CONSTRUCTIVISM, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE FUTURE OF CLASSROOM LEARNING
SUMMARY
Technology has effectively revolutionized American society. An unexpected byproduct of this revolution has been the emergence of a generation of children weaned on multidimensional, interactive media sources, a generation whose understanding and expectations of the world differ profoundly from that of the generations preceding them. If we are to give these children the education necessary to succeed in our technologically intense, global future a new form of educational practice, one that builds on children's native learning abilities and technological competence, must replace our existing methods. The theoretical foundation for such changes exists, and the time to implement them is now. We have allowed our schools to remain in the past, while our children have been born in the future. The result is a mismatch of learner and educator. But it is not the children who are mismatched to the schools; the schools are mismatched to the children. Only by revising educational practice in light of how our culture has changed can we close this gap, and reunite our schools with our children and the rest of our society.