On Sunday we launched the inaugural public event of the Constructivist Consortium (http://www.constructivistconsortium.org) at the NECC Conference (National Educational Computing Conference) - nestled into the Atlanta Botanical Gardens a hop, skip and jump from midtown Atlanta. We dedicated the day to the “godfather” of constructivism Seymour Papert, who is still recovering from a serious head injury when he was hit by a motorcycle while at a conference on mathematics in Vietnam. We announced that several Consortium members are raising money to help defray the medical costs - and we hope others will follow our lead.
The event itself was hugely successful - with a sell-out crowd of over 100 attendees and a long waiting list. I’ll write a full review of the day soon - but the basic take-away points are

1) the huge draw was evidence of a healthy and growing constructivist movement and

2) encouragement to all the attendees that they are not alone - that there is a supportive network of progressive educators ready to share best practices and help them fight the good fight to empower students with learner-centric experiences/tools/approaches/best practices.
I am COMPLETEY ENERGIZED - and ready to help grow this out nationwide - and globally - with parallel focus on changes at the policy level to create room for constructivist learning (including socio-economically depressed communities.)

Onward, Paul

necc07

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 3:17 am by Paul Reynolds and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.