Abstract:
Over the past decade, the field of educational technology has endorsed constructivism as a
suitable referent for the development and meaningful use of appropriate software in
education. Examples in science include the constructivist use of multimedia such as videobased
laboratories and student multimedia authoring, microcomputer-based laboratories
(MBLs) and microworlds. When used in peer learning environments, students can use
representations from these programs as conversational artifacts (Pea, 1993), articulating
their own views, reflecting on others ideas and negotiating shared meanings.
This paper will give an overview of this area before presenting the main findings and
future directions emerging from a recent study in this field. The study focussed on two
secondary science classes using an interactive multimedia program that incorporated sixteen
digital video clips showing difficult, expensive, time-consuming or dangerous demonstrations
of mostly real-life, out-of-classroom scenarios. The program used the
predict-observe-explain (POE) strategy to structure the students engagement with each
scenario the clips acting as stimuli for the sixteen POE tasks. The findings have
implications for authentic technology-mediated learning in science classrooms.
