Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Education in an Open Informational World

Item

Title

Education in an Open Informational World

Author

Scardamalia, Marlene

Bereiter, Carl

Research Area

Social Institutions

Topic

Educational Institutions

Abstract

Education now functions in an open informational world in which there are essentially no boundaries constraining the information that may be brought to bear on any topic, question, or activity. Changes in the form and connectedness of information are giving rise to new issues concerning coherence, sustained work with ideas, and complexity. In place of the extended text of a well‐crafted book, with its carefully developed line of thought, information on the web is frequently presented as hypertext—relatively small packets of information complexly interlinked. It is now up to the reader to construct a connecting line of thought. The ability to produce coherent knowledge out of such fragmentary information now has a name: transliteracy. Transliteracy requires not only skill in using new information media but ability to carry on sustained integrative work with ideas—an ability traditionally the mark of a skilled teacher but now increasingly the shared capacity of a knowledge‐building community. Whereas traditionally the skilled teacher has smoothed the way to learning by simplifying complex content and problems, functioning in the open informational world requires that learners be able and willing to work with complexity and with problems that have not been structured for them. A current trend is to bring these requirements together in a focus on the “big ideas” of the disciplines. A number of “constructivist” educational approaches engage students in creative knowledge work and problem solving but neglect the sine qua non of contemporary knowledge building: students taking collective responsibility for idea development and improvement.

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Identifier

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extracted text

Education in an Open
Informational World
MARLENE SCARDAMALIA and CARL BEREITER

Abstract
Education now functions in an open informational world in which there are essentially no boundaries constraining the information that may be brought to bear on
any topic, question, or activity. Changes in the form and connectedness of information are giving rise to new issues concerning coherence, sustained work with ideas,
and complexity. In place of the extended text of a well-crafted book, with its carefully developed line of thought, information on the web is frequently presented as
hypertext—relatively small packets of information complexly interlinked. It is now up
to the reader to construct a connecting line of thought. The ability to produce coherent knowledge out of such fragmentary information now has a name: transliteracy.
Transliteracy requires not only skill in using new information media but ability to
carry on sustained integrative work with ideas—an ability traditionally the mark of
a skilled teacher but now increasingly the shared capacity of a knowledge-building
community. Whereas traditionally the skilled teacher has smoothed the way to learning by simplifying complex content and problems, functioning in the open informational world requires that learners be able and willing to work with complexity
and with problems that have not been structured for them. A current trend is to
bring these requirements together in a focus on the “big ideas” of the disciplines.
A number of “constructivist” educational approaches engage students in creative
knowledge work and problem solving but neglect the sine qua non of contemporary
knowledge building: students taking collective responsibility for idea development
and improvement.

Schools have historically functioned in a relatively closed informational
world. Textbooks and lecturers were often the sole source of academic
subject matter. New information media, starting with radio, began gradually
to change that, but the change was marginal until the advent of the World
Wide Web. We now live in an open informational world in which there
are essentially no boundaries constraining the information that may be

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

brought to bear on any topic, question, or activity.1 College lecturers are
liable to find their statements challenged by information retrieved as they
speak by students armed with web-enabled mobile devices. At the school
level, however, old structures persist, and so information openness finds
its place mainly in the traditional research paper or, as it is often called at
the elementary level, “project.” Such projects may allow students to explore
topics of interest drawing on the vast information resources of the web, but
they generally play a peripheral role in the main instructional program,
which continues in its closed-world ways.
An emerging research trend finds learning scientists, information and
media scientists, and management scientists looking more deeply into the
implications of the opening up of the informational world, including implications for the design of education. Relevant strands of research have not yet
come together into full-fledged interdisciplinary research programs, but connections are forming. The most conspicuous effects of new media arise from
their enabling of widespread social interaction. Thus, we have Massive Open
Online Courses (MOOCs), which exploit the web’s ability to deliver rich
content to a selected (or self-selected) but widely dispersed audience, and
a variety of social networking websites, which provide meeting places for
widely dispersed people who wish to interact socially for whatever reason.
Both of these are receiving considerable and well-deserved attention from
behavioral scientists. With respect to openness of the informational world,
arguably the outstanding web-based innovation is Wikipedia and the many
other wikis inspired by it. Here we have a reference source of a size exceeding
by an order of magnitude that of any printed encyclopedia. More remarkable
than its size, however, is the fact that its content is user-generated. This has
made reliability of information a major concern, and one frequently noted
in the education literature (see, for instance, articles, links, and an on-going
poll at edutopia.org). The reliability of information presented to students is
a perennial problem brought into sharper relief by the new media, but the
more important consequence of the opening up of the informational world is
that students themselves must begin to exercise judgment about the information they process into knowledge. We will have more to say about this later,
in the context of a general expansion in students’ collective responsibility
for knowledge advancement. Our immediate focus, however, is on issues
that involve changes in the form and connectedness of information and that
imply changes in the roles of both information providers and information
users. The issues are coherence, sustained work with ideas, and complexity.
1. Curtis Bonk (2009) has investigated the many aspects of what he terms the “open educational
world,” in which “Anyone can now learn anything from anyone at anytime” (p. 16). The opening up of the
informational world may be seen as one aspect of this openness in education, but it is also a phenomenon
affecting all areas of knowledge-based work.

Education in an Open Informational World

3

COHERENT KNOWLEDGE: FROM TEXT TO HYPERTEXT
TO SUBTEXT
A well-crafted textbook or lecture does not only deliver information. The
pieces of information fit together. There is a line of thought, and if you follow
it the topic will make sense as a whole and not merely as a collection of facts
and ideas. What has been called “considerate text” is a discourse that makes
connections between ideas explicit and easy to recognize. MOOCs, because
of the extensive work that goes into preparing the lectures and instructional
texts, sometimes set new standards of informational coherence. However, the
more pervasive way of presenting organized information on the web is well
represented by Wikipedia. A topic that would normally occupy a whole book
is introduced in an article that would print out to 20 pages or less but contains numerous links to other articles that cover subtopics or related topics;
these also contain hyperlinks and so on. The result is a “hypertext,” which if
all the pieces were assembled would constitute a text of enormous size but
which readers are expected to traverse in limited ways according to their own
interests (Bromme & Stahl, 2005). This can lead to problems of distraction and
losing the thread, but in any case the job of putting the pieces together into
coherent knowledge is left to the reader. There is no overseeing author or
integrator doing this for us, as is the case of the well-crafted book or course.
The ability to produce coherent knowledge out of fragmentary information now has a name: transliteracy, a term introduced by media analyst Alan
Liu.2 An older term, multiliteracy, refers to ability to use a variety of media
for obtaining and communicating information. Transliteracy assumes multiliteracy and adds the essential element of coherence making. Coherence
making can be, and for most learners must be a group activity. One might
suppose that the “social web” (Semple, 2012), with all its ways of bringing
people together, would be a lush ecosystem of people working together to
produce meaning, but the opposite is more nearly the case: pages of sentences and pictures held together by little more than the personality of the
page owner. In our web browsing we have followed the discussions on a
number of news sites where important issues are commented on. There are
occasional insightful or informative comments, but further comments seldom build on these. There may be collaborative belief reinforcement, but that
is something quite different from collaborating to make sense of something
in need of explanation—almost the polar opposite, in fact.
It is not that human beings are averse to collaborative explanation. After a
headline-grabbing event, even strangers at a bus stop may enjoy a minute
or two of collaborative theory building. School could be a place where
2. Consistent with their focus on implications of new information media, transliteracy researchers
have shown a distinct preference for non-print means of disseminating their work. Currently the best
way to gain access is through the Transliteracies Project website at transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

collaborative explanation building enjoys a longer life span, but unfortunately that is not the norm in most classroom discourse. Students take
turns expressing loosely related thoughts. Organized debate gives more
structure to the discourse, but it tends to divide information along pro-con
lines rather than integrating information into more coherent understanding.
A recent trend that shows up in both curriculum materials and tests is
having students draw conclusions from two or more contrasting documents.
Although current efforts tend to be focused on deciding which source to
trust rather than on reaching coherent conclusions, they at least represent
a start on transliteracy, which we predict will come to be recognized as the
most distinctly “twenty-first century” of twenty-first -century skills.3
The subtext of a book or other communicative object is content that is not
explicit but that may be inferred or intuited. The subtext may or may not
be intended by the author, but in any case it is a mental construction by the
perceiver. In the case of hypertext, where there may be many authors with
diverse intentions, the subtext may be thought of as the main text. It is the
fabric of meanings that holds the pieces together, and of course it varies from
reader to reader, depending on each reader’s intentions and path through
the hypertext maze. In the case of conventionally authored literary works,
explicating the subtext represents a secondary sort of literary creation, practiced by literary critics. It is presumably a learnable craft and one that can
be extended beyond literary texts to informative and ideational texts. The
coherence-making aspect of transliteracy could be defined as the process of
constructing a subtext out of a hypertext.
SUSTAINED WORK WITH IDEAS
Knowledge work is work with ideas. Sometimes the ideas are embodied
in tools, artifacts, or material actions and so the work has an observable
physical character, but insofar as it is knowledge work it has a conceptual
layer where the things operated on—generated, categorized, combined,
transformed, and so on—are the immaterial entities collectively known as
ideas. Ideas have started coming into their own in education. Curriculum
standards and guidelines now call for explicit attention to “big ideas,”
whereas previously ideas were hidden behind specifications of topics and
procedures. Ability to make difficult ideas accessible to students—by means
of definitions, demonstrations, illuminating examples, and so forth—has
been a long-recognized mark of good teaching, figuring prominently in
3. As transliteracy has begun to gain recognition (more in library science than in education at present)
most attention has been given to its multimedia aspects. This is unfortunate because these have already
been receiving ample attention (including theoretical attention) for decades under the rubric of “multiliteracy” or “multimedia learning,” whereas education apparently lacks a theory of how transliterate
coherence building is even possible.

Education in an Open Informational World

5

student ratings of course instructors. With the opening up of the informational world, however, the teacher’s task becomes less straightforward. A
large body of research on students’ misconceptions had already shown
that “teaching for understanding” often failed. Now, with a diversity of
information resources of varying accuracy and clarity, and with a diversity
of ideas to be grasped rather than a limited set of ideas selected in part
because of their teachability, teaching for understanding becomes even more
problematic. More responsibility for such idea work as defining, identifying
positive and negative instances, relating ideas to one another and to larger
contexts, and producing explanations falls to the learners. Education needs
to prepare students for this.
Striking the right balance between understanding and fact learning has
always been a problem for curriculum designers. However, the greatly
increased accessibility of factual information has led to technobabble about
“just-in-time” knowledge and about teaching internet search skills instead
of facts. This ignores the body of research from the 1970s showing the strong
effects of prior knowledge on comprehension and learning (Schallert, 1982).
While there may be “just-in-time” information, there is no such thing as
“just-in-time” understanding.
Research on conceptual understanding has shown that success often
depends on students trying to understand (Vosniadou, 2003). The need
for intentionality in understanding may seem self-evident, but in fact a
large part of our understanding of the world is picked up effortlessly in
the course of pursuing goals other than understanding. Understanding
becomes problematic when what needs to be understood is complex. Given
normal experience with countable quantities, young children will acquire a
sufficient understanding of whole numbers, cardinality, and addition and
subtraction. However, when it comes to algorithms for adding and subtracting multidigit numbers, understanding is not a natural result of working
with such quantities. Educators have tried to craft understanding by having
children do computations using blocks of one, ten, and a hundred sections,
so that they would need to trade a tens block for ten ones, or vice-versa, and
so on. In an experiment where students worked the same problems, alternating between using blocks and using the numerical algorithms they
were taught, Omanson and Resnick found that many children learned to
carry out both kinds of operations but never saw the connection—never
caught on that the block trading and the symbolic regrouping were the same
mathematical operation. Some did grasp it, however, and when interviewed
they revealed that they had recognized there ought to be a connection
and tried to figure out what it was. The same phenomenon appeared in
college physics. Provided with worked examples, students would apply
the examples to solving textbook physics problems but most would not

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

learn the physics the examples were intended to convey. Those who did
grasp the physical principles engaged in what Chi and van Lehn called
“self-explanation”—trying to explain why the worked examples worked.
Along with research showing the pervasiveness of instruction-resistant
misconceptions, these studies indicate that even in the relatively closed
world of conventional curricula students need to do serious work with
ideas and not merely receive them passively and carry out prescribed
tasks in the least effortful manner possible. The opening up of the information world has heightened this imperative both by distributing the need
for cognitive effort over a wider range of things to be understood, and
by increasing the importance of understanding as compared to factual
memory.
COMPLEXITY: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT
That tomorrow’s citizens will have to deal with a heightened level of
complexity is already a platitude. It draws approving nods but little action.
Meanwhile, today’s citizens are flocking to ideologies that offer them
monumentally simplified representations of the world. For instance, the
vast majority of Americans reject the idea of Darwinian evolution (they
either reject species evolution altogether or else believe it has to have been
intelligently guided). This suggests that the concept of natural selection is
just too complex for many people to grasp. The truth is, however, that the
world is too complex for any of us to deal with in the systematically rational
way that we can deal with more constrained artificial problems such as
sudoku puzzles. With some finality, Herbert Simon (1991) declared:
Whatever their computational powers, present or future computers are
no match for the complexity of the real world. They (and we) are forever
condemned to carrying out our reasoning with highly simplified models of
tiny parts of the entire reality that confronts us.

Two factors can cause complexity to get out of hand: combinatorial
explosion (exponential increase in the number of possibilities as the train
of decisions gets longer) and working memory limitations (the fact that
humans can hold only a small number of items in mind to be acted upon
coordinately). Computers are great at generating combinations but the
number can quickly exceed the ability of either human or artificial agents
to evaluate them. Computer search can go a long way toward making up
for deficiencies in long-term memory, but when it comes to helping people
make up for working memory limitations, available computer tools are
not much improvement over a pencil and a sheet of paper. That may well

Education in an Open Informational World

7

change as computers keep getting smarter, but for the present we are stuck
with using simplified models that are hopefully not so simplified that they
miss the essence of the problem we are trying to deal with.
All things considered, most people do fairly well dealing with complexity at a practical level and some even thrive on it. However, if complexity is
getting worse and more pervasive, as Homer-Dixon (2000) has persuasively
argued, we need to find ways of doing better and helping more people cope
successfully with it. Complexity has its own body of theory, best known to
educators as dynamic systems theory. One trend already beginning to appear
in schools is explicit teaching of systems concepts or at least familiarizing students with them by means of simulations. A different, though related kind
of effort is teaching “systems thinking”—which unfortunately is about as
ill-defined as a curriculum objective can possibly be. Skill objectives are now
appearing that call for students being able to “use systems thinking,” but
often the only definite objective is using systems concepts to explain things.
Every up-to-date school subject that has theoretical content will require this,
and so treating it as a separate objective is questionable. The real challenge is
using systems ideas in solving complex real-world problems. Here complexity science has scant offerings, but is clearly the direction to go in seeking
what Homer-Dixon calls “ingenuity” and defines as “ideas applied to solve
practical social and technical problems.”
In order to give substance to the goal of promoting systems thinking, more
research is needed on how successful thinkers actually deal with complex
problems. A good start was research in the 1980s on mental models and
analogies. As carried forward by Philip Johnson-Laird (1983, 2009) and
others, the upshot is that human beings do not function like logic machines,
even imperfect ones, but instead harness a variety of resources not routinely
available to computers and which, though makeshift and imprecise, do
manage to circumvent combinatorial explosion and working memory limitations. These resources include unconscious inference, imagery, affective
responses, mental modeling, and analogy. For any complex situation, a virtually unlimited number of simplified decision or explanatory models could
be generated. We of course do not simplify reality in such a crank-it-out way.
Instead we say things like “The essence of this problem (or situation, concept, plan, et cetera) is . . . .” A “sense of essence,” as Douglas Hofstadter has
said, is the essence of sense. It is what enables us to recognize good models
and productive analogies from among the vast number of possibilities that
equally fit formal (logical) requirements. It is an important edge we have
over thinking machines and is one that education is still a long way from
exploiting.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

BEYOND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SKILLS
The misfit that arises from trying to insert new ideas into predetermined frameworks is nowhere more evident than in the widely heralded
“twenty-first-century skills” movement (Johnson, 2009). Terms like “knowledge creation,” “knowledge society,” and “innovation-driven” signal a new
set of imperatives that education is expected to address in some manner. The
way education authorities around the world customarily address such challenges is by adding new elements to existing categories: new skills entered
into the objectives list, new subjects into the subjects list, new tests into
the assessments list, new teacher workshops into the professional services
list. This is essentially the same approach that was taken in back-to-basics
movements such as No Child Left Behind: define objectives, institute tests
to drive schools to pursue those objectives, and then offer guidance in how
to teach to them.
No Child Left Behind and similar approaches to educational improvement
have had questionable results and have raised doubts about the whole notion
of using tests to drive instruction (Ravitch, 2011). However, there is this much
to be said for “back to basics”: Unlike “twenty-first-century skills,” basic literacy and numeracy are already well established as teachable and testable
skills, there exists a body of “best practice,” which, however imperfect, is
demonstrably more effective than no teaching at all, and it is reasonable to
expect that just by trying harder some gains can be achieved. Above all, it
is reasonable to assume that gains in literacy and numeracy achieved within
the school context will have value in modern life outside the school. This
is not true of most “twenty-first century skills” gains. They are a mixed bag.
Computer skills are definable, testable, and teachable and so they can readily
fit within existing curriculum frameworks, but there are questions of obsolescence and how much instruction is really necessary—questions that do
not apply so obviously to the traditional academic skills. There are tests of
critical thinking and creativity, and these have some predictive validity, but
it is not clear whether these are skills at all, as distinct from psychological traits, mindsets, or habits. Training and other learning activities can produce gains in test scores, but there is little or no evidence that such gains
have any value outside the immediate learning context. (For instance, a common form of creativity test calls for rapidly listing as many uses as possible for a familiar object such as a coat hanger. Thinking of novel uses may
have real-world value, but in the real world the number of such ideas and
the speed of producing them seldom count as measures of one’s value to a
project or organization. Problem solving is identified as a supposedly generic
twenty-first-century skill, but tests of it are limited to specific content areas,

Education in an Open Informational World

9

such as arithmetic problems, and the evidence indicates little or no transfer between acquired problem solving skill in one area and another. Then
there are oral communication skills, which, being based on more general
language skills, fit comfortably within existing curriculum frameworks; but
there is nothing particularly twenty-first century about oral language skill
and one could point to past times when it was probably more important than
at present.
One of the most widely publicized projects to promote twenty-first-century
skills is “Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills,” funded by three
major technology companies (ATC21S.org). The actual creative work of the
project has concentrated on test development, with the teaching part left
largely to affiliated groups. Thus, its framework is essentially the familiar
one of test-driven reform. However, in the initial formulation of objectives,
a project team, comprising learning scientists and tasked with examining
learning environments, proposed a complementary approach (Scardamalia,
Bransford, Kozma, & Quellmalz, 2011). They identified the test-driven
reform strategy as “working backward”—a term that has a positive connotation in the cognitive literature on problem solving. Start with objectives,
work backward from them to assessments of success in attaining the objectives, and then work backward from the tests to develop learning activities
that produce gains in the assessments. The learning scientists argued that,
although working backward can be effective for already well-understood
objectives, the dynamic nature of contemporary knowledge societies calls
for an approach that is open to emergent objectives—objectives that arise out
of systemic interactions between societal changes and human capabilities
and that need to be discovered rather than determined in a top-down manner.
Such discovery, in turn, depends on educational environments in which
new competencies (or deficiencies) have an opportunity to appear. That
would mean educational environments that approximate the conditions of
the surrounding open, innovation-driven, knowledge society.
The emerging trend that will take education beyond test-driven curricula
and such test-driven offshoots as the twenty-first-century skills movement is
grounded in recognition of self-organization and its ubiquity in learning and
human development. Systemic evolutionary processes dominate education
at all levels, with settling on local minima being a common phenomenon.
Modern education administrators are well aware of this as an explanation
of why, for instance, the “mile wide, inch deep curriculum” persists despite
a dearth of advocates. “Systemic change” has been the watchword of school
reform for a quarter century or more. The elementary school classroom is a
self-organizing social unit in which the teacher plays an important but not
all-powerful role. The classroom community may, for instance, self-organize
around minimizing the cognitive and time demands of schoolwork in

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

response to an excessively task-oriented teacher. At the individual level
there are cognitive strategies such as “knowledge-telling” and “copy-delete”
that are efficient for the performance of school tasks but defeat the educational purpose of the tasks (Brown & Day, 1983; Scardamalia, Bereiter, &
Lamon, 1994). Students do not design these strategies, are not even aware
of them, but they evolve through the interaction of task demands, internal
constraints, and goal-directed behavior.
We cannot leave this topic without noting the currently hot topic of “brain
fitness.” Discussions of twenty-first-century skills are sometimes muddied
by confusion with brain fitness exercises, which are much in the news as
well as being intensely commercialized. Brain exercises deal with basic cognitive functions such as short-term memory capacity, attentional control, and
response speed. These are at a much more basic level than such favorites of
the twenty-first-century skills movement as critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity. Brain fitness is not about strategy learning and improving
skills through practice, it is about improving brain chemistry and sprouting
more dendrites in certain areas of the cerebral cortex. The important point as
far as education is concerned is that whatever benefits research may attribute
to brain exercises are irrelevant to decisions about twenty-first-century skills,
except perhaps in pointing to an alternative to thinking skills instruction.
THE CLASSROOM AS A KNOWLEDGE BUILDING COMMUNITY
Sociocultural theory, inspired by Vygotsky and with a nod to Dewey, began
to take hold in education in the 1980s and evolved into ideas such as “situated cognition” and “communities of practice.” The result is that learning research has taken a decided turn toward treating learning as a group
phenomenon while educational practice, under the influence of tests that
always index individual performance, has moved increasingly toward focus
on the individual learner. This anomaly is brought out dramatically in the
case of collaboration, which is increasingly recognized in the world at large
as essential for progress in any knowledge-based activity. Acknowledging
this, PISA, the leading international achievement test, will reportedly contain a test of collaborative problem solving ability in its 2015 edition. However, true to the norms of achievement testing, scores are to be awarded on
an individual basis and so examinees will not interact with real people but
with computational avatars. Dating from two decades earlier, computer supported collaborative learning, abbreviated to “CSCL,” has been a thriving
research and development area within the learning sciences, and “collaborative learning” has become a byword right up there with “learner centered.”
Yet shifting classroom practice toward something more closely resembling

Education in an Open Informational World

11

real-world collaborative knowledge work remains more a vision than a reality. School-age students are capable of working together toward a common
knowledge objective such as producing an explanation, a solution to a significant problem, a plan, or an invention, but learning activities often function
as an obstruction rather than a means to that end.
The obvious solution is to focus collaborative schoolwork on the “big ideas”
already gaining a favored place in the curriculum: producing explanations of
those ideas, building them into larger conceptual structures (e.g., theories),
finding uses for them, and solving problems such as perceived inconsistencies or gaps. An approach that has this as its explicit focus is Knowledge
Building, one of five foundational approaches recognized in the 2006 Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, and defined as “the production and
continual improvement of ideas of value to a community” (Scardamalia &
Bereiter, 2003). It is essentially the same idea as “knowledge creation,” as
that term is used in design sciences, knowledge-creating organizations, and
knowledge management circles. A number of “constructivist” educational
approaches engage students in creative knowledge work and problem solving but with less emphasis on what in Knowledge Building is the sine qua non:
students taking collective responsibility for idea development and improvement. An important part of that collective responsibility is bringing relevant new information into the knowledge-building process, and this includes
responsibility for information quality and reliability—both quality and reliability of the source and of the students’ own rendition of the information
as they contribute it to a knowledge-creating effort. We earlier noted educators’ concern with information reliability. There is a growing body of research
on students’ ability to make such reliability judgments (Goldman & Scardamalia, 2013). However, like many other such concerns in education, it is
not only a matter of students’ ability but also a matter of their motivation to
do the necessary intellectual work. Knowledge Building is designed to provide a context in which students have a reason to read and write carefully
and critically. The classroom becomes a knowledge workshop, in which students collaborate to build something of value to themselves and thus have
reasons to care about the quality of the materials and the way they are used.
In order to change classrooms and other educational settings into knowledge building communities, systemic change is required not just at the
level of curriculum standards and learning activities but at the level of
knowledge building discourse. “Building Cultural Capacity for Innovation”
(BCCI) http://ikit.org/bcci/ is an international initiative to introduce such
systemic change in all kinds of educational contexts at all levels in more than
20 nations. BCCI aims at social and technological supports for sustained
creative work with important ideas. It makes use of sophisticated assessment
tools, but instead of using them to drive instruction it uses them to provide

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

feedback that allows students to see their ideas in relation to disciplinary
knowledge and empowers students in their knowledge-building efforts.
Committed to open source, BCCI partners will develop and continually
improve technology and pedagogical designs for education adapted to our
innovation-driven open informational world.
CONCLUSION
Any speculation about emerging trends in the process of education must
reckon with the still largely unknown effects of social media. Young people
are demonstrating a massive shift away from television toward spending
their leisure (and sometimes working) hours on the likes of Facebook
and Twitter and internet games. This means more than a shift in form of
entertainment. It means a shift from being spectators to being participants.
One measured educational effect is a decline in achievement test scores
associated with amount of time spent with social media (Kirschner &
Karpinsi, 2010). The evidence being correlational, it must be considered only
suggestive of a causal connection, but a causal connection is highly plausible. Watching television while doing homework may diminish attention
to the latter, but dividing attention between homework and online social
activity seems closer to being impossible. Effects on how students process
information, on what gets attention and what gets filtered out, on students’
worldviews, mindsets, and general orientations to knowledge—these could
have profound educational implications, but so far little is known and
speculations tend to be either airily optimistic or part of the usual moaning
about the decline of civilization. When we were addressing one group
of college educators with the concerns expressed here about coherence,
one technology specialist responded that coherence is still being achieved
but it is now taking shape in cyberspace. Concept maps and other types
of visualization are ways of representing coherent knowledge, but the
coherence is still in the mind of the observer and the visualizations are best
viewed as aids to transliterate comprehension.
One documented change with implications for education in an open
informational world is a shift from seeking authoritative information to
seeking information from peers. There are now websites dedicated to such
information exchange. It is easy to find examples on these sites of people
exchanging ignorance rather than knowledge. However, much of the information people gather from peers is matters of judgment rather than fact. It
seems important today more than ever to promote student engagement with
what Joseph Schwab called “disciplined knowledge” and characterized as
“a massive potential of capacities to do, to make, to alter, and to modify.” A
glance at Google appearances of this term suggests that the most common

Education in an Open Informational World

13

references to “disciplined knowledge” are disparaging. It is the dry stuff
of textbooks, a prime source of boredom among students. However, disciplined knowledge is, or ought to be, the home of big and growing ideas
and a springboard to innovation. In its 21st Century Learning manifesto,
the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2008)
asserted: “Educated workers need a conceptual understanding of complex
concepts, and the ability to work with them creatively to generate new ideas,
new theories, new products, and new knowledge . . . . They need to learn
integrated and usable knowledge, rather than the sets of compartmentalised
and decontextualised facts.” In this view, innovativeness and disciplinary
knowledge are partners, but getting these partners together in the same
educational process is not common. If creative work with ideas enters the
curriculum at all it tends to be through activities such as science fair projects,
design challenges, and entrepreneurial ventures that are separate from the
main curriculum and often authentically engaging for only a minority of
students. The synthesis that Knowledge Building aims to achieve consists of
making knowledge creation the principal way of engaging with disciplined
knowledge—the way that produced that disciplined knowledge in the first
place and continues to advance it.
REFERENCES
Bonk, C. J. (2009). The world is open: How web technology is revolutionizing education.
San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Boss.
Bromme, R., & Stahl, E. (2005). Is a hypertext a book or a space? The impact of different introductory metaphors on hypertext construction. Computers & Education,
44(2005), 115–133.
Brown, A. L., & Day, J. D. (1983). Macrorules for summarizing texts: The development of expertise. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22(1), 1–14.
Goldman, S. R., & Scardamalia, M. (2013). Managing, understanding, applying,
and creating knowledge in the information age: Next-generation challenges and
opportunities. Cognition and Instruction, 31(2), 255–269.
Homer-Dixon, T. (2000). The ingenuity gap: Facing the economic, environmental, and other
challenges of an increasingly complex and unpredictable world. New York, NY: Knopf.
Johnson, P. (2009). The 21st century skills movement. Educational Leadership, 67(1),
11–11.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models: Towards a cognitive science of language, inference and consciousness. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2009). Reasoning. In P. Rabbitt (Ed.), Inside psychology: A science
over 50 years (pp. 167–177). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Kirschner, P. A., & Karpinski, A. C. (2010). Facebook® and academic performance.
Computers in Human Behavior, 26, 1237–1245.
OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) (2008). 21st century learning: Research, innovation and policy. Paris, France: OECD.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Ravitch, D. (2011). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and
choice are undermining education. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2003). Knowledge building. In Encyclopedia of education (2nd ed., pp. 1370–1373). New York, NY: Macmillan Reference.
Scardamalia, M., Bereiter, C., & Lamon, M. (1994). The CSILE project: Trying to bring
the classroom into World 3. In K. McGilley (Ed.), Classroom lessons: Integrating cognitive theory and classroom practice (pp. 201–228). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Scardamalia, M., Bransford, J., Kozma, R., & Quellmalz, E. (2011). New assessments
and environments for knowledge building. In P. Griffin, B. McGaw & E. Care
(Eds.), Assessment and teaching 21st century skills. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.
Schallert, D. L. (1982). The significance of knowledge: A synthesis of research related
to schema theory. In W. Otto & S. White (Eds.), Reading expository prose (pp. 13–48).
New York, NY: Academic Press.
Semple, E. (2012). Organizations don’t tweet, people do: A manager’s guide to the social
web. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Simon, H. A. (1991). Problem formulation and alternative generation in the decision
making process. In A. Chikan et al. (Eds.), Progress in decision, utility and risk theory
(pp. 77–84). Boston, MA: Kluwer.
Vosniadou, S. (2003). Exploring the relationships between conceptual change and
intentional learning. In G. M. Sinatra & P. R. Pintrich (Eds.), Intentional conceptual
change (pp. 373–402). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

MARLENE SCARDAMALIA AND CARL BEREITER
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter are professors at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Scardamalia holds the
Presidents’ Chair in Education and Knowledge Technologies and directs the
Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology (IKIT). Bereiter is a professor emeritus and cofounder of IKIT. They have collaborated for more than
35 years on research that includes the psychology of written composition,
intentional learning, and knowledge building. Connecting these three areas
is concern with the progress of students’ understanding of the world, the
level of personal and collective responsibility students take for it, and the
extent to which school practices induce strategies that undermine students’
own pursuit of understanding. This concern led to a shift from treating writing as a communication skill to treating it as a medium for building knowledge. It also led to an effort to find ways of giving young learners more
cognitive and social responsibility. One direction this took was design of
what turned out to be the first networked learning environment (piloted in
1983 and fully functional in 1986). The present version, Knowledge Forum,
is reportedly the most widely used software in CSCL (computer-supported
collaborative learning) worldwide.

Education in an Open Informational World

15

While at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in
1992–1993, they organized the Schools for Thought project, which brought
together three distinct but compatible programs of research-based educational innovation—Brown and Campione’s Fostering Communities of Learners,
the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt’s Jasper Woodbury mathematical problem-solving series, and IKIT’s Knowledge Building pedagogy
and technology. The bringing together of these approaches within the same
classrooms led to a sharpening of distinctions within the broad family of
“constructivist” educational approaches—to the extent that Scardamalia
and Bereiter argue for a distinction between learning and knowledge
building, with knowledge building more closely aligned with “knowledge creation,” as understood in the design sciences, knowledge-creating
organizations, and knowledge management. Their current efforts focus
Knowledge Building models and technology on the attainment of an
inclusive knowledge society. Toward this end, partners from more than 20
nations are united in a “Building Cultural Capacity for Innovation” initiative
(http://ikit.org/bcci/).
RELATED ESSAYS
Economics of Early Education (Economics), W. Steven Barnett
Shadow Education (Sociology), Soo-yong Byun and David P. Baker
Four Psychological Perspectives on Creativity (Psychology), Rodica Ioana
Damian and Dean Keith Simonton
Expertise (Sociology), Gil Eyal
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children’s Academic Achievement (Psychology), David C. Geary and Daniel B. Berch
The Evidence-Based Practice Movement (Sociology), Edward W. Gondolf
Educational Testing: Measuring and Remedying Achievement Gaps (Educ),
Jaekyung Lee
Retrieval-Based Learning: Research at the Interface between Cognitive Science and Education (Psychology), Ludmila D. Nunes and Jeffrey D. Karpicke
The Impact of Learning Technologies on Higher Education (Psychology),
Chrisopher S. Pentoney et al.
Curriculum as a Site of Political and Cultural Conflict (Sociology), Fabio
Rojas
Leadership (Anthropology), Adrienne Tecza and Dominic Johnson



Education in an Open
Informational World
MARLENE SCARDAMALIA and CARL BEREITER

Abstract
Education now functions in an open informational world in which there are essentially no boundaries constraining the information that may be brought to bear on
any topic, question, or activity. Changes in the form and connectedness of information are giving rise to new issues concerning coherence, sustained work with ideas,
and complexity. In place of the extended text of a well-crafted book, with its carefully developed line of thought, information on the web is frequently presented as
hypertext—relatively small packets of information complexly interlinked. It is now up
to the reader to construct a connecting line of thought. The ability to produce coherent knowledge out of such fragmentary information now has a name: transliteracy.
Transliteracy requires not only skill in using new information media but ability to
carry on sustained integrative work with ideas—an ability traditionally the mark of
a skilled teacher but now increasingly the shared capacity of a knowledge-building
community. Whereas traditionally the skilled teacher has smoothed the way to learning by simplifying complex content and problems, functioning in the open informational world requires that learners be able and willing to work with complexity
and with problems that have not been structured for them. A current trend is to
bring these requirements together in a focus on the “big ideas” of the disciplines.
A number of “constructivist” educational approaches engage students in creative
knowledge work and problem solving but neglect the sine qua non of contemporary
knowledge building: students taking collective responsibility for idea development
and improvement.

Schools have historically functioned in a relatively closed informational
world. Textbooks and lecturers were often the sole source of academic
subject matter. New information media, starting with radio, began gradually
to change that, but the change was marginal until the advent of the World
Wide Web. We now live in an open informational world in which there
are essentially no boundaries constraining the information that may be

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

brought to bear on any topic, question, or activity.1 College lecturers are
liable to find their statements challenged by information retrieved as they
speak by students armed with web-enabled mobile devices. At the school
level, however, old structures persist, and so information openness finds
its place mainly in the traditional research paper or, as it is often called at
the elementary level, “project.” Such projects may allow students to explore
topics of interest drawing on the vast information resources of the web, but
they generally play a peripheral role in the main instructional program,
which continues in its closed-world ways.
An emerging research trend finds learning scientists, information and
media scientists, and management scientists looking more deeply into the
implications of the opening up of the informational world, including implications for the design of education. Relevant strands of research have not yet
come together into full-fledged interdisciplinary research programs, but connections are forming. The most conspicuous effects of new media arise from
their enabling of widespread social interaction. Thus, we have Massive Open
Online Courses (MOOCs), which exploit the web’s ability to deliver rich
content to a selected (or self-selected) but widely dispersed audience, and
a variety of social networking websites, which provide meeting places for
widely dispersed people who wish to interact socially for whatever reason.
Both of these are receiving considerable and well-deserved attention from
behavioral scientists. With respect to openness of the informational world,
arguably the outstanding web-based innovation is Wikipedia and the many
other wikis inspired by it. Here we have a reference source of a size exceeding
by an order of magnitude that of any printed encyclopedia. More remarkable
than its size, however, is the fact that its content is user-generated. This has
made reliability of information a major concern, and one frequently noted
in the education literature (see, for instance, articles, links, and an on-going
poll at edutopia.org). The reliability of information presented to students is
a perennial problem brought into sharper relief by the new media, but the
more important consequence of the opening up of the informational world is
that students themselves must begin to exercise judgment about the information they process into knowledge. We will have more to say about this later,
in the context of a general expansion in students’ collective responsibility
for knowledge advancement. Our immediate focus, however, is on issues
that involve changes in the form and connectedness of information and that
imply changes in the roles of both information providers and information
users. The issues are coherence, sustained work with ideas, and complexity.
1. Curtis Bonk (2009) has investigated the many aspects of what he terms the “open educational
world,” in which “Anyone can now learn anything from anyone at anytime” (p. 16). The opening up of the
informational world may be seen as one aspect of this openness in education, but it is also a phenomenon
affecting all areas of knowledge-based work.

Education in an Open Informational World

3

COHERENT KNOWLEDGE: FROM TEXT TO HYPERTEXT
TO SUBTEXT
A well-crafted textbook or lecture does not only deliver information. The
pieces of information fit together. There is a line of thought, and if you follow
it the topic will make sense as a whole and not merely as a collection of facts
and ideas. What has been called “considerate text” is a discourse that makes
connections between ideas explicit and easy to recognize. MOOCs, because
of the extensive work that goes into preparing the lectures and instructional
texts, sometimes set new standards of informational coherence. However, the
more pervasive way of presenting organized information on the web is well
represented by Wikipedia. A topic that would normally occupy a whole book
is introduced in an article that would print out to 20 pages or less but contains numerous links to other articles that cover subtopics or related topics;
these also contain hyperlinks and so on. The result is a “hypertext,” which if
all the pieces were assembled would constitute a text of enormous size but
which readers are expected to traverse in limited ways according to their own
interests (Bromme & Stahl, 2005). This can lead to problems of distraction and
losing the thread, but in any case the job of putting the pieces together into
coherent knowledge is left to the reader. There is no overseeing author or
integrator doing this for us, as is the case of the well-crafted book or course.
The ability to produce coherent knowledge out of fragmentary information now has a name: transliteracy, a term introduced by media analyst Alan
Liu.2 An older term, multiliteracy, refers to ability to use a variety of media
for obtaining and communicating information. Transliteracy assumes multiliteracy and adds the essential element of coherence making. Coherence
making can be, and for most learners must be a group activity. One might
suppose that the “social web” (Semple, 2012), with all its ways of bringing
people together, would be a lush ecosystem of people working together to
produce meaning, but the opposite is more nearly the case: pages of sentences and pictures held together by little more than the personality of the
page owner. In our web browsing we have followed the discussions on a
number of news sites where important issues are commented on. There are
occasional insightful or informative comments, but further comments seldom build on these. There may be collaborative belief reinforcement, but that
is something quite different from collaborating to make sense of something
in need of explanation—almost the polar opposite, in fact.
It is not that human beings are averse to collaborative explanation. After a
headline-grabbing event, even strangers at a bus stop may enjoy a minute
or two of collaborative theory building. School could be a place where
2. Consistent with their focus on implications of new information media, transliteracy researchers
have shown a distinct preference for non-print means of disseminating their work. Currently the best
way to gain access is through the Transliteracies Project website at transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

collaborative explanation building enjoys a longer life span, but unfortunately that is not the norm in most classroom discourse. Students take
turns expressing loosely related thoughts. Organized debate gives more
structure to the discourse, but it tends to divide information along pro-con
lines rather than integrating information into more coherent understanding.
A recent trend that shows up in both curriculum materials and tests is
having students draw conclusions from two or more contrasting documents.
Although current efforts tend to be focused on deciding which source to
trust rather than on reaching coherent conclusions, they at least represent
a start on transliteracy, which we predict will come to be recognized as the
most distinctly “twenty-first century” of twenty-first -century skills.3
The subtext of a book or other communicative object is content that is not
explicit but that may be inferred or intuited. The subtext may or may not
be intended by the author, but in any case it is a mental construction by the
perceiver. In the case of hypertext, where there may be many authors with
diverse intentions, the subtext may be thought of as the main text. It is the
fabric of meanings that holds the pieces together, and of course it varies from
reader to reader, depending on each reader’s intentions and path through
the hypertext maze. In the case of conventionally authored literary works,
explicating the subtext represents a secondary sort of literary creation, practiced by literary critics. It is presumably a learnable craft and one that can
be extended beyond literary texts to informative and ideational texts. The
coherence-making aspect of transliteracy could be defined as the process of
constructing a subtext out of a hypertext.
SUSTAINED WORK WITH IDEAS
Knowledge work is work with ideas. Sometimes the ideas are embodied
in tools, artifacts, or material actions and so the work has an observable
physical character, but insofar as it is knowledge work it has a conceptual
layer where the things operated on—generated, categorized, combined,
transformed, and so on—are the immaterial entities collectively known as
ideas. Ideas have started coming into their own in education. Curriculum
standards and guidelines now call for explicit attention to “big ideas,”
whereas previously ideas were hidden behind specifications of topics and
procedures. Ability to make difficult ideas accessible to students—by means
of definitions, demonstrations, illuminating examples, and so forth—has
been a long-recognized mark of good teaching, figuring prominently in
3. As transliteracy has begun to gain recognition (more in library science than in education at present)
most attention has been given to its multimedia aspects. This is unfortunate because these have already
been receiving ample attention (including theoretical attention) for decades under the rubric of “multiliteracy” or “multimedia learning,” whereas education apparently lacks a theory of how transliterate
coherence building is even possible.

Education in an Open Informational World

5

student ratings of course instructors. With the opening up of the informational world, however, the teacher’s task becomes less straightforward. A
large body of research on students’ misconceptions had already shown
that “teaching for understanding” often failed. Now, with a diversity of
information resources of varying accuracy and clarity, and with a diversity
of ideas to be grasped rather than a limited set of ideas selected in part
because of their teachability, teaching for understanding becomes even more
problematic. More responsibility for such idea work as defining, identifying
positive and negative instances, relating ideas to one another and to larger
contexts, and producing explanations falls to the learners. Education needs
to prepare students for this.
Striking the right balance between understanding and fact learning has
always been a problem for curriculum designers. However, the greatly
increased accessibility of factual information has led to technobabble about
“just-in-time” knowledge and about teaching internet search skills instead
of facts. This ignores the body of research from the 1970s showing the strong
effects of prior knowledge on comprehension and learning (Schallert, 1982).
While there may be “just-in-time” information, there is no such thing as
“just-in-time” understanding.
Research on conceptual understanding has shown that success often
depends on students trying to understand (Vosniadou, 2003). The need
for intentionality in understanding may seem self-evident, but in fact a
large part of our understanding of the world is picked up effortlessly in
the course of pursuing goals other than understanding. Understanding
becomes problematic when what needs to be understood is complex. Given
normal experience with countable quantities, young children will acquire a
sufficient understanding of whole numbers, cardinality, and addition and
subtraction. However, when it comes to algorithms for adding and subtracting multidigit numbers, understanding is not a natural result of working
with such quantities. Educators have tried to craft understanding by having
children do computations using blocks of one, ten, and a hundred sections,
so that they would need to trade a tens block for ten ones, or vice-versa, and
so on. In an experiment where students worked the same problems, alternating between using blocks and using the numerical algorithms they
were taught, Omanson and Resnick found that many children learned to
carry out both kinds of operations but never saw the connection—never
caught on that the block trading and the symbolic regrouping were the same
mathematical operation. Some did grasp it, however, and when interviewed
they revealed that they had recognized there ought to be a connection
and tried to figure out what it was. The same phenomenon appeared in
college physics. Provided with worked examples, students would apply
the examples to solving textbook physics problems but most would not

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

learn the physics the examples were intended to convey. Those who did
grasp the physical principles engaged in what Chi and van Lehn called
“self-explanation”—trying to explain why the worked examples worked.
Along with research showing the pervasiveness of instruction-resistant
misconceptions, these studies indicate that even in the relatively closed
world of conventional curricula students need to do serious work with
ideas and not merely receive them passively and carry out prescribed
tasks in the least effortful manner possible. The opening up of the information world has heightened this imperative both by distributing the need
for cognitive effort over a wider range of things to be understood, and
by increasing the importance of understanding as compared to factual
memory.
COMPLEXITY: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT
That tomorrow’s citizens will have to deal with a heightened level of
complexity is already a platitude. It draws approving nods but little action.
Meanwhile, today’s citizens are flocking to ideologies that offer them
monumentally simplified representations of the world. For instance, the
vast majority of Americans reject the idea of Darwinian evolution (they
either reject species evolution altogether or else believe it has to have been
intelligently guided). This suggests that the concept of natural selection is
just too complex for many people to grasp. The truth is, however, that the
world is too complex for any of us to deal with in the systematically rational
way that we can deal with more constrained artificial problems such as
sudoku puzzles. With some finality, Herbert Simon (1991) declared:
Whatever their computational powers, present or future computers are
no match for the complexity of the real world. They (and we) are forever
condemned to carrying out our reasoning with highly simplified models of
tiny parts of the entire reality that confronts us.

Two factors can cause complexity to get out of hand: combinatorial
explosion (exponential increase in the number of possibilities as the train
of decisions gets longer) and working memory limitations (the fact that
humans can hold only a small number of items in mind to be acted upon
coordinately). Computers are great at generating combinations but the
number can quickly exceed the ability of either human or artificial agents
to evaluate them. Computer search can go a long way toward making up
for deficiencies in long-term memory, but when it comes to helping people
make up for working memory limitations, available computer tools are
not much improvement over a pencil and a sheet of paper. That may well

Education in an Open Informational World

7

change as computers keep getting smarter, but for the present we are stuck
with using simplified models that are hopefully not so simplified that they
miss the essence of the problem we are trying to deal with.
All things considered, most people do fairly well dealing with complexity at a practical level and some even thrive on it. However, if complexity is
getting worse and more pervasive, as Homer-Dixon (2000) has persuasively
argued, we need to find ways of doing better and helping more people cope
successfully with it. Complexity has its own body of theory, best known to
educators as dynamic systems theory. One trend already beginning to appear
in schools is explicit teaching of systems concepts or at least familiarizing students with them by means of simulations. A different, though related kind
of effort is teaching “systems thinking”—which unfortunately is about as
ill-defined as a curriculum objective can possibly be. Skill objectives are now
appearing that call for students being able to “use systems thinking,” but
often the only definite objective is using systems concepts to explain things.
Every up-to-date school subject that has theoretical content will require this,
and so treating it as a separate objective is questionable. The real challenge is
using systems ideas in solving complex real-world problems. Here complexity science has scant offerings, but is clearly the direction to go in seeking
what Homer-Dixon calls “ingenuity” and defines as “ideas applied to solve
practical social and technical problems.”
In order to give substance to the goal of promoting systems thinking, more
research is needed on how successful thinkers actually deal with complex
problems. A good start was research in the 1980s on mental models and
analogies. As carried forward by Philip Johnson-Laird (1983, 2009) and
others, the upshot is that human beings do not function like logic machines,
even imperfect ones, but instead harness a variety of resources not routinely
available to computers and which, though makeshift and imprecise, do
manage to circumvent combinatorial explosion and working memory limitations. These resources include unconscious inference, imagery, affective
responses, mental modeling, and analogy. For any complex situation, a virtually unlimited number of simplified decision or explanatory models could
be generated. We of course do not simplify reality in such a crank-it-out way.
Instead we say things like “The essence of this problem (or situation, concept, plan, et cetera) is . . . .” A “sense of essence,” as Douglas Hofstadter has
said, is the essence of sense. It is what enables us to recognize good models
and productive analogies from among the vast number of possibilities that
equally fit formal (logical) requirements. It is an important edge we have
over thinking machines and is one that education is still a long way from
exploiting.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

BEYOND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SKILLS
The misfit that arises from trying to insert new ideas into predetermined frameworks is nowhere more evident than in the widely heralded
“twenty-first-century skills” movement (Johnson, 2009). Terms like “knowledge creation,” “knowledge society,” and “innovation-driven” signal a new
set of imperatives that education is expected to address in some manner. The
way education authorities around the world customarily address such challenges is by adding new elements to existing categories: new skills entered
into the objectives list, new subjects into the subjects list, new tests into
the assessments list, new teacher workshops into the professional services
list. This is essentially the same approach that was taken in back-to-basics
movements such as No Child Left Behind: define objectives, institute tests
to drive schools to pursue those objectives, and then offer guidance in how
to teach to them.
No Child Left Behind and similar approaches to educational improvement
have had questionable results and have raised doubts about the whole notion
of using tests to drive instruction (Ravitch, 2011). However, there is this much
to be said for “back to basics”: Unlike “twenty-first-century skills,” basic literacy and numeracy are already well established as teachable and testable
skills, there exists a body of “best practice,” which, however imperfect, is
demonstrably more effective than no teaching at all, and it is reasonable to
expect that just by trying harder some gains can be achieved. Above all, it
is reasonable to assume that gains in literacy and numeracy achieved within
the school context will have value in modern life outside the school. This
is not true of most “twenty-first century skills” gains. They are a mixed bag.
Computer skills are definable, testable, and teachable and so they can readily
fit within existing curriculum frameworks, but there are questions of obsolescence and how much instruction is really necessary—questions that do
not apply so obviously to the traditional academic skills. There are tests of
critical thinking and creativity, and these have some predictive validity, but
it is not clear whether these are skills at all, as distinct from psychological traits, mindsets, or habits. Training and other learning activities can produce gains in test scores, but there is little or no evidence that such gains
have any value outside the immediate learning context. (For instance, a common form of creativity test calls for rapidly listing as many uses as possible for a familiar object such as a coat hanger. Thinking of novel uses may
have real-world value, but in the real world the number of such ideas and
the speed of producing them seldom count as measures of one’s value to a
project or organization. Problem solving is identified as a supposedly generic
twenty-first-century skill, but tests of it are limited to specific content areas,

Education in an Open Informational World

9

such as arithmetic problems, and the evidence indicates little or no transfer between acquired problem solving skill in one area and another. Then
there are oral communication skills, which, being based on more general
language skills, fit comfortably within existing curriculum frameworks; but
there is nothing particularly twenty-first century about oral language skill
and one could point to past times when it was probably more important than
at present.
One of the most widely publicized projects to promote twenty-first-century
skills is “Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills,” funded by three
major technology companies (ATC21S.org). The actual creative work of the
project has concentrated on test development, with the teaching part left
largely to affiliated groups. Thus, its framework is essentially the familiar
one of test-driven reform. However, in the initial formulation of objectives,
a project team, comprising learning scientists and tasked with examining
learning environments, proposed a complementary approach (Scardamalia,
Bransford, Kozma, & Quellmalz, 2011). They identified the test-driven
reform strategy as “working backward”—a term that has a positive connotation in the cognitive literature on problem solving. Start with objectives,
work backward from them to assessments of success in attaining the objectives, and then work backward from the tests to develop learning activities
that produce gains in the assessments. The learning scientists argued that,
although working backward can be effective for already well-understood
objectives, the dynamic nature of contemporary knowledge societies calls
for an approach that is open to emergent objectives—objectives that arise out
of systemic interactions between societal changes and human capabilities
and that need to be discovered rather than determined in a top-down manner.
Such discovery, in turn, depends on educational environments in which
new competencies (or deficiencies) have an opportunity to appear. That
would mean educational environments that approximate the conditions of
the surrounding open, innovation-driven, knowledge society.
The emerging trend that will take education beyond test-driven curricula
and such test-driven offshoots as the twenty-first-century skills movement is
grounded in recognition of self-organization and its ubiquity in learning and
human development. Systemic evolutionary processes dominate education
at all levels, with settling on local minima being a common phenomenon.
Modern education administrators are well aware of this as an explanation
of why, for instance, the “mile wide, inch deep curriculum” persists despite
a dearth of advocates. “Systemic change” has been the watchword of school
reform for a quarter century or more. The elementary school classroom is a
self-organizing social unit in which the teacher plays an important but not
all-powerful role. The classroom community may, for instance, self-organize
around minimizing the cognitive and time demands of schoolwork in

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

response to an excessively task-oriented teacher. At the individual level
there are cognitive strategies such as “knowledge-telling” and “copy-delete”
that are efficient for the performance of school tasks but defeat the educational purpose of the tasks (Brown & Day, 1983; Scardamalia, Bereiter, &
Lamon, 1994). Students do not design these strategies, are not even aware
of them, but they evolve through the interaction of task demands, internal
constraints, and goal-directed behavior.
We cannot leave this topic without noting the currently hot topic of “brain
fitness.” Discussions of twenty-first-century skills are sometimes muddied
by confusion with brain fitness exercises, which are much in the news as
well as being intensely commercialized. Brain exercises deal with basic cognitive functions such as short-term memory capacity, attentional control, and
response speed. These are at a much more basic level than such favorites of
the twenty-first-century skills movement as critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity. Brain fitness is not about strategy learning and improving
skills through practice, it is about improving brain chemistry and sprouting
more dendrites in certain areas of the cerebral cortex. The important point as
far as education is concerned is that whatever benefits research may attribute
to brain exercises are irrelevant to decisions about twenty-first-century skills,
except perhaps in pointing to an alternative to thinking skills instruction.
THE CLASSROOM AS A KNOWLEDGE BUILDING COMMUNITY
Sociocultural theory, inspired by Vygotsky and with a nod to Dewey, began
to take hold in education in the 1980s and evolved into ideas such as “situated cognition” and “communities of practice.” The result is that learning research has taken a decided turn toward treating learning as a group
phenomenon while educational practice, under the influence of tests that
always index individual performance, has moved increasingly toward focus
on the individual learner. This anomaly is brought out dramatically in the
case of collaboration, which is increasingly recognized in the world at large
as essential for progress in any knowledge-based activity. Acknowledging
this, PISA, the leading international achievement test, will reportedly contain a test of collaborative problem solving ability in its 2015 edition. However, true to the norms of achievement testing, scores are to be awarded on
an individual basis and so examinees will not interact with real people but
with computational avatars. Dating from two decades earlier, computer supported collaborative learning, abbreviated to “CSCL,” has been a thriving
research and development area within the learning sciences, and “collaborative learning” has become a byword right up there with “learner centered.”
Yet shifting classroom practice toward something more closely resembling

Education in an Open Informational World

11

real-world collaborative knowledge work remains more a vision than a reality. School-age students are capable of working together toward a common
knowledge objective such as producing an explanation, a solution to a significant problem, a plan, or an invention, but learning activities often function
as an obstruction rather than a means to that end.
The obvious solution is to focus collaborative schoolwork on the “big ideas”
already gaining a favored place in the curriculum: producing explanations of
those ideas, building them into larger conceptual structures (e.g., theories),
finding uses for them, and solving problems such as perceived inconsistencies or gaps. An approach that has this as its explicit focus is Knowledge
Building, one of five foundational approaches recognized in the 2006 Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, and defined as “the production and
continual improvement of ideas of value to a community” (Scardamalia &
Bereiter, 2003). It is essentially the same idea as “knowledge creation,” as
that term is used in design sciences, knowledge-creating organizations, and
knowledge management circles. A number of “constructivist” educational
approaches engage students in creative knowledge work and problem solving but with less emphasis on what in Knowledge Building is the sine qua non:
students taking collective responsibility for idea development and improvement. An important part of that collective responsibility is bringing relevant new information into the knowledge-building process, and this includes
responsibility for information quality and reliability—both quality and reliability of the source and of the students’ own rendition of the information
as they contribute it to a knowledge-creating effort. We earlier noted educators’ concern with information reliability. There is a growing body of research
on students’ ability to make such reliability judgments (Goldman & Scardamalia, 2013). However, like many other such concerns in education, it is
not only a matter of students’ ability but also a matter of their motivation to
do the necessary intellectual work. Knowledge Building is designed to provide a context in which students have a reason to read and write carefully
and critically. The classroom becomes a knowledge workshop, in which students collaborate to build something of value to themselves and thus have
reasons to care about the quality of the materials and the way they are used.
In order to change classrooms and other educational settings into knowledge building communities, systemic change is required not just at the
level of curriculum standards and learning activities but at the level of
knowledge building discourse. “Building Cultural Capacity for Innovation”
(BCCI) http://ikit.org/bcci/ is an international initiative to introduce such
systemic change in all kinds of educational contexts at all levels in more than
20 nations. BCCI aims at social and technological supports for sustained
creative work with important ideas. It makes use of sophisticated assessment
tools, but instead of using them to drive instruction it uses them to provide

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

feedback that allows students to see their ideas in relation to disciplinary
knowledge and empowers students in their knowledge-building efforts.
Committed to open source, BCCI partners will develop and continually
improve technology and pedagogical designs for education adapted to our
innovation-driven open informational world.
CONCLUSION
Any speculation about emerging trends in the process of education must
reckon with the still largely unknown effects of social media. Young people
are demonstrating a massive shift away from television toward spending
their leisure (and sometimes working) hours on the likes of Facebook
and Twitter and internet games. This means more than a shift in form of
entertainment. It means a shift from being spectators to being participants.
One measured educational effect is a decline in achievement test scores
associated with amount of time spent with social media (Kirschner &
Karpinsi, 2010). The evidence being correlational, it must be considered only
suggestive of a causal connection, but a causal connection is highly plausible. Watching television while doing homework may diminish attention
to the latter, but dividing attention between homework and online social
activity seems closer to being impossible. Effects on how students process
information, on what gets attention and what gets filtered out, on students’
worldviews, mindsets, and general orientations to knowledge—these could
have profound educational implications, but so far little is known and
speculations tend to be either airily optimistic or part of the usual moaning
about the decline of civilization. When we were addressing one group
of college educators with the concerns expressed here about coherence,
one technology specialist responded that coherence is still being achieved
but it is now taking shape in cyberspace. Concept maps and other types
of visualization are ways of representing coherent knowledge, but the
coherence is still in the mind of the observer and the visualizations are best
viewed as aids to transliterate comprehension.
One documented change with implications for education in an open
informational world is a shift from seeking authoritative information to
seeking information from peers. There are now websites dedicated to such
information exchange. It is easy to find examples on these sites of people
exchanging ignorance rather than knowledge. However, much of the information people gather from peers is matters of judgment rather than fact. It
seems important today more than ever to promote student engagement with
what Joseph Schwab called “disciplined knowledge” and characterized as
“a massive potential of capacities to do, to make, to alter, and to modify.” A
glance at Google appearances of this term suggests that the most common

Education in an Open Informational World

13

references to “disciplined knowledge” are disparaging. It is the dry stuff
of textbooks, a prime source of boredom among students. However, disciplined knowledge is, or ought to be, the home of big and growing ideas
and a springboard to innovation. In its 21st Century Learning manifesto,
the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2008)
asserted: “Educated workers need a conceptual understanding of complex
concepts, and the ability to work with them creatively to generate new ideas,
new theories, new products, and new knowledge . . . . They need to learn
integrated and usable knowledge, rather than the sets of compartmentalised
and decontextualised facts.” In this view, innovativeness and disciplinary
knowledge are partners, but getting these partners together in the same
educational process is not common. If creative work with ideas enters the
curriculum at all it tends to be through activities such as science fair projects,
design challenges, and entrepreneurial ventures that are separate from the
main curriculum and often authentically engaging for only a minority of
students. The synthesis that Knowledge Building aims to achieve consists of
making knowledge creation the principal way of engaging with disciplined
knowledge—the way that produced that disciplined knowledge in the first
place and continues to advance it.
REFERENCES
Bonk, C. J. (2009). The world is open: How web technology is revolutionizing education.
San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Boss.
Bromme, R., & Stahl, E. (2005). Is a hypertext a book or a space? The impact of different introductory metaphors on hypertext construction. Computers & Education,
44(2005), 115–133.
Brown, A. L., & Day, J. D. (1983). Macrorules for summarizing texts: The development of expertise. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22(1), 1–14.
Goldman, S. R., & Scardamalia, M. (2013). Managing, understanding, applying,
and creating knowledge in the information age: Next-generation challenges and
opportunities. Cognition and Instruction, 31(2), 255–269.
Homer-Dixon, T. (2000). The ingenuity gap: Facing the economic, environmental, and other
challenges of an increasingly complex and unpredictable world. New York, NY: Knopf.
Johnson, P. (2009). The 21st century skills movement. Educational Leadership, 67(1),
11–11.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models: Towards a cognitive science of language, inference and consciousness. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2009). Reasoning. In P. Rabbitt (Ed.), Inside psychology: A science
over 50 years (pp. 167–177). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Kirschner, P. A., & Karpinski, A. C. (2010). Facebook® and academic performance.
Computers in Human Behavior, 26, 1237–1245.
OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) (2008). 21st century learning: Research, innovation and policy. Paris, France: OECD.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Ravitch, D. (2011). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and
choice are undermining education. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2003). Knowledge building. In Encyclopedia of education (2nd ed., pp. 1370–1373). New York, NY: Macmillan Reference.
Scardamalia, M., Bereiter, C., & Lamon, M. (1994). The CSILE project: Trying to bring
the classroom into World 3. In K. McGilley (Ed.), Classroom lessons: Integrating cognitive theory and classroom practice (pp. 201–228). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Scardamalia, M., Bransford, J., Kozma, R., & Quellmalz, E. (2011). New assessments
and environments for knowledge building. In P. Griffin, B. McGaw & E. Care
(Eds.), Assessment and teaching 21st century skills. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.
Schallert, D. L. (1982). The significance of knowledge: A synthesis of research related
to schema theory. In W. Otto & S. White (Eds.), Reading expository prose (pp. 13–48).
New York, NY: Academic Press.
Semple, E. (2012). Organizations don’t tweet, people do: A manager’s guide to the social
web. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Simon, H. A. (1991). Problem formulation and alternative generation in the decision
making process. In A. Chikan et al. (Eds.), Progress in decision, utility and risk theory
(pp. 77–84). Boston, MA: Kluwer.
Vosniadou, S. (2003). Exploring the relationships between conceptual change and
intentional learning. In G. M. Sinatra & P. R. Pintrich (Eds.), Intentional conceptual
change (pp. 373–402). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

MARLENE SCARDAMALIA AND CARL BEREITER
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter are professors at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Scardamalia holds the
Presidents’ Chair in Education and Knowledge Technologies and directs the
Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology (IKIT). Bereiter is a professor emeritus and cofounder of IKIT. They have collaborated for more than
35 years on research that includes the psychology of written composition,
intentional learning, and knowledge building. Connecting these three areas
is concern with the progress of students’ understanding of the world, the
level of personal and collective responsibility students take for it, and the
extent to which school practices induce strategies that undermine students’
own pursuit of understanding. This concern led to a shift from treating writing as a communication skill to treating it as a medium for building knowledge. It also led to an effort to find ways of giving young learners more
cognitive and social responsibility. One direction this took was design of
what turned out to be the first networked learning environment (piloted in
1983 and fully functional in 1986). The present version, Knowledge Forum,
is reportedly the most widely used software in CSCL (computer-supported
collaborative learning) worldwide.

Education in an Open Informational World

15

While at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in
1992–1993, they organized the Schools for Thought project, which brought
together three distinct but compatible programs of research-based educational innovation—Brown and Campione’s Fostering Communities of Learners,
the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt’s Jasper Woodbury mathematical problem-solving series, and IKIT’s Knowledge Building pedagogy
and technology. The bringing together of these approaches within the same
classrooms led to a sharpening of distinctions within the broad family of
“constructivist” educational approaches—to the extent that Scardamalia
and Bereiter argue for a distinction between learning and knowledge
building, with knowledge building more closely aligned with “knowledge creation,” as understood in the design sciences, knowledge-creating
organizations, and knowledge management. Their current efforts focus
Knowledge Building models and technology on the attainment of an
inclusive knowledge society. Toward this end, partners from more than 20
nations are united in a “Building Cultural Capacity for Innovation” initiative
(http://ikit.org/bcci/).
RELATED ESSAYS
Economics of Early Education (Economics), W. Steven Barnett
Shadow Education (Sociology), Soo-yong Byun and David P. Baker
Four Psychological Perspectives on Creativity (Psychology), Rodica Ioana
Damian and Dean Keith Simonton
Expertise (Sociology), Gil Eyal
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children’s Academic Achievement (Psychology), David C. Geary and Daniel B. Berch
The Evidence-Based Practice Movement (Sociology), Edward W. Gondolf
Educational Testing: Measuring and Remedying Achievement Gaps (Educ),
Jaekyung Lee
Retrieval-Based Learning: Research at the Interface between Cognitive Science and Education (Psychology), Ludmila D. Nunes and Jeffrey D. Karpicke
The Impact of Learning Technologies on Higher Education (Psychology),
Chrisopher S. Pentoney et al.
Curriculum as a Site of Political and Cultural Conflict (Sociology), Fabio
Rojas
Leadership (Anthropology), Adrienne Tecza and Dominic Johnson


Education in an Open
Informational World
MARLENE SCARDAMALIA and CARL BEREITER

Abstract
Education now functions in an open informational world in which there are essentially no boundaries constraining the information that may be brought to bear on
any topic, question, or activity. Changes in the form and connectedness of information are giving rise to new issues concerning coherence, sustained work with ideas,
and complexity. In place of the extended text of a well-crafted book, with its carefully developed line of thought, information on the web is frequently presented as
hypertext—relatively small packets of information complexly interlinked. It is now up
to the reader to construct a connecting line of thought. The ability to produce coherent knowledge out of such fragmentary information now has a name: transliteracy.
Transliteracy requires not only skill in using new information media but ability to
carry on sustained integrative work with ideas—an ability traditionally the mark of
a skilled teacher but now increasingly the shared capacity of a knowledge-building
community. Whereas traditionally the skilled teacher has smoothed the way to learning by simplifying complex content and problems, functioning in the open informational world requires that learners be able and willing to work with complexity
and with problems that have not been structured for them. A current trend is to
bring these requirements together in a focus on the “big ideas” of the disciplines.
A number of “constructivist” educational approaches engage students in creative
knowledge work and problem solving but neglect the sine qua non of contemporary
knowledge building: students taking collective responsibility for idea development
and improvement.

Schools have historically functioned in a relatively closed informational
world. Textbooks and lecturers were often the sole source of academic
subject matter. New information media, starting with radio, began gradually
to change that, but the change was marginal until the advent of the World
Wide Web. We now live in an open informational world in which there
are essentially no boundaries constraining the information that may be

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

brought to bear on any topic, question, or activity.1 College lecturers are
liable to find their statements challenged by information retrieved as they
speak by students armed with web-enabled mobile devices. At the school
level, however, old structures persist, and so information openness finds
its place mainly in the traditional research paper or, as it is often called at
the elementary level, “project.” Such projects may allow students to explore
topics of interest drawing on the vast information resources of the web, but
they generally play a peripheral role in the main instructional program,
which continues in its closed-world ways.
An emerging research trend finds learning scientists, information and
media scientists, and management scientists looking more deeply into the
implications of the opening up of the informational world, including implications for the design of education. Relevant strands of research have not yet
come together into full-fledged interdisciplinary research programs, but connections are forming. The most conspicuous effects of new media arise from
their enabling of widespread social interaction. Thus, we have Massive Open
Online Courses (MOOCs), which exploit the web’s ability to deliver rich
content to a selected (or self-selected) but widely dispersed audience, and
a variety of social networking websites, which provide meeting places for
widely dispersed people who wish to interact socially for whatever reason.
Both of these are receiving considerable and well-deserved attention from
behavioral scientists. With respect to openness of the informational world,
arguably the outstanding web-based innovation is Wikipedia and the many
other wikis inspired by it. Here we have a reference source of a size exceeding
by an order of magnitude that of any printed encyclopedia. More remarkable
than its size, however, is the fact that its content is user-generated. This has
made reliability of information a major concern, and one frequently noted
in the education literature (see, for instance, articles, links, and an on-going
poll at edutopia.org). The reliability of information presented to students is
a perennial problem brought into sharper relief by the new media, but the
more important consequence of the opening up of the informational world is
that students themselves must begin to exercise judgment about the information they process into knowledge. We will have more to say about this later,
in the context of a general expansion in students’ collective responsibility
for knowledge advancement. Our immediate focus, however, is on issues
that involve changes in the form and connectedness of information and that
imply changes in the roles of both information providers and information
users. The issues are coherence, sustained work with ideas, and complexity.
1. Curtis Bonk (2009) has investigated the many aspects of what he terms the “open educational
world,” in which “Anyone can now learn anything from anyone at anytime” (p. 16). The opening up of the
informational world may be seen as one aspect of this openness in education, but it is also a phenomenon
affecting all areas of knowledge-based work.

Education in an Open Informational World

3

COHERENT KNOWLEDGE: FROM TEXT TO HYPERTEXT
TO SUBTEXT
A well-crafted textbook or lecture does not only deliver information. The
pieces of information fit together. There is a line of thought, and if you follow
it the topic will make sense as a whole and not merely as a collection of facts
and ideas. What has been called “considerate text” is a discourse that makes
connections between ideas explicit and easy to recognize. MOOCs, because
of the extensive work that goes into preparing the lectures and instructional
texts, sometimes set new standards of informational coherence. However, the
more pervasive way of presenting organized information on the web is well
represented by Wikipedia. A topic that would normally occupy a whole book
is introduced in an article that would print out to 20 pages or less but contains numerous links to other articles that cover subtopics or related topics;
these also contain hyperlinks and so on. The result is a “hypertext,” which if
all the pieces were assembled would constitute a text of enormous size but
which readers are expected to traverse in limited ways according to their own
interests (Bromme & Stahl, 2005). This can lead to problems of distraction and
losing the thread, but in any case the job of putting the pieces together into
coherent knowledge is left to the reader. There is no overseeing author or
integrator doing this for us, as is the case of the well-crafted book or course.
The ability to produce coherent knowledge out of fragmentary information now has a name: transliteracy, a term introduced by media analyst Alan
Liu.2 An older term, multiliteracy, refers to ability to use a variety of media
for obtaining and communicating information. Transliteracy assumes multiliteracy and adds the essential element of coherence making. Coherence
making can be, and for most learners must be a group activity. One might
suppose that the “social web” (Semple, 2012), with all its ways of bringing
people together, would be a lush ecosystem of people working together to
produce meaning, but the opposite is more nearly the case: pages of sentences and pictures held together by little more than the personality of the
page owner. In our web browsing we have followed the discussions on a
number of news sites where important issues are commented on. There are
occasional insightful or informative comments, but further comments seldom build on these. There may be collaborative belief reinforcement, but that
is something quite different from collaborating to make sense of something
in need of explanation—almost the polar opposite, in fact.
It is not that human beings are averse to collaborative explanation. After a
headline-grabbing event, even strangers at a bus stop may enjoy a minute
or two of collaborative theory building. School could be a place where
2. Consistent with their focus on implications of new information media, transliteracy researchers
have shown a distinct preference for non-print means of disseminating their work. Currently the best
way to gain access is through the Transliteracies Project website at transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

collaborative explanation building enjoys a longer life span, but unfortunately that is not the norm in most classroom discourse. Students take
turns expressing loosely related thoughts. Organized debate gives more
structure to the discourse, but it tends to divide information along pro-con
lines rather than integrating information into more coherent understanding.
A recent trend that shows up in both curriculum materials and tests is
having students draw conclusions from two or more contrasting documents.
Although current efforts tend to be focused on deciding which source to
trust rather than on reaching coherent conclusions, they at least represent
a start on transliteracy, which we predict will come to be recognized as the
most distinctly “twenty-first century” of twenty-first -century skills.3
The subtext of a book or other communicative object is content that is not
explicit but that may be inferred or intuited. The subtext may or may not
be intended by the author, but in any case it is a mental construction by the
perceiver. In the case of hypertext, where there may be many authors with
diverse intentions, the subtext may be thought of as the main text. It is the
fabric of meanings that holds the pieces together, and of course it varies from
reader to reader, depending on each reader’s intentions and path through
the hypertext maze. In the case of conventionally authored literary works,
explicating the subtext represents a secondary sort of literary creation, practiced by literary critics. It is presumably a learnable craft and one that can
be extended beyond literary texts to informative and ideational texts. The
coherence-making aspect of transliteracy could be defined as the process of
constructing a subtext out of a hypertext.
SUSTAINED WORK WITH IDEAS
Knowledge work is work with ideas. Sometimes the ideas are embodied
in tools, artifacts, or material actions and so the work has an observable
physical character, but insofar as it is knowledge work it has a conceptual
layer where the things operated on—generated, categorized, combined,
transformed, and so on—are the immaterial entities collectively known as
ideas. Ideas have started coming into their own in education. Curriculum
standards and guidelines now call for explicit attention to “big ideas,”
whereas previously ideas were hidden behind specifications of topics and
procedures. Ability to make difficult ideas accessible to students—by means
of definitions, demonstrations, illuminating examples, and so forth—has
been a long-recognized mark of good teaching, figuring prominently in
3. As transliteracy has begun to gain recognition (more in library science than in education at present)
most attention has been given to its multimedia aspects. This is unfortunate because these have already
been receiving ample attention (including theoretical attention) for decades under the rubric of “multiliteracy” or “multimedia learning,” whereas education apparently lacks a theory of how transliterate
coherence building is even possible.

Education in an Open Informational World

5

student ratings of course instructors. With the opening up of the informational world, however, the teacher’s task becomes less straightforward. A
large body of research on students’ misconceptions had already shown
that “teaching for understanding” often failed. Now, with a diversity of
information resources of varying accuracy and clarity, and with a diversity
of ideas to be grasped rather than a limited set of ideas selected in part
because of their teachability, teaching for understanding becomes even more
problematic. More responsibility for such idea work as defining, identifying
positive and negative instances, relating ideas to one another and to larger
contexts, and producing explanations falls to the learners. Education needs
to prepare students for this.
Striking the right balance between understanding and fact learning has
always been a problem for curriculum designers. However, the greatly
increased accessibility of factual information has led to technobabble about
“just-in-time” knowledge and about teaching internet search skills instead
of facts. This ignores the body of research from the 1970s showing the strong
effects of prior knowledge on comprehension and learning (Schallert, 1982).
While there may be “just-in-time” information, there is no such thing as
“just-in-time” understanding.
Research on conceptual understanding has shown that success often
depends on students trying to understand (Vosniadou, 2003). The need
for intentionality in understanding may seem self-evident, but in fact a
large part of our understanding of the world is picked up effortlessly in
the course of pursuing goals other than understanding. Understanding
becomes problematic when what needs to be understood is complex. Given
normal experience with countable quantities, young children will acquire a
sufficient understanding of whole numbers, cardinality, and addition and
subtraction. However, when it comes to algorithms for adding and subtracting multidigit numbers, understanding is not a natural result of working
with such quantities. Educators have tried to craft understanding by having
children do computations using blocks of one, ten, and a hundred sections,
so that they would need to trade a tens block for ten ones, or vice-versa, and
so on. In an experiment where students worked the same problems, alternating between using blocks and using the numerical algorithms they
were taught, Omanson and Resnick found that many children learned to
carry out both kinds of operations but never saw the connection—never
caught on that the block trading and the symbolic regrouping were the same
mathematical operation. Some did grasp it, however, and when interviewed
they revealed that they had recognized there ought to be a connection
and tried to figure out what it was. The same phenomenon appeared in
college physics. Provided with worked examples, students would apply
the examples to solving textbook physics problems but most would not

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

learn the physics the examples were intended to convey. Those who did
grasp the physical principles engaged in what Chi and van Lehn called
“self-explanation”—trying to explain why the worked examples worked.
Along with research showing the pervasiveness of instruction-resistant
misconceptions, these studies indicate that even in the relatively closed
world of conventional curricula students need to do serious work with
ideas and not merely receive them passively and carry out prescribed
tasks in the least effortful manner possible. The opening up of the information world has heightened this imperative both by distributing the need
for cognitive effort over a wider range of things to be understood, and
by increasing the importance of understanding as compared to factual
memory.
COMPLEXITY: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT
That tomorrow’s citizens will have to deal with a heightened level of
complexity is already a platitude. It draws approving nods but little action.
Meanwhile, today’s citizens are flocking to ideologies that offer them
monumentally simplified representations of the world. For instance, the
vast majority of Americans reject the idea of Darwinian evolution (they
either reject species evolution altogether or else believe it has to have been
intelligently guided). This suggests that the concept of natural selection is
just too complex for many people to grasp. The truth is, however, that the
world is too complex for any of us to deal with in the systematically rational
way that we can deal with more constrained artificial problems such as
sudoku puzzles. With some finality, Herbert Simon (1991) declared:
Whatever their computational powers, present or future computers are
no match for the complexity of the real world. They (and we) are forever
condemned to carrying out our reasoning with highly simplified models of
tiny parts of the entire reality that confronts us.

Two factors can cause complexity to get out of hand: combinatorial
explosion (exponential increase in the number of possibilities as the train
of decisions gets longer) and working memory limitations (the fact that
humans can hold only a small number of items in mind to be acted upon
coordinately). Computers are great at generating combinations but the
number can quickly exceed the ability of either human or artificial agents
to evaluate them. Computer search can go a long way toward making up
for deficiencies in long-term memory, but when it comes to helping people
make up for working memory limitations, available computer tools are
not much improvement over a pencil and a sheet of paper. That may well

Education in an Open Informational World

7

change as computers keep getting smarter, but for the present we are stuck
with using simplified models that are hopefully not so simplified that they
miss the essence of the problem we are trying to deal with.
All things considered, most people do fairly well dealing with complexity at a practical level and some even thrive on it. However, if complexity is
getting worse and more pervasive, as Homer-Dixon (2000) has persuasively
argued, we need to find ways of doing better and helping more people cope
successfully with it. Complexity has its own body of theory, best known to
educators as dynamic systems theory. One trend already beginning to appear
in schools is explicit teaching of systems concepts or at least familiarizing students with them by means of simulations. A different, though related kind
of effort is teaching “systems thinking”—which unfortunately is about as
ill-defined as a curriculum objective can possibly be. Skill objectives are now
appearing that call for students being able to “use systems thinking,” but
often the only definite objective is using systems concepts to explain things.
Every up-to-date school subject that has theoretical content will require this,
and so treating it as a separate objective is questionable. The real challenge is
using systems ideas in solving complex real-world problems. Here complexity science has scant offerings, but is clearly the direction to go in seeking
what Homer-Dixon calls “ingenuity” and defines as “ideas applied to solve
practical social and technical problems.”
In order to give substance to the goal of promoting systems thinking, more
research is needed on how successful thinkers actually deal with complex
problems. A good start was research in the 1980s on mental models and
analogies. As carried forward by Philip Johnson-Laird (1983, 2009) and
others, the upshot is that human beings do not function like logic machines,
even imperfect ones, but instead harness a variety of resources not routinely
available to computers and which, though makeshift and imprecise, do
manage to circumvent combinatorial explosion and working memory limitations. These resources include unconscious inference, imagery, affective
responses, mental modeling, and analogy. For any complex situation, a virtually unlimited number of simplified decision or explanatory models could
be generated. We of course do not simplify reality in such a crank-it-out way.
Instead we say things like “The essence of this problem (or situation, concept, plan, et cetera) is . . . .” A “sense of essence,” as Douglas Hofstadter has
said, is the essence of sense. It is what enables us to recognize good models
and productive analogies from among the vast number of possibilities that
equally fit formal (logical) requirements. It is an important edge we have
over thinking machines and is one that education is still a long way from
exploiting.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

BEYOND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SKILLS
The misfit that arises from trying to insert new ideas into predetermined frameworks is nowhere more evident than in the widely heralded
“twenty-first-century skills” movement (Johnson, 2009). Terms like “knowledge creation,” “knowledge society,” and “innovation-driven” signal a new
set of imperatives that education is expected to address in some manner. The
way education authorities around the world customarily address such challenges is by adding new elements to existing categories: new skills entered
into the objectives list, new subjects into the subjects list, new tests into
the assessments list, new teacher workshops into the professional services
list. This is essentially the same approach that was taken in back-to-basics
movements such as No Child Left Behind: define objectives, institute tests
to drive schools to pursue those objectives, and then offer guidance in how
to teach to them.
No Child Left Behind and similar approaches to educational improvement
have had questionable results and have raised doubts about the whole notion
of using tests to drive instruction (Ravitch, 2011). However, there is this much
to be said for “back to basics”: Unlike “twenty-first-century skills,” basic literacy and numeracy are already well established as teachable and testable
skills, there exists a body of “best practice,” which, however imperfect, is
demonstrably more effective than no teaching at all, and it is reasonable to
expect that just by trying harder some gains can be achieved. Above all, it
is reasonable to assume that gains in literacy and numeracy achieved within
the school context will have value in modern life outside the school. This
is not true of most “twenty-first century skills” gains. They are a mixed bag.
Computer skills are definable, testable, and teachable and so they can readily
fit within existing curriculum frameworks, but there are questions of obsolescence and how much instruction is really necessary—questions that do
not apply so obviously to the traditional academic skills. There are tests of
critical thinking and creativity, and these have some predictive validity, but
it is not clear whether these are skills at all, as distinct from psychological traits, mindsets, or habits. Training and other learning activities can produce gains in test scores, but there is little or no evidence that such gains
have any value outside the immediate learning context. (For instance, a common form of creativity test calls for rapidly listing as many uses as possible for a familiar object such as a coat hanger. Thinking of novel uses may
have real-world value, but in the real world the number of such ideas and
the speed of producing them seldom count as measures of one’s value to a
project or organization. Problem solving is identified as a supposedly generic
twenty-first-century skill, but tests of it are limited to specific content areas,

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9

such as arithmetic problems, and the evidence indicates little or no transfer between acquired problem solving skill in one area and another. Then
there are oral communication skills, which, being based on more general
language skills, fit comfortably within existing curriculum frameworks; but
there is nothing particularly twenty-first century about oral language skill
and one could point to past times when it was probably more important than
at present.
One of the most widely publicized projects to promote twenty-first-century
skills is “Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills,” funded by three
major technology companies (ATC21S.org). The actual creative work of the
project has concentrated on test development, with the teaching part left
largely to affiliated groups. Thus, its framework is essentially the familiar
one of test-driven reform. However, in the initial formulation of objectives,
a project team, comprising learning scientists and tasked with examining
learning environments, proposed a complementary approach (Scardamalia,
Bransford, Kozma, & Quellmalz, 2011). They identified the test-driven
reform strategy as “working backward”—a term that has a positive connotation in the cognitive literature on problem solving. Start with objectives,
work backward from them to assessments of success in attaining the objectives, and then work backward from the tests to develop learning activities
that produce gains in the assessments. The learning scientists argued that,
although working backward can be effective for already well-understood
objectives, the dynamic nature of contemporary knowledge societies calls
for an approach that is open to emergent objectives—objectives that arise out
of systemic interactions between societal changes and human capabilities
and that need to be discovered rather than determined in a top-down manner.
Such discovery, in turn, depends on educational environments in which
new competencies (or deficiencies) have an opportunity to appear. That
would mean educational environments that approximate the conditions of
the surrounding open, innovation-driven, knowledge society.
The emerging trend that will take education beyond test-driven curricula
and such test-driven offshoots as the twenty-first-century skills movement is
grounded in recognition of self-organization and its ubiquity in learning and
human development. Systemic evolutionary processes dominate education
at all levels, with settling on local minima being a common phenomenon.
Modern education administrators are well aware of this as an explanation
of why, for instance, the “mile wide, inch deep curriculum” persists despite
a dearth of advocates. “Systemic change” has been the watchword of school
reform for a quarter century or more. The elementary school classroom is a
self-organizing social unit in which the teacher plays an important but not
all-powerful role. The classroom community may, for instance, self-organize
around minimizing the cognitive and time demands of schoolwork in

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

response to an excessively task-oriented teacher. At the individual level
there are cognitive strategies such as “knowledge-telling” and “copy-delete”
that are efficient for the performance of school tasks but defeat the educational purpose of the tasks (Brown & Day, 1983; Scardamalia, Bereiter, &
Lamon, 1994). Students do not design these strategies, are not even aware
of them, but they evolve through the interaction of task demands, internal
constraints, and goal-directed behavior.
We cannot leave this topic without noting the currently hot topic of “brain
fitness.” Discussions of twenty-first-century skills are sometimes muddied
by confusion with brain fitness exercises, which are much in the news as
well as being intensely commercialized. Brain exercises deal with basic cognitive functions such as short-term memory capacity, attentional control, and
response speed. These are at a much more basic level than such favorites of
the twenty-first-century skills movement as critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity. Brain fitness is not about strategy learning and improving
skills through practice, it is about improving brain chemistry and sprouting
more dendrites in certain areas of the cerebral cortex. The important point as
far as education is concerned is that whatever benefits research may attribute
to brain exercises are irrelevant to decisions about twenty-first-century skills,
except perhaps in pointing to an alternative to thinking skills instruction.
THE CLASSROOM AS A KNOWLEDGE BUILDING COMMUNITY
Sociocultural theory, inspired by Vygotsky and with a nod to Dewey, began
to take hold in education in the 1980s and evolved into ideas such as “situated cognition” and “communities of practice.” The result is that learning research has taken a decided turn toward treating learning as a group
phenomenon while educational practice, under the influence of tests that
always index individual performance, has moved increasingly toward focus
on the individual learner. This anomaly is brought out dramatically in the
case of collaboration, which is increasingly recognized in the world at large
as essential for progress in any knowledge-based activity. Acknowledging
this, PISA, the leading international achievement test, will reportedly contain a test of collaborative problem solving ability in its 2015 edition. However, true to the norms of achievement testing, scores are to be awarded on
an individual basis and so examinees will not interact with real people but
with computational avatars. Dating from two decades earlier, computer supported collaborative learning, abbreviated to “CSCL,” has been a thriving
research and development area within the learning sciences, and “collaborative learning” has become a byword right up there with “learner centered.”
Yet shifting classroom practice toward something more closely resembling

Education in an Open Informational World

11

real-world collaborative knowledge work remains more a vision than a reality. School-age students are capable of working together toward a common
knowledge objective such as producing an explanation, a solution to a significant problem, a plan, or an invention, but learning activities often function
as an obstruction rather than a means to that end.
The obvious solution is to focus collaborative schoolwork on the “big ideas”
already gaining a favored place in the curriculum: producing explanations of
those ideas, building them into larger conceptual structures (e.g., theories),
finding uses for them, and solving problems such as perceived inconsistencies or gaps. An approach that has this as its explicit focus is Knowledge
Building, one of five foundational approaches recognized in the 2006 Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, and defined as “the production and
continual improvement of ideas of value to a community” (Scardamalia &
Bereiter, 2003). It is essentially the same idea as “knowledge creation,” as
that term is used in design sciences, knowledge-creating organizations, and
knowledge management circles. A number of “constructivist” educational
approaches engage students in creative knowledge work and problem solving but with less emphasis on what in Knowledge Building is the sine qua non:
students taking collective responsibility for idea development and improvement. An important part of that collective responsibility is bringing relevant new information into the knowledge-building process, and this includes
responsibility for information quality and reliability—both quality and reliability of the source and of the students’ own rendition of the information
as they contribute it to a knowledge-creating effort. We earlier noted educators’ concern with information reliability. There is a growing body of research
on students’ ability to make such reliability judgments (Goldman & Scardamalia, 2013). However, like many other such concerns in education, it is
not only a matter of students’ ability but also a matter of their motivation to
do the necessary intellectual work. Knowledge Building is designed to provide a context in which students have a reason to read and write carefully
and critically. The classroom becomes a knowledge workshop, in which students collaborate to build something of value to themselves and thus have
reasons to care about the quality of the materials and the way they are used.
In order to change classrooms and other educational settings into knowledge building communities, systemic change is required not just at the
level of curriculum standards and learning activities but at the level of
knowledge building discourse. “Building Cultural Capacity for Innovation”
(BCCI) http://ikit.org/bcci/ is an international initiative to introduce such
systemic change in all kinds of educational contexts at all levels in more than
20 nations. BCCI aims at social and technological supports for sustained
creative work with important ideas. It makes use of sophisticated assessment
tools, but instead of using them to drive instruction it uses them to provide

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

feedback that allows students to see their ideas in relation to disciplinary
knowledge and empowers students in their knowledge-building efforts.
Committed to open source, BCCI partners will develop and continually
improve technology and pedagogical designs for education adapted to our
innovation-driven open informational world.
CONCLUSION
Any speculation about emerging trends in the process of education must
reckon with the still largely unknown effects of social media. Young people
are demonstrating a massive shift away from television toward spending
their leisure (and sometimes working) hours on the likes of Facebook
and Twitter and internet games. This means more than a shift in form of
entertainment. It means a shift from being spectators to being participants.
One measured educational effect is a decline in achievement test scores
associated with amount of time spent with social media (Kirschner &
Karpinsi, 2010). The evidence being correlational, it must be considered only
suggestive of a causal connection, but a causal connection is highly plausible. Watching television while doing homework may diminish attention
to the latter, but dividing attention between homework and online social
activity seems closer to being impossible. Effects on how students process
information, on what gets attention and what gets filtered out, on students’
worldviews, mindsets, and general orientations to knowledge—these could
have profound educational implications, but so far little is known and
speculations tend to be either airily optimistic or part of the usual moaning
about the decline of civilization. When we were addressing one group
of college educators with the concerns expressed here about coherence,
one technology specialist responded that coherence is still being achieved
but it is now taking shape in cyberspace. Concept maps and other types
of visualization are ways of representing coherent knowledge, but the
coherence is still in the mind of the observer and the visualizations are best
viewed as aids to transliterate comprehension.
One documented change with implications for education in an open
informational world is a shift from seeking authoritative information to
seeking information from peers. There are now websites dedicated to such
information exchange. It is easy to find examples on these sites of people
exchanging ignorance rather than knowledge. However, much of the information people gather from peers is matters of judgment rather than fact. It
seems important today more than ever to promote student engagement with
what Joseph Schwab called “disciplined knowledge” and characterized as
“a massive potential of capacities to do, to make, to alter, and to modify.” A
glance at Google appearances of this term suggests that the most common

Education in an Open Informational World

13

references to “disciplined knowledge” are disparaging. It is the dry stuff
of textbooks, a prime source of boredom among students. However, disciplined knowledge is, or ought to be, the home of big and growing ideas
and a springboard to innovation. In its 21st Century Learning manifesto,
the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2008)
asserted: “Educated workers need a conceptual understanding of complex
concepts, and the ability to work with them creatively to generate new ideas,
new theories, new products, and new knowledge . . . . They need to learn
integrated and usable knowledge, rather than the sets of compartmentalised
and decontextualised facts.” In this view, innovativeness and disciplinary
knowledge are partners, but getting these partners together in the same
educational process is not common. If creative work with ideas enters the
curriculum at all it tends to be through activities such as science fair projects,
design challenges, and entrepreneurial ventures that are separate from the
main curriculum and often authentically engaging for only a minority of
students. The synthesis that Knowledge Building aims to achieve consists of
making knowledge creation the principal way of engaging with disciplined
knowledge—the way that produced that disciplined knowledge in the first
place and continues to advance it.
REFERENCES
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44(2005), 115–133.
Brown, A. L., & Day, J. D. (1983). Macrorules for summarizing texts: The development of expertise. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22(1), 1–14.
Goldman, S. R., & Scardamalia, M. (2013). Managing, understanding, applying,
and creating knowledge in the information age: Next-generation challenges and
opportunities. Cognition and Instruction, 31(2), 255–269.
Homer-Dixon, T. (2000). The ingenuity gap: Facing the economic, environmental, and other
challenges of an increasingly complex and unpredictable world. New York, NY: Knopf.
Johnson, P. (2009). The 21st century skills movement. Educational Leadership, 67(1),
11–11.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models: Towards a cognitive science of language, inference and consciousness. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2009). Reasoning. In P. Rabbitt (Ed.), Inside psychology: A science
over 50 years (pp. 167–177). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Kirschner, P. A., & Karpinski, A. C. (2010). Facebook® and academic performance.
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OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) (2008). 21st century learning: Research, innovation and policy. Paris, France: OECD.

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Ravitch, D. (2011). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and
choice are undermining education. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2003). Knowledge building. In Encyclopedia of education (2nd ed., pp. 1370–1373). New York, NY: Macmillan Reference.
Scardamalia, M., Bereiter, C., & Lamon, M. (1994). The CSILE project: Trying to bring
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Scardamalia, M., Bransford, J., Kozma, R., & Quellmalz, E. (2011). New assessments
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(Eds.), Assessment and teaching 21st century skills. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.
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change (pp. 373–402). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

MARLENE SCARDAMALIA AND CARL BEREITER
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter are professors at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Scardamalia holds the
Presidents’ Chair in Education and Knowledge Technologies and directs the
Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology (IKIT). Bereiter is a professor emeritus and cofounder of IKIT. They have collaborated for more than
35 years on research that includes the psychology of written composition,
intentional learning, and knowledge building. Connecting these three areas
is concern with the progress of students’ understanding of the world, the
level of personal and collective responsibility students take for it, and the
extent to which school practices induce strategies that undermine students’
own pursuit of understanding. This concern led to a shift from treating writing as a communication skill to treating it as a medium for building knowledge. It also led to an effort to find ways of giving young learners more
cognitive and social responsibility. One direction this took was design of
what turned out to be the first networked learning environment (piloted in
1983 and fully functional in 1986). The present version, Knowledge Forum,
is reportedly the most widely used software in CSCL (computer-supported
collaborative learning) worldwide.

Education in an Open Informational World

15

While at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in
1992–1993, they organized the Schools for Thought project, which brought
together three distinct but compatible programs of research-based educational innovation—Brown and Campione’s Fostering Communities of Learners,
the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt’s Jasper Woodbury mathematical problem-solving series, and IKIT’s Knowledge Building pedagogy
and technology. The bringing together of these approaches within the same
classrooms led to a sharpening of distinctions within the broad family of
“constructivist” educational approaches—to the extent that Scardamalia
and Bereiter argue for a distinction between learning and knowledge
building, with knowledge building more closely aligned with “knowledge creation,” as understood in the design sciences, knowledge-creating
organizations, and knowledge management. Their current efforts focus
Knowledge Building models and technology on the attainment of an
inclusive knowledge society. Toward this end, partners from more than 20
nations are united in a “Building Cultural Capacity for Innovation” initiative
(http://ikit.org/bcci/).
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