Vygotsky, Piaget and YouTube

The world is changing, and it's largely due to the proliferation of new technology. Learning in particular is being democratised because of technology. Where once, experts had a monopoly on knowledge and expertise, now anyone it seems can access content that will teach them via the social web. This is known as autodidacticism - teaching yourself.

And yet according to one very respected psychologist - Lev Vygotsky - learning on your own is not as powerful or extensive as learning alongside a 'knowledgeable other' person. According to his Zone of Proximal Development theory (ZPD), whether that person be a teacher, peer or parent, children learn more extensively within a social context. The same can be applied to adults, who can build on their existing knowledge through interaction with others.

ZPD theory ran counter to other developmental theories of the time. Jean Piaget, for example, famously claimed that children were solo-scientists, exploring the world and constructing meaning for themselves. They would need to progress through a strictly defined set of cognitive stages before they were ready to learn at the next level, he said. Vygotsky's tack on learning was invariably laced with rich social contexts, and laden with cultural nuances, and he didn't hold to the stage development theory as strictly as Piaget. Vygotsky also subscribed to the notion that we construct our own meaning, but what you can learn on your own, he believed, was limited when compared to what you could learn with someone else in close proximity, supporting and encouraging you. Jerome Bruner took this notion a little further and talked about the scaffolding of learners - proving close support for them as they developed their skills, knowledge and expertise, and then, when they became more independent, the scaffolding could be faded and eventually removed.

Today, the bold claim is that anyone can learn anything they wish, because social media channels can provide that scaffolding. Choose any subject, whether it be baking a sponge cake, playing blues guitar, or animal husbandry, and you will find dozens of YouTube videos that will teach you. The content is out there. All you need to do is provide the commitment for hours of practice and application. In Vygotskiian terms, the knowledgeable other (the social context) is replaced by the technology. Behind the technology he would argue, are the experts. They create the content and present it to you on YouTube, and the ZPD is still there. In effect, the technology is now mediating the social interaction between learner and knowledgeable other person. In Piagetian terms it could be argued that in fact the learner is still a solo explorer, discovering for himself that he can indeed, with a lot of practice and a great deal of trial and error, eventually bake the perfect sponge cake, emulate Eric Clapton's finest blues riffs, or run a sheep farm in the hills of Cumbria.

For Vygotsky, the technology is the ZPD - mediating the social. Behind the video is the social support, the scaffolding. For Piaget, the technology is simply another tool that enables self discovery. The learner is still a solo explorer, discovering for themselves through trial and error, what is possible.

Which is the correct perspective? It's open to discussion, but whatever way we look at it, tools such as YouTube are opening up unprecedented and very rich learning opportunities for anyone who has access to the Web. Informal learning will never be the same again.

Photo by Anne Roberts


Vygotsky, Piaget and YouTube by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.