice and claims that education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. There is a strong connection between the learner, social context, and resources. Learning is by doing and authentic experiences. 


Jean Piaget comes with developmentalism, where he thinks a child's development resembles the biological development of an organism. Piaget's constructivism is the one of the most important theory in education.  Constuctivism states that individual must create ideas and ways of thinking based on his/her experience, learner's mental construction is the cause of learning. 
Late 20th century, as the computers get more and more accessible, information processing theory  became powerful. This theory sees mind as a computer and learning as the process of the computer encoding the information.   


Finally Vygotsky, came up zone of proximal development, that describes type of problem solving which cannot be done without the help of an assistance, scaffolding. This also forms the bases of situated learning theory, by Lave and Wenger, which argues that learning is more of a social process than a mental one (as opposed to Piaget's mental construction), that processes through enculturation, where learners pick up habits and practices of the society.


Distributed cognition: which analyzes social and cultural phenomenon from the point of view of people and their tools as a distributed information processing systems.
Cognitive apprenticeship: in which learners are viewed as supported through cognitive processes by social actors and technologies.
Papert's constructionism: discovery learning by constructing a meaningful product
Learning sciences are pluralistic, multi disciplinary, studies learning in real settings, and hence need an existing functional environment. This way it would be practical and support usable knowledge.  Here the design is the focus as the scientists need a working environment.