Is learning truly an individual process? Cognitive psychologists have advanced numerous theories that suggest that it isn't. Instead, they point to numerous ways in which knowledge is situated in artifacts and in interactions rather than residing in the individual. Particularly in an information-intensive era such as ours, expecting the individual to retain vast reservoirs of information is counter-productive to accomplishing tasks. Pea, for instance, writes:

Knowledge is commonly socially constructed, through collaborative efforts toward shared objectives or by dialogues and challenges brought about by differences in persons' perspective. Intelligence may also be distributed for use in designed artifacts as diverse as physical tools, representations such as diagrams, and computer-user interfaces to complex tasks. In these cases, intelligence is often distributed by off-loading what could be elaborate and error-prone mental reasoning processes as action constraints of either the physical or symbolic environments.

A distinction should be made, however, between the artifacts that contain distributed intelligence, and the interactions that permit distributed cognition. It is much easier to describe a situation and to point to the tools that contain distributed intelligence (once you get the hang of it, it's hard to find a tool that doesn't do this), than it is to design situations in which distributed cognition can take place.

(Hey, which one is it, anyway? Intelligence or cognition?)

Back
Back to: Online Discussion Forums - an introduction