Situated cognition

1. Situated cognition … and locating that in communities of practice

5. From Brown et al “Situated cognition and the culture of learning….” The case for community… “People generally learn words in the context of ordinary communication” “Because it is dependent on situations and negotiations, the meaning of a word cannot, in principle, be captured by a definition, even when the definition is supported by a couple of exemplary sentences” “..a concept, for example, will continually evolve with each new occasion of use” “It is possible to acquire a tool but to be unable to use it” “Because tools and the way they are used reflect the particular accumulated insights of communities, it is not possible to use a tool appropriately without understanding the community or culture in which it is used.”

6. From Brown et al “Situated cognition and the culture of learning….” “Yet communities of practitioners are connected by more than their ostensible tasks. They are bound by intricate socially constructed webs of belief, which are essential to understanding what they do. The activities of many communities are unfathomable, unless they are viewed from within the culture” “Too often the practices of contemporary schooling deny students the chance to engage the relevant domain culture, because that culture is not in evidence” “By participating in such ersatz activities [word problems], students are likely to misconceive entirely what practitioners actually do. As a result, students can easily be introduced to a formalistic intimidating view of math that encourages a culture of math phobia rather than one of authentic math activity”

7. Guiding educational ideas as “crystyallising out” from something “systemic” How does a loosely-coupled set of ideas (theories, prejudices, practices) become integrated into something coherent (and persuasive, and inspiring)? Often a phrase. Often a lucid thesis. Often an historically apposite moment “Situated cognition”

8. Distributed Cognition Vygotsky Activity theory Informal learning: apprenticeship School as failing Informal learning: preschooler Make education relevant Situated Cognition Participation/Acquisition Learning: “cultural practice” Practice fieldwork Learning scenarios Whither ICT? Learning environments Learning communities

9. They say…. (1) Many methods of didactic education assume a separation between knowing and doing (2) Too often the practices of contemporary schooling deny students the chance to engage the relevant domain culture, because that culture is not in evidence (3) They [pupils] need to be exposed to the use of a domain's conceptual tools in authentic activity to teachers acting as practitioners and using these tools in wrestling with problems of the world

10. The article summarised… • Abstraction: Schools separate knowing from doing • Accepting an implicit model of “knowledge” • A denial of legitimate context experience • 2) Situativity: Knowledge co-produced by acting in (multiple) situations • 3) Instrumentality: Knowledge is a set of tools – acquisition without use? • 4) Enculturation: Acquiring knowledge is achieving membership • 5) School culture: There is no such thing as “unsituated” knowledge • 6) Cognitive apprenticeships: The way forward • 7) Maths: Two examples of enculturing the experience of maths

11. Distributed Cognition Vygotsky Activity theory Informal learning: apprenticeship School as failing Informal learning: preschooler Make education relevant Situated Cognition Participation/Acquisition Learning: “cultural practice” Practice fieldwork Learning scenarios Whither ICT? Learning environments Learning communities

12. How (well) do we learn before school? Vocabulary teaching shows the dangers of separating knowing and doing We do not learn vocabulary by dictionary definitions out of school Is a dictionary not useful? “Miller and Gildea note that by listening, talking, and reading, the average 17-year-old has learned vocabulary at a rate of 5,000 words per year (13 per day) for over 16 years….here is barely enough classroom time to teach more than 100 to 200 words per year” Immersion learning of second (spoken) language So, how do we learn written language?

13. Distributed Cognition Vygotsky Activity theory Informal learning: apprenticeship School as failing Informal learning: preschooler Make education relevant Situated Cognition Participation/Acquisition Learning: “cultural practice” Practice fieldwork Learning scenarios Whither ICT? Learning environments Learning communities

14. We (JPFs) do learn out of school When we do, it is better described as “legitimate peripheral participation”?

15. Distributed Cognition Vygotsky Activity theory Informal learning: apprenticeship School as failing Informal learning: preschooler Make education relevant Situated Cognition Participation/Acquisition Learning: “cultural practice” Practice fieldwork Learning scenarios Whither ICT? Learning environments Learning communities

16. Learning as a social construction • Mediation – learning as encounters with “mediational means” (tools) • But, natural concepts vs. scientific concepts

17. Distributed Cognition Vygotsky Activity theory Informal learning: apprenticeship School as failing Informal learning: preschooler Make education relevant Situated Cognition Participation/Acquisition Learning: “cultural practice” Practice fieldwork Learning scenarios Whither ICT? Learning environments Learning communities

18. Some origins of the distributed cognition idea Merlin Donald: Third phase of representational development – externalising cognition by “distributing” it across designed artefacts Perkins: the “person plus” (tools) Suchman: Challening “plans”. Or the ideahumans think before they act. An assumed sub conscious world controlling action. The photocopier user! Kirsch: “epistemic actions” – organising the environment to make it easy to “think” Tetris

19. Distributed Cognition Vygotsky Activity theory Informal learning: apprenticeship School as failing Informal learning: preschooler Make education relevant Situated Cognition Participation/Acquisition Learning: “cultural practice” Practice fieldwork Learning scenarios Whither ICT? Learning environments Learning communities

20. Activity Theory – the Soviet tradition elaboratied Leontiev A systemic view A practice view Behaviour – Action – Practice “Embedding”

22. Distributed Cognition Vygotsky Activity theory Informal learning: apprenticeship School as failing Informal learning: preschooler Make education relevant Situated Cognition Participation/Acquisition Learning: “cultural practice” Practice fieldwork Learning scenarios Whither ICT? Learning environments Learning communities

23. Distributed Cognition Vygotsky Activity theory Informal learning: apprenticeship School as failing Informal learning: preschooler Make education relevant Situated Cognition Participation/Acquisition Learning: “cultural practice” Practice fieldwork Learning scenarios Whither ICT? Learning environments Learning communities

24. Distributed Cognition Vygotsky Activity theory Informal learning: apprenticeship School as failing Informal learning: preschooler Make education relevant Situated Cognition Participation/Acquisition Learning: “cultural practice” Practice fieldwork Learning scenarios Whither ICT? Learning environments Learning communities

25. “On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one” Anna Sfard, Educational Researcher 27(2) 4-13 Acquisition Participation Varieties of compromising – the problem of transfer

26. Examples of situated/authentic learning (non-ICT) Schoenfeld and Lampert on authentic maths problems (see Brown et al) Palinscar and Brown: Reciprocal teaching of reading Elementary texts approached as mature readers (The scaffolding role of teachers) …the acquisition metaphor vs. the participation metaphor

27. Distributed Cognition Vygotsky Activity theory Informal learning: apprenticeship School as failing Informal learning: preschooler Make education relevant Situated Cognition Participation/Acquisition Learning: “cultural practice” Practice fieldwork Learning scenarios Whither ICT? Learning environments Learning communities

28. The school itself is a culture “The student enters the school culture while ostensibly being taught something else. And the general strategies for intuitive reasoning, resolving issues, and negotiating meaning that people develop through everyday activity are superseded by the precise, well defined problems, formal definitions, and symbol manipulation of much school activity.”

31. Distributed Cognition Vygotsky Activity theory Informal learning: apprenticeship School as failing Informal learning: preschooler Make education relevant Situated Cognition Participation/Acquisition Learning: “cultural practice” Practice fieldwork Learning scenarios Whither ICT? Learning environments Learning communities

32. Ethnographies of work Photocopier repair men (Orr) Tailors (Lave) Milk distribution staff (Scribner) Brown et al “The social life of information”

33. Distributed Cognition Vygotsky Activity theory Informal learning: apprenticeship School as failing Informal learning: preschooler Make education relevant Situated Cognition Participation/Acquisition Learning: “cultural practice” Practice fieldwork Learning scenarios Whither ICT? Learning environments Learning communities

34. “Belief vs. Design” learning (Bereiter) Belief: What we and other people believe or ought to believe… a response mode of agreeing and disagreeing, arguing for or against Design: usefulness, adequacy and improvability of ideas Need to: switch between them but represent the design mode more often in schools.

35. Learning by design • Project based learning • Problem based learning • Knowledge building Learning by design: A design challenge should motivate the investigation of basic concepts (eg. in science) Problem – tasks tend to be over-reaching or ambitious. Thus the basic principles tend to get added on in “belief mode” teaching rather than extracted.

36. Project based learning Projects too often defined by a topic, rather than a “driving question” Tends to generate good “powerpoint shows”, rather than basic understanding Difficulty of getting to sufficiently “deep” driving questions in the context of a realistic practical project. They must be allowed to “emerge” from more basic inquiry Format tends to be too limited by need for closure An artifact, presentation, performance, document, poster etc Pursuit of “driving question” can be hijacked by increasing pursuit of the artifact

37. Problem based learning Case based orientation (medical school and law school) Collaborative orientation to case analysis and research Tends to be compartmentalised problems with little development/iteration Not artifact/product oriented – but solution oriented Difficult in schools – hard to find “cases” that are motivating, as lack of explicit career orientation at this age

38. Distributed Cognition Vygotsky Activity theory Informal learning: apprenticeship School as failing Informal learning: preschooler Make education relevant Situated Cognition Participation/Acquisition Learning: “cultural practice” Practice fieldwork Learning scenarios Whither ICT? Learning environments Learning communities

39. Where does situativity leave, for example, mulimedia illustration? “Old-fashioned pocket knives, for example, have a device for removing stones from horses' hooves. People with this device may know its use and be able to talk wisely about horses, hooves, and stones. But they may never betray or even recognize that they would not begin to know how to use this implement on a horse” Would a flash animation help? Would it prepare you for an actual “limping horse” “The occasions and conditions for use arise directly out of the context of activities of each community that uses the tool, framed by the way members of that community see the world” “Conceptual tools similarly reflect the cumulative wisdom of the culture in which they are used” “To learn to use tools as practitioners use them, a student, like an apprentice, must enter that community and its culture.” Is there compromise? Is “incomplete membership” credible? (The social scientist as statistician)

40. Distributed Cognition Vygotsky Activity theory Informal learning: apprenticeship School as failing Informal learning: preschooler Make education relevant Situated Cognition Participation/Acquisition Learning: “cultural practice” Practice fieldwork Learning scenarios Whither ICT? Learning environments Learning communities

41. Simulation and vivid contextualisation The Jasper Project Tools to simulate authentic environments for problem solving Stories with project-oriented problems/challenges

42. Distributed Cognition Vygotsky Activity theory Informal learning: apprenticeship School as failing Informal learning: preschooler Make education relevant Situated Cognition Participation/Acquisition Learning: “cultural practice” Practice fieldwork Learning scenarios Whither ICT? Learning environments Learning communities

43. “Yet communities of practitioners are connected by more than their ostensible tasks. They are bound by intricate socially constructed webs of belief, which are essential to understanding what they do. The activities of many communities are unfathomable, unless they are viewed from within the culture” “Too often the practices of contemporary schooling deny students the chance to engage the relevant domain culture, because that culture is not in evidence” “By participating in such ersatz activities [word problems], students are likely to misconceive entirely what practitioners actually do. As a result, students can easily be introduced to a formalistic intimidating view of math that encourages a culture of math phobia rather than one of authentic math activity”

44. Berieter’s Knowledge building “creative work with ideas that really matter to the people doing the work” A focus on idea improvement – developing early ideas Problems rather than questions - problems tend to create too much closure Knowledge of value to the community - evolving resources for the class product is often no more than the online record of the evolving work CSILE > Knowledge Forum Schools as scientific research communities – tools for this? Software to create and structure classes as knowledge communities Tools to systematise the resulting knowledge Portfolios as “new views” Portfolios as objects of self-evaluation and assessment Evolution of ideas traced as “trails” Knowledge Society Network: authentic communication and dissemination

45. Bereiter From, text: “learning to work creatively with knowledge” ICT: “the Knowledge Forum” “Focus on powerful learning environments rather than on powerful instructional methods” “Belief mode”: What others believe or ought to believe. We agree/disagree. Argue. “Design mode”: What is useful, improvable. Beyond (the well established) designing (material) artefacts to conceptual artefacts “Ideas” moved from belief mode presentation to design mode construction

46. “Knowledge Building”; Beyond “project work” • “Learning by design” • Abstract science by building something – that works • Transfer to other artefacts…. Abstract the science from the engineering • But: teachers converge on teaching the science first (in belief mode) • Because: the gap between (simple) engineering and (profound) science is • actually hard to bridge • 2) “Project based science” • Typically driven by topics, rather than questions • (Microsofts vision of the volcano project) • But: Abstraction of profound science needs deep questions • These need to be made to emerge • Thus, need an environment for evolving query, iterative design • A “project” defines that evolution – it should not define an end-product

47. “Knowledge Building”; Beyond “project work” 3) Problem based learning Solving problems based on authentic “cases” (eg medicine) But: Unlike medicine, most school disciplines will find it difficult to generate cases that resonate with everyday experience 4) Knowledge building Advancing frontiers “as they perceive them”. Identifying what is an advance - Focus on idea improvement - Problems not questions (more design mode) - Contributing progressive value to the community (and its knowledge needs) - Emergent goals and products (but iterative, not final) - Constructive use of sources: all ideas are improvable# Unlike others, an “approach to knowledge” that is pervasive, not bound to projects. A technology for realising this : the Knowledge Forum “environment” Progressive discourse, contributions as movable knowledge items, multi-perspective

48. The status quo? • Coerced participation in practice • A given set of practices that is not open to local negotiation • A system with strong boundaries, not responsive to other local systems/networks • Practices which have a regulatory or disciplinary intent • Separation and lack of mutuality within the community. Experience of separation and individualisation. • Disparate enterprises • Toleration of practices rather than real engagement • Marginal participation • Fixed hierarchies and limited, regularised trajectories of participation • Authoritarian relationships between participants • Identities of rank rather than participation. Alienation. • Relatively static; reproductive rather than productive