social constructivism

i have been perusing dawn hogue's online english resources site and her many linked resources, finding a lot of content that relies on, operates in support of and discusses openly the social constructivist approach to learning and teaching. as is evidenced, i hope, by my last post, i believe this is an essential consideration in education, though it seems neither embraced nor understood by most educators. with the increasing importance of and reliance on wiki resources, social constructivism is the primary framework within which we are creating and accessing knowledge. i weep for door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen, though only for a moment, because they have become extinct as a result of the evolution of knowledge itself, not merely the changes in methods of knowledge development. as we change our ideas about what words, places, ideas and people mean, who can cause this change but we who think about them? education is not a unidirectional heirarchy as it once was. education operates in all directions: student to teacher, teacher to student, student to community, country to student, world to teacher, student to world, student to student. many of these avenues are restricted by one limitation of schooling or another. we are peeling these restrictions away bit by bit, though we seem to be approaching it in a straightlined chronological method, placing obstacles behind one another clearing only one at a time and without looking ahead to the next barrier. the collaborative communities i see forming will help change this, as each of us work on our own ideas and those of others, sidelining isolated patterns of thought to put collective cognition on the field. since we are all students as well as educators, it makes sense that we should learn how to teach in the same way we teach students how to learn.