More resonating with distributed cognition

Reference: Karasavvidis, I. (2002). Distributed cognition and educational practice. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 13 (1/2), 11-29.

Karasavvidis' (2002) article on distributed cognition (DC) helped me better understand this concept.
This author argues that DC is a “set of ideas about the nature of cognition and how it relates to fellow people and artifacts” (p.13). It seems that DC is not a completely new idea in the cognitive science but rather a revived one.
DC is a different lens for understanding human cognition, which emerged as a reaction to the cognitive science tradition of limiting cognition to what happens inside of the individual’s head. In this tradition, cognition is seen as the property of the individual. Adepts of the distributed cognition framework (i.e., Hutchins, Clark, Nardi, Cobb, Salomon), however, argue for seeing cognition as a “property of the whole system within which the individual functions” (p. 14). The individual makes use of the environment (artifacts and/or fellow individuals) to reduce the cognitive load.

This article identifies two dimensions of distributed cognition: social and material. The social dimension refers to distribution across members of the community, while the material one refers to distribution between internal and external components (i.e., cognitive tools, artifacts). This separation, however, is artificial but useful, as Karasavvidis points out, because the two dimensions can co-exist, as cognition can involve other individuals and tools/ artifacts simultaneous.

An interesting case that Karasavvidis makes is that the idea of distributed cognition can be traced back to Vygotsky’s concepts of mediation of psychological processes by symbols, and cultural development. Especially the social dimension of DC seems to draw heavily on Vygotsky’s view of the “social origins of individual mental functioning” (p.19).

Karasavvidis identifies important implications of DC for educational practice. From a DC perspective, the teaching, learning and assessment practices have to change fundamentally. An educational system which emphasizes individual work and secluded assessment of the students without resort to artifacts is incompatible with the distributed cognition approach.
When cognition is distributed across settings and fellow students, the learning objective need to be reformulated. For example, when using computers to learn about graphs, the emphasis moves from learning to design graphs to learning to interpret the graphs which are easily generated by the computer. Thus, teaching and learning have to be redefined and the curriculum revised to accommodate the new approach to understanding cognition.

Resonating with distributed cognition

Since last class I’ve struggled to grasp what distributed cognition (DC) really is. How is distributed cognition different and/or connected with collaborative learning? Is collaborative learning a form of distributed cognition? Where do these concepts overlap? I found some hints on the web that distributed cognition is a prevalent theory in the field of computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL). So that’s a bit of an answer. I wonder though whether the field of traditional face-to-face collaborative learning takes into account distributed cognition.

The clearest explanation so far related to DC seems to be Hollan’s et al. (2001) (as cited by Glenberg, 2006) who lists the three main characteristics of distributed cognition:· Cognition can be distributed across the members of a social group (social distribution)· Cognition can be distributed between internal and external structures (material distribution)· Cognition can be distributed across time, with final products reflecting partial/ earlier products (temporal distribution)

Here http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/yrogers/dist_cog/ I found that distributed cognition is not proposing the existence of a new cognitive process but it’s trying to reframe the understanding of cognition as situated in and spread across social contexts. So, DC is an alternative theoretical perspective in response to the traditional theory in the cognitive science which emphasizes the internal states/ cognitive process and neglects cognition as potentially happening outside of the individual’s head.

This theoretical shift from understanding cognition as a strictly internal process to conceiving it as a possible socially distributed process (from internalism to externalism) seems to (might) be linked to an epistemological turn from constructivism to social constructivism and social constructionism. Constructivism sees the individual making meaning of knowledge within social contexts. Social constructionism argues that knowledge is constructed through social interactions.

Other questions that pop into my head on this topic are: How does distributed cognition connect to discursive ways of knowing? If we look at cognition as a social/ interactional process, how is this similar or not to distributed cognition?

Action and cognition

Reference: Glenberg A. M. (2006). Radical changes in cognitive process due to technology. Pragmatics & Cognition, 14 (2), 263-274.

The purpose of this theoretical article is to make the case for grounding cognition in action and to introduce a theoretical framework for cognition and distributed cognition based on action.

Glenberg reviews several recent experimental studies which demonstrate the connection between action and cognition. For example, in Smith’s (2005) experiment, 3-year old children were given a bulb-like asymmetrical object to play with. The children who had the chance to take action upon (i.e., to rotate) the object were more likely to include more asymmetrical objects in the same category with the object they manipulated than the children who only held the bulb and wave it. Thus the categorization depends “on the types of action they performed with the objects” (p.266). Another study (Glenberg, 2004) revealed that children who were given the chance to make meaning of a story by manipulating toys which corresponded to the story line showed gains in memory and reading comprehension (2 standard deviation grater) than children who only read and re-read the text.

The central idea in Glenberg’s framework of cognition is that “the basic function of the cognitive system is to select the next action” (p.267). The selection of the next action is “a process of constraint satisfaction” (p.267). In his model, the sources of constraint are: environment, body & physiology, emotions, goals, learning & culture and social situation. These all interact to produce affordances. When the action is generated, it will impact the sources of constraint so that “taking one action changes the constraints for selecting the next action and in the process creates a dynamic system” (p.268).

The article proposes this framework as an example of distributed cognition. Glenberg adopts Hollan’s et al. (2001) characteristics of distributed cognition:
· Cognition is distributed across the member of a social group who combine their expertise to create a product which is different from the sum of all contributions.
· Cognition involves “coordination between internal and external structure” (p.268).
· Cognition is distributed across time, with final products reflecting partial products.

To be continued in a later post

Article review

Viégas, F.(2006). Bloggers' Expectations of Privacy and Accountability: An Initial Survey. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10 (3).

Critique of the article:
This research study investigates the perceptions of blog authors on issues of privacy and liability. Participants in this study are 492 bloggers who took an online survey composed of 34 Likert-scale questions and 16 open-ended questions. Results were reported mainly through descriptive statistics. Some correlations are also provided. The participants’ answers to the open-ended questions were analyzed and a summary of their content is provided.

The sample of this study has the following characteristics: 63% of the participants were male bloggers; 46.3% were 21-30 years old; 59% were college graduates and 31% attended graduate school; 79% were Caucasian.

Interesting findings regarding blog audience were reported. The bloggers pointed out three main strategies of learning about their audience: comments on their blog, access logs, and links (trackbacks and referrer). Interestingly, there was no correlation found between the frequency of checking access log and the feeling of knowing the audience. Thus, the bloggers who reported checking the access logs did not reported knowing their audience better.
The findings also reveal that bloggers’ perception of their audience does not always reflect the actual audience. The participants’ perceived audience was smaller than the actual audience. This perception is thought to have important implications for online privacy. Thus, the perceived smaller audience could be connected to a tendency to reveal more information on one’s private life. Yet, there is no evidence provided in this article for such a connection. In addition, the article does not discuss strategies of recording the actual audience of the participant bloggers.
Surprisingly, no correlation was found between the frequency of revealing personal info on the blog and the blogger’s attitude towards the persistence of their posts. Thus, those bloggers who post more private info do not necessarily worry more about their entries being maintained online over time.

Although some interesting findings are reported, the article has several flaws. The purpose of this article is not very clearly stated. In addition, the article does not provide information on the statistical procedures employed for data analysis. The sample was large yet the sampling technique did not involve randomization but snowball which is considered a disadvantage in terms of generalizing the findings. However, the author does acknowledge this drawback and cautions against extending these findings to the whole blogging population. Instead she provides detailed description of the sample which allows the readers to have a clear image of the targeted population.