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Distributed Cognition and Educational Practice Jl. of Interactive Learning Research (2002) 13(1/2), 11-29 Distributed Cognition and Educational Practice ILIAS KARASAVVIDIS Department of Primary Teacher Education University of Crete Crete, Greece [email protected] The objective of this article is to present a brief historical over- view of ideas related to the distribution of cognition, offer a criti- cal appraisal, and outline some of the implications for the teach- ing and learning practice. First, the article provides a description of the mind as disembodied and disembedded, an image that has come to dominate western psychological thought. Second, the ar- ticle focuses on a set of ideas that challenge this notion of the mind as the locus of all cognition and intelligence: distributed cognition. The main tenets of distributed cognition in two psy- chological traditions, cognitive science and educational psycholo- gy, are presented. Third, the article considers another influential tradition that has significantly influenced the development of conceptions of distributed cognition: cultural-historical psychol- ogy. Fourth, distributed cognition ideas in cognitive science and educational psychology are critically appraised, so that similari- ties and differences are highlighted. The article concludes with a discussion of some of the implications of distributed cognition ideas for the teaching and learning practice. Socrates: What do you say of him, Meno? Were not all these answers giv- en out of his own head? Meno: Yes, they were all his own. Plato, Meno 12 Karasavvidis In one of the first recorded texts ever to address questions about the mind and the nature of knowledge, the Platonic dialogue Meno, Socrates in- vites Meno to observe his interaction with a young slave to decide on whether the slave is learning something from Socrates or is simply remem- bering known facts. Socrates makes a clear distinction between teaching and telling, considering, asking questions as distinct from teaching (“I am not teaching the boy anything, but only asking him questions”). In the course of the interaction, Socrates elicits certain knowledge of geometry from the slave. Meno is compelled to agree on that all the answers the slave gave were “given out of his own head” and further accepts this “spontaneous re- covery of knowledge” on the part of the slave as “recollection.” Even though Socrates merely aimed to show that recollection is a main source of knowledge, the dialogue is interesting in two main respects. First, it portrays a certain image of knowledge that is basically seen as being prior to exist- ence. Second, it delineates roles for the teacher and the learner, thereby pro- viding a model of cognition that can be utilized for instruction: teaching is presented as a process of eliciting knowledge from rather than presenting knowledge to the leaner. The present article focuses on the notion of cognition as distributed, a notion which is largely incompatible with Socrates’; interpretation that the answers the slave gave were “given out of his own head”, an interpretation that eventually has come to dominate western philosophical and psycholog- ical thought. By presenting and discussing views that support the notion of cognition as distributed, we will cast doubt on Socrates’ account that the slave was unassisted in arriving at the respective understanding of a geo- metrical fact. DISTRIBUTED COGNITION: A BRIEF HISTORICAL OVERVIEW Descartes carried forward this Platonic image of knowledge, thereby separat- ing the mind from the body and treating the mind as a self-standing, inde- pendently operating entity (Haugeland, 1998). While for the first few de- cades of psychology as a scientific discipline the mind was a legitimate ob- ject of study through introspection (cf. Cole’s, 1996, account of the second psychology), ushering in the behaviorist rein shifted the focus from the mind to objective behavior. Finally, the cognitive revolution of the ’50s re- stored the emphasis on the mind (Gardner, 1987). This evolution helps un- derstand why the mind has been treated as disembodied and disembedded, Distributed Cognition and Educational Practice 13 cognition being “in the head” as a property of the individual mind. Most of the current psychological research is either explicitly or implicitly based on this conception of cognition: cognitive processes are thought of as residing inside the head, their study is largely decontextualized, and the individual is used as the unit of analysis. For instance, the study of memory typically in- volves the examination of how individuals memorize a body of knowledge, how they encode it and integrate it into the existing knowledge structures, and how they retrieve it from those structures. The study of memory usually involves abstract tasks that are typically meaningless and likely to have very little connection with the real world. Finally, experiments are carried out in a “white room” where subjects are neither allowed to use any artifacts for re- membering (e.g., take notes as they would usually do in real life if they had to remember long meaningless strings of symbols) nor turn to others present in the environment (family members, partners, colleagues, friends) and use them as memory aids (e.g. asking a colleague in the office to remind them to do something as they would normally do in real life). This approach to the study of psychological processes is indicative of the tendency to think of the individual mind as the locus of all cognition and intelligence. In recent years, however, the mind-body dualism has been challenged both on philosophical (e.g., Winograd & Flores, 1987; Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1990) and empirical grounds (Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Hutchins, 1995a; Clark, 1997). Owing to such theoretical and empirical advances, new models of the mind and cognition have surfaced aiming to transcend the lim- itations of the dualistic model: situated cognition and distributed cognition. Our specific focus in this article will be on the latter. The idea that cognition is distributed is not new as Cole and Engestrom (1993) pointed out. The revived interest in the idea of cognition as distribut- ed has been attributed to; (a) the fact that people rely on computer artifacts to handle a wide variety of cognitive tasks, (b) the influence of cultural-his- torical psychology, and (c) the dissatisfaction with the notion of cognition as a property of the individual mind (Salomon, 1993a). In spite of this re- newed interest, it should be stressed that distributed cognition is neither a coherent theory nor a theoretical framework. Rather, it can be roughly de- scribed as a set of ideas about the nature of cognition and how it relates to fellow people and artifacts. We will present an integrated account of distrib- uted views of cognition in two different traditions: cognitive science (Hutch- ins, 1995a; Clark, 1997), and educational psychology (Salomon, 1993; Resnick, Levine, & Teasley, 1991). We will mainly focus on the volume by Salomon even though we refer to both volumes as falling under the category of educational psychology. It should be noted, however, that as opposed to 14 Karasavvidis the volume by Salomon, which is mainly addressing psychologists and edu- cators, the volume by Resnick, Levine and Teasley is much broader in scope covering areas such as psychology, education, conversation, language and communication (Schegloff, 1991; Heath, 1991; Rogoff, 1991; Hutchins, 1991; Resnick, 1991; Lave, 1991). Distributed Cognition in Cognitive Science While in traditional cognitive science cognition was considered to re- side in the head, recent approaches have moved the boundaries of cognition beyond the head (Norman, 1993; Hutchins, 1995a; Clark, 1997; Haugeland, 1998). The limitations of cognition as symbol-based computation are being highlighted by cognitive scientists who acknowledge that, for certain pur- poses, it is more appropriate to consider cognition (and intelligence) as a property of the whole system within which the individual functions rather than as something limited by the skin or skull (Clark, 1997; Greeno & Moore, 1993; Zhang & Norman, 1994; Norman, 1993; Hutchins, 1995a; Hutchins & Klausen, 1998). The image of mind that emerges is that of the leaky mind “es- caping its natural confines and mingling shamelessly with body and with the world” (Clark, 1997, p. 53). The appropriateness of using the individual as a unit of analysis is questioned, as it is maintained that the properties of individual cognition cannot be understood by simply studying individual cognition per se: rath- er, one should look at the whole system within which the person operates using various tools (Hutchins, 1995a; 1995b; Hutchins & Palen, 1998). By way of illustration, Hutchins (1995b) reached two main conclusions in his study of the memory processes in a commercial airline cockpit. First, memory functions are more a matter of interpretation of material symbols by the pi- lots than a matter of recollection of these symbols from their memories. Sec- ond, the memory of the cockpit is not made of individual pilot memory alone; focusing on individual pilot memory is insufficient in understanding the phe- nomenon of memory, because a considerable portion of the mnemonic func- tion takes place outside the individual pilot memory, namely outside of the individual pilot head. Hutchins (1995a) has studied how cognition makes use both of the nat- ural environment to offload some of the computational burden involved in calculations and specially designed artifacts which crystallize knowledge and practice thereby saving mental effort. Regarding the use of the environ- ment as a tool, Hutchins (1995a) provided a colorful example with his de- scription of Micronesian navigation, where navigators are sailing for several Distributed Cognition and Educational Practice 15 days out of the sight of land without using any typical western mechanical, electrical or magnetic resources. While at first sight it appears that they are poorly equipped for such a task, they nevertheless navigate very accurately: they know the bearings of the point of departure, the destination, and can indicate other islands off to the side of the course even though these are out of sight.
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