Teams Construct Knowledge During Project-Driven Social Interactions

The educational model of the twentieth century has become obsolete partly because we did not pay enough attention to facilitating interaction and collaboration between learners and partly because it has been rendered irrelevant to real life. The replacement of the teacher-centered paradigm with the childcentered paradigm is not a sufficient condition for promoting collaboration, and it does not, by itself, encourage more interactions between individual learners. Interactions require structured methodologies, and collaboration requires a purpose. In this chapter, we highlight how a project-driven construction of knowledge is achieved when (1) projects are socially relevant, (2) projects are carried out as group activities, (3) technology serves to create the learning space, and (4) structured methodologies facilitate meaningful, well-organized interactions between the members of the project team.