Special Issue Preface Concept Mapping

A rather drastic attempt to benefit from computers in our schools is to see them as prostheses for thinking, reasoning, estimating, experimenting, and learning. Most intriguing in these attempts is that we are confronted with new views on the process of learning. An even further speculation would be that learning tools might even change the way we learn, as they finally embody the ways we think and imagine. Looking back to dominant views on learning we see associationism, behaviorism, and cybernetics which gave in-depth change to teaching models, didactic procedures, and the way teachers tend to structure, sequence, and represent learning events. As students are immersed in the teachers' explanations, thinking procedures, and testing for longer periods we may expect that students are shaped by popular teaching methods and will hence incorporate dominant views on learning at that period.