Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age

8

Putting Learning in Its Proper Place

When Marlene Scardamalia and I started using the term “knowledge building” around 1987, we had never encountered it before.¹ A decade later, “knowledge building” was in common use, but like many terms in popular educational discourse, its meaning had become degraded. It became merely a synonym for learning, a term to be used when one wants to add a constructivist flourish to whatever one is saying about that well-worn topic. We saw it as something different, although it took several years to work out the nature ...