Abstract:
There has been a widespread increase to conduct teaching
and learning over the Internet. However, many instruction
sites just provide teaching materials on the Internet to
support traditional face-to-face methods. Learners then
passively retrieve information from the Web pages. They
are not engaged in actively constructing meaningful
understandings of the topics being studied by using
constructivist learning methods. This paper proposes that
software agents be used to develop constructivist learning
environments (CLEs) on the Web, to assist learners to
construct new knowledge. The constructivist theory of
learning is first reviewed and the characteristics of the
CLEs are then outlined. The paper then suggests a process
constructed out of constructivist learning methods over the
Internet. Ways of using software agent technology to assist
learners in constructivist learning are then investigated,
along with the relevant implementation approaches.
Finally future work in this area is presented.
