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.