Teaching in the Zone with Sakai

This Web Design course portal is a social constructivist framework informed by the learning principles codified by the National Research Council (2000) in their canonical work entitled How People Learn. Chief among these principles is engaging students in a dynamic conversational framework that establishes early in the course a dialog among students and professor. Having students articulate their goals early in the course and hone them dialogically creates a bond that the professor later uses to scaffold students when they begin encountering difficulty. This is when students enter an educational space that the great Russian psychologist Vygotsky (1978) refers to as the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). I refer to it simply as the zone. Coaching students in their zone is the most important principle of e-learning, and I was happy to discover that Sakai supports it extremely well.

References

National Research Council. (2000). How People Learn (expanded edition edited by J.D. Bransford, A.L. Brown, and R.R. Cocking). Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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