Open peer commentary on the article “Amusement, Delight, and Whimsy: Humor Has Its Reasons that Reason Cannot Ignore” by Edith K. Ackermann. Upshot: Ackermann tackles “humor” as an agentive participant in the process of knowledge construction. Performing her thesis in her writing, she give a reflective account of how oblique ways of knowing have always been present in debates concerning epistemology, albeit not given equal status as rational ones. As such, her endeavors in this text are geared towards lifting up (...) the position of “humor” to a much deserved higher level in educational and learning practices. Consequently, our endeavors in this commentary are targeted towards a little more in this direction by focusing on how “humor” becomes a way of accessing the process of knowledge construction and of unraveling its significance. (shrink)

Context: Sustainability is among major societal goals in our days. Education is acknowledged as an essential strategy for attaining sustainability by activating the creative potential within young people to understand sustainability, bring forth changes in their everyday life, and collectively envision a more sustainable future. Problem: However, teaching and learning about sustainability and sustainability-related issues is not an easy task due to the inherent complexity, ambiguity, and context-specificity of the concept. We are in need of innovative pedagogical approaches and tools (...) that will allow us to design learning activities in which learners will be empowered to develop new, alternative interpretations of sustainability in personally and collectively meaningful ways. Method: We argue that a constructionist perspective involving the use of expressive media for digital storytelling offers an appropriate frame for designing learning activities fostering collaborative creativity in thinking and learning about urban sustainability. Our study is based on the design of a learning activity following this rationale. We adopted a qualitative approach in the collection and analysis of different sources of data with the aim to explore collaborative creativity as a learning process based on the students’ collective processes and resulting in the co-construction of new ideas and insights about sustainability, and new tangible artefacts encompassing them. Results: Our analysis of the collaborative creativity exemplified in the three digital stories produced identified important creative elements with regards to the three components of a digital story and how they were embodied in each digital story produced as a result of the students’ joint constructionist activity. Implications: Our study provides some preliminary evidence that collaborative creativity from a constructionist perspective can stand as an appropriate framework for designing learning activities addressing the difficult concept of sustainability. There are several implications for both theory and educational practice in environmental education and education for sustainable development, constructionism, and digital storytelling in education. Moreover, our study opens up new fields for research and theory in creativity. (shrink)

Upshot: The three commentaries focus on the c-book as “object,” on locating the learner in the design process and on the challenge to develop more fine-grained theory for constructionist collaborative design of educational resources. I respond to this delightfully critical discussion in three ways, addressing the c-book as a potentially new kind of mediation, thinking of constructionist collaborative designs as creativity enhancers and considering constructionism as one of the key frameworks for understanding collective designs.

Context: The article discusses design strategies for infusing constructionism and creativity into widely recognised media such as e-books. Problem: E-books have recently included constructionist widgets but we do not yet have creative designs for readers who may want to both read and tinker with an e-book. Method: The generation and study of a community of interest collaboratively designing e-books, with a strong constructionist element. Results: Some first examples of social creativity in the collaborative design process are discussed in the article, (...) showing the complexity of fusing reading with constructionism and the importance of the designers’ own ability to exchange widgets meant for the book and at the same time use them as boundary objects to communicate with each other. Implications: Social creativity in such design processes is considered as key for spreading and democratizing design for constructionism and creativity. (shrink)

Upshot: Constructionism is an epistemology, a theory of design and a theory of learning. It addresses constructivist learning in individual and social environments where bricolage with digital expressive media plays an important role. This editorial situates constructionism within constructivist discourse, and discusses the potential for constructionism to play an identifiable and important role in a wider educational discourse and theory networking. In this framework, it provides a short synthetic review of the eight papers addressing constructionism from a diversity of perspectives.

Upshot: The commentaries raise a plethora of issues, extending the article’s problematic in insightful ways. In this response, we chose to focus on two interesting views on the “powerful idea” in the constructionist sense, on systems versus causal-rule thinking and on the affective aspect of collaborative learning.