ZPD

I'd heard of Vygotsky before, but I'd never really thought of him as the genesis behind the concept of "scaffolding." Maybe my instructors weren't clear, or maybe they were and I just wasn't paying much attention. I suppose his concept, connecting your knowledge with something outside yourself that you do not neccessarily know makes sense. I think the bridge analogy works better than the scaffold. When I think scaffold, I think upward. I suppose the direction of the knowledge connection doesn't neccessarily matter, its a mental picture kind of a thing. Vygotsky generates a picture of one guy reaching a book off of a shelf into someone elses hands to me, a horizontal motion. Scaffolding is a stacking off stuff ontop of something else that already was there. There may not exactly be anything to neccessarily build upon, depending on the learner.