| authors |
Pea, R. |
| year |
1993 |
| title |
Practices of Distributed Intelligence and Designs for Education |
| source |
Distributed Cognitions, edited by G. Salomon. New York, NY: CambridgeUniversity Press |
| summary |
v Knowledge is commonly socially constructed, through collaborative efforts... v 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. v Leont'ev 1978 for activity theory that argues forcibly for the centrality of people-in-action, activity systems, as units of analysis for deepening our understanding of thinking. v Intelligence is distributed: the resources that shape and enable activity are distributed across people, environments, and situations. v Intelligence is accomplished rather than possessed. v Affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of a thing, primarily those functional properties that determine how the thing could possibly be used. v Norman 1988 on design and psychology - the psychology of everyday things" v We deploy effort-saving strategies in recognition of their cognitive economy and diminished opportunity for error. v The affordances of artifacts may be more or less difficult to convey to novice users of these artifacts in the activities to which they contribute distributed intelligence. v Starts with Norman's seven stages of action Ø Forming a goal; an intention § Task desire - clear goal and intention - an action and a means § Mapping desire - unable to map goal back to action § Circumstantial desire - no specific goal or intention - opportunistic approach to potential new goal § Habitual desire - familiar course of action - rapidly cycle all seven stages of action v Differentiates inscriptional systems from representational or symbol systems because inscriptional systems are completely external, while representational or symbol systems have been used in cognitive science as mental constructs. v The situated properties of everyday cognition are highly inventive in exploiting features of the physical and social situation as resources for performing a task, thereby avoiding the need for mental symbol manipulations unless they are required by that task. v Explicit recognition of the intelligence represented and representable in design, specifically in designed artifacts that play important roles in human activities. v Once intelligence is designed into the affordances properties of artifacts, it both guides and constrains the likely contributions of that artifact to distributed intelligence in activity. v Culturally valued designs for distributed intelligence will change over time, especially as new technology becomes associated with a task domain. v If we treat distributed intelligence in action as the scientific unit of analysis for research and theory on learning and reasoning... Ø What is distributed? Ø What constraints govern the dynamics of such distributions in different time scales? Ø Through what reconfigurations of distributed intelligence might the performance of an activity system improve over time? v Intelligence is manifest in activity and distributed in nature. v Intelligent activities ...in the real world... are often collaborative, depend on resources beyond an individual's long-term memory, and require the use of information-handling tools... v Wartofsky 1979 - the artifact is to cultural evolution what the gene is to biological evolution - the vehicle of information across generations. v Systems of activity - involving persons, environment, tools - become the locus of developmental investigation. v Disagrees with Salomon et al.'s entity-oriented approach - a language of containers holding things. v Human cognition aspires to efficiency in distributing intelligence - across individuals, environment, external symbolic representations, tools, and artifacts - as a means of coping with the complexity of activities we often cal "mental." " |
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| last changed |
2003/04/23 15:14 |
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