Learning in doing: Social, cognitive, and computational perspectives Distributed cognitions GENERAL EDITORS: ROY PEA Psychological and educational JOHN SEELY BROWN considerations The construction zone: Working for cognitive change in school Denis Newman, Peg Grrfin, and Michael Cole Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine Edited by interaction Lucy Suchman GAVRIEL SALOMON Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation University of Ha$, Israel Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger Street mathematics and school mathematics Terezinha Nunes, Anahria Dim Schliemann, and David William Carraher Understanding practice: Perspectives on activity and context Seth Chaiklin andJean Lave (editors) I943 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pin Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RI' 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA Contents 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia 0 Cambridge Universify Press 1993 First phlished 1993 Printed in the United States of America Library of Conqcsr Catalo@n~-in-PublicdionData Disaibuted cognitions : psychological and educational considerations I / edited by Gavriel Salomon. List of contribufon page vii I p. cm. - (Learning in doing) Includes index. Series foreword ix ISBN 0-521-41406-7 (hard) xi 1. Cognition and culture. 2. Knowledge, Sociology of. 3. Cognition - Social aspects. 4. Learning. Psychology of - Social aswcts. I. Salomon. Gavriel. 11. Series. 1 A cultural-historical approach to distributed 92-41220 cognition CIP MICHAEL COLE AND YRJO ENGESTR~M A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. 2 Practices of distributed intelligence and designs for education ISBN 0-521-41406-7 hardback ROY D. PEA 3 Person-plus: a distributed view of thinking and learning D. N. PERKINS 4 No distribution without individuals' cognition: a dynamic interactional view GAVRlEL SALOMON 5 Living knowledge: the social distribution of cultural resources for thinking I.UIS C. MOLL, JAVIER TAPIA, AND KATHRYN F. WHITMORE 6 Finding cognition in the classroom: an expanded view of human intelligence 164 THOMAS HATCH AND HOWARD GARDNER 46 Michael Cole and Yji; Engestrom Miinsterberg, H. (1914). Psychology: Gmnd and applied. New York: Appleton. Palincsar, A. S., & Brown, A. L. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprchension- fostering and monitoring activities. Cognition and Instrudion, 1, 117-75. 2 Practices of distributed intelligence Rubin, J. Z., Provezano, F. J., & Luria, Z. (1974). The eye of the beholder: Parents' view on sex of newborns. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 44, 5 12-19. and designs for education Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1985). Fostering the development of self-regulation in children's knowledge processing. In S. F. Shipman, J. W. Segal, & R. Glaser (Eds.), Thinking and learning skills: Research and opm questions (pp. Roy D. Pea 65-80). tlillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Schwartz, T. (1978). The size and shape of culture. In F. Barth (Ed.), Scale andsorial mgnniia!ion @p. 215-52). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. (1990). The structure of national cultures. In P Funke (Ed.), Undmtanding thc Introduction USA @p. 110-49). Tiibingen: Gunter Narr. Shorter, E. (1985). Bedri& mannm: 7%~troubled histoy of d~aand paticn~s. New Widespread conceptions of learning and reasoning invoke York: Simon & Schuster. "intelligence" largely as a property of the minds of individuals. This Stocking, G. (1968). Rue, ml~urc,and mlution. New York: Free Press. belief is prevalent in educational settings, which are concerned 'I'oulmin, S. (1981). Toward reintegration: An agenda for psychology's second cen- largely with solitary intelligence. Intelligence, they say, is what testing tury. In R. A. Kasschau & C. N. Coter (Eds.), Psychology? second crntury: during issues @p. 264-86). New York: Pneger. firms test and, increasingly commonly, what schools need to be held Valsiner, J. (1988). DcuelopmmtaIpsycholo~in the Souid Union. Bloomington: Indiana more accountable to measuring and improving. University Press. Problems lurk in these assumptions. Anyone who has closely ob- Vygotsky, L. S. (1929). The problem of the cultunl development of the child, 11. served the practices of cognition is struck by the fact that the "mind" Journal of Gmctic Psyrholo~,36, 415-34. rarely works alone. The intelligences revealed through these practices (1960). 7%~dcvclopmrnt of hixher psychological /undions (in Russian). Moscow: Izdael'stov Akademii Pedagogicheskikh Nauk. are distributed - across minds, persons, and the symbolic and phys- (1978). Mind in sodefy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ical environments, both natural and artificial. Gregory Bateson re- (1987). 'Ihinking and speech. New York: Plenum. (Originally published 1934.) marked that memory is half in the head and half in the world. In this Wertsch, J. (1985). 771cswial f~ionof mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University chapter, I will first lay out the central ideas of the distributed- Press. intelligence framework and then provide a background to its devel- White, L. (1942). On the use of tools by primates. 3urnol of Comparative psycho lo^, opment, before closing considerations of some implications for 34, 369-74. with (1959). The concept of culture. Amnhn Anthropologist, 61, 227-51. education. How we think about these relations may change what we Wundt, W. (1921). Elonrnlr offilkpsyrholo~.London: Allen & Unwin. Portions of this chapter were originally slated to appear in a book edited by David Perkins and Becky Simmons of Harvard University's Educational Technology Cen- ter. Plans for that book subsequently foundered, and portions of my essay (Pea, 1988) appear here as a necessary pretext to subsequent work. Previous papers on this theme were first presented in April 1988 to the First Annual Cognition and Education Workshop, Bolt, Beranek and Newrnan, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusens, and at the 1988 Cognitive Science Society Meetings. Related work was described at the 1989 Social Science Research Council Conference on Social Aspects of Computing (in which Gawiel Salomon and David Perkins participated) and in the 1990 American Educational Research Association Symposium on Distributed Intelligence, which led to the plan for this book. I am indebted to Christina Allen for provocative dis- cussions of distributed intelligence, especially concerning design and the roles of hu- man desires. Distributed intelligence and &signs fir education 49 48 Rq D. Pea to organize piles of materials on a desktop, the emergent text in a do with technologies in education - not only computational media, mitten composition one is constructing. These everyday cases show but also social technologies for supporting learning such as guided the active and evolving structuring of the material and social environ- participation or peer collaboration and learningheaching materials ments to make them a repository of action mediators. Unlike other more broadly. While providing few answers, I hope to provoke new species, such as Simon's (1981) ant on the beach, whose complexity questions and inquiries, for distributed intelligence is not a theory of of behavior is determined more by the shape of its environment than mind, or culture, or design, or symbol systems and their impact on by its mental contents, humans have desires that lead them to recraft human thought so much as it is a heuristic framework for raising their environments to cany out aspects of reasoning, to make remind- 1 and addressing theoretical and empirical questions about these and ers for action, and to get help from others. When talking about dis- other topics. i tributed intelligence, then, 1 mean that resources in the world are While the relevance of these concepts is not restricted to learning used, or come together in use, to shape and direct possible activity in mathematics, science, and technology, I will often use examples emerging from desire. This is not to claim, of course, that all intelli- r! and issues in these fields for making my points, since the roles for gence is or can be so distributed, but that there is a constitutive trend distributed intelligence perhaps stand out in greater relief in these in this direction to be found in cultural history, ontogenesis, and the domains than in other areas of learning, education, and work. microgenesis of activity. The distributed-intelligence orientation that I describe, which The nature and concepts of distributed intelligence takes these observations as central data about cognition, stands in I sharp contrast to the common focus on "intelligence" as an attribute Knowledge is commonly socially constructed, through col- of individuals, carried primarily in internal transformations of mental laborative efforts toward shared objectives or by dialogues and chal- representations of symbols for goals, objects, and relations. Theories lenges brought about by differences in persons' perspectives. of education building on these notions are concerned largely with sol- Intelligence may also be distributed for use in designed artifacts as itary intelligence, decontextualized from its uses in activities beyond diverse as physical tools, representations such as diagrams, and com- the educational. Analyses of our designs for such distributions may be puter-user interfaces to complex tasks. In these cases, intelligence is more revealing for understanding cognition than are studies of the often distributed by off-loading what could be elaborate and error- formation and transformation of mental