W. Pan and I. Hawryszkiewycz (Australia)
constructivist learning, learning environment, software agent, Web, personalized learning, collaborative learning
There has been a widespread increase to conduct teaching and learning over the Internet. However, many instruction sites just provide teaching materials on the Internet to support traditional face-to-face methods. Learners then passively retrieve information from the Web pages. They are not engaged in actively constructing meaningful understandings of the topics being studied by using constructivist learning methods. This paper proposes that software agents be used to develop constructivist learning environments (CLEs) on the Web, to assist learners to construct new knowledge. The constructivist theory of learning is first reviewed and the characteristics of the CLEs are then outlined. The paper then suggests a process constructed out of constructivist learning methods over the Internet. Ways of using software agent technology to assist learners in constructivist learning are then investigated, along with the relevant implementation approaches. Finally future work in this area is presented.
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