Constructivism is an epistemology (a philosophical framework or theory of learning, Jean Piaget, 1967), which argues humans construct meaning from current knowledge structures, and which values developmentally-appropriate facilitator-supported learning in
I'm interested that when Michael Wesch or Howard Rheingold undertake this sort of social/distributed teaching, they rely quite heavily on RAs to pick u the slack and fill in the gaps. Perhaps that where I'm going wrong, expecting the students to achieve this sort of outcome with insufficient scaffolding.