Welcome to the Introduction to the Learning Sciences course website for the Spring 2008 semester at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. This site contains student work from the course, so access is currently restricted to members of the class.
If you are interested in the course but are not enrolled, please feel free to look over the course description below as well as the online the syllabus. You can also write to the instructor for more information.
Learning takes place all around us -- in chance encounters and in the midst of doing other things as much as in schools and other institutions. What distinguishes classrooms and other settings organized for learning is that they are designed. Educators have made choices about content (what people will learn), activities (how people might best learn), and organization (when, with whom, and under what circumstances people will learn).
Ideally, the choices educators make should be guided by an understanding of how people think and how people learn.
This course is the beginning of a two-semester sequence on the foundations of the learning sciences as guidelines for the design of learning environments. The course is open to all students with an interest in the study of learning, but the syllabus, course work, and class discussions are designed primarily for students beginning doctoral-level study of education rather than to practitioners or those pursuing professional degrees.
In this two-semester course sequence, we will address the learning sciences from two distinct perspectives about the nature of mind. One emphasizes thinking as a variety of "internal" processes, including: perception; creation, use, and interpretation of symbols of various kinds; analytical and categorical reasoning; and holistic interpretation of the contexts for individual action. This "symbolic" view of cognition looks at thinking as an interaction between an individual and his or her external world shaped by the propensities and abilities of an individual thinker, particularly (though not exclusively) the way in which individuals represent the external world in internal symbols.
An alternative perspective on cognition emphasizes thinking as a form of mediated activity. Mediation is construed quite broadly, including language and other systems of signs, forms of social practice, and artifacts that aid thought (like blackboards and computer technologies). This perspective is often referred to as "sociocultural," emphasizing contexts as forums for socially constituted practices. In this view, thinking is a matter of participation in forms of practice.
There is a tendency to place these two general perspectives in competition; in this sequence of courses, we will examine them as alternative levels of description -- just as in biology, where descriptions of populations and of organisms employ different models and concepts. Organisms participate in populations and populations are made up of organisms. Both perspectives are important in understanding the whole system.