Seminar on Constructivism in Science Education

Dr. Tom McCloughlin was the invited speaker in a doctoral students' seminar on Constructivism in Science Education in the Faculty of Pedagogy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.  The topic of his talk was 'constructivism in education' which attempted to provoke alternative approaches to teaching and learning, in particular, the strategies of metacognition and cognitive conflict, modelled in a real-time constructive concept map using CMapTools. Such a process affords extraction of propositional phrases which provide a textual record in additional to the visual artefact of the concept map itself. Dr. McCloughlin has been working with the University of Ljubljana since 2004 on two EU funded projects, the second of which is due to be concluded in 2017.  Dr. McCloughlin also attended the annual conference organised by the Centre for Iconographic Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Rijeka, Croatia. The theme of this year's conference was 'iconoclasm and iconophilia' which provided a range of papers from the visual, cognitive, philosophical and psychological domains. His input into working with the CIS is part of his commitment to using psychometric and visual-analytic methods in visual representations in 'Global Studies'.