Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks that distributed cognition is a good fit with workflow and workflow learning; SAP is pushing it too. This article doesn’t contain a whole lot of info beyond what was in the Dickelman and Greenberg piece I cited earlier, but it’s interesting to see a vendor talking this up.
Category: Ed Tech
The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.
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More on RSS, the Power Law, and Blogger Sites
Reader Alan Levine (of MLX and cogdogblog fame) writes in with this tip regarding Blogger sites with no visible syndication links:
I commented to James, but all of the Blogger.com sites, e.g. http://yanknowwhat.blogspot.com actually have fully functional RSS feeds- the problem is that the default templates do not have the link- you can easily access the feed yourself by tacking “atom.xml” on the end:
http://yanknowwhat.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Oddly, Blogger does not provide RSS feeds; only Atom. Sadly, my RSS reader (NetNewsWire) doesn’t support Atom feeds yet. (C’mon, Brent, get that Version 2.0 out already…please?!)
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Distributed Cognition and Workflow Learning
Thinking some more about Sam Adkins’ description of the distinction between EPSS and workflow learning, I decided to go back and refresh my memory on the concept of distributed cognition. As Gary Dickelman and Jan Greenberg note [PDF],
Distributed cognition looks for cognitive processes, wherever they may happen, on the basis of the functional relationship of elements that participate in this process (Hutchins & Hollan, 1999). A process is not cognitive just because it happens in a brain; conversely, a process isn’t deemed noncognitive because it happens in the interactions among many brains. The second distinguishing principle concerns the range of media assumed to participate in cognitive processes. Hutchins and Hollan note that traditional information-processing theories look for cognitive events in the manipulation of symbols inside an individual’s head. Distributed cognition looks for a broader class of cognitive events; it does not expect these events to be encompassed within an individual’s head. Hutchins and Hollan state that if these principles were applied to the observations of human activity in its natural state (e.g., how people go about their jobs on a daily basis), at least three kinds of cognitive process distributions would become clear: first, cognitive processes may be distributed among members of a social group; second, cognitive processes may involve coordination between internal and external (environmental and/or material) structure; and third, cognitive processes may be distributed through time in a way that the end results (products) of earlier events can change the nature of events that come later. field notes, record work events, and transcribe and encode them. The ultimate goal is to abstract the artifacts and process elements of the native human activity system and replace them with new representations that are computer based. If successful, the distributed cognition system will be re-represented in the performance-based system, such that a human being engaged in the system will be able to achieve goals without support or “training events” that are external to the system. According to Don Norman- The sciences of cognition have tended to examine a disembodied intelligence, a pure intelligence isolated from the world. It is time to question this approach…. Humans operate within the physical world. We use the physical world and one another as sources of information, as reminders, and in general as extensions of our own knowledge and reasoning…. With a disembodied intellect, isolated from the work, intelligent behavior requires a tremendous amount of knowledge, lots of deep planning and decisionmaking, and efficient memory storage and retrieval. When the intellect is tightly coupled to the world, decisionmaking and action can take place.
Two points here. First, Sam’s requirements for bi-directional components and feedback loops might be productively understood and explored as examples of distributed cognition. In other words, if we map how an organization needs to collectively “think” about a business process then we can tease out where we need those bi-directional components and feedback loops. Second, I think that when people invoke “emergent learning,” what they may really mean is distributed cognition. Both concepts share a collectivist picture of thought as a group activity. However, unlike emergence, distributed cognition does not explicitly disallow meta-awareness by the participating individuals. (In fact, Gary and Jan explicitly explore this idea in their article.)
Beyond the Dickelman/Greenberg piece, if you want to read more about distributed cognition then check out Don Norman’s book Things That Make Us Smart. While it’s not nearly as well written as his classic The Design of Everyday Things, it has an extensive and highly readable section on distributed cognition.
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Idea Viruses as Informational Cascades
In a previous post, I suggested that so-called “idea viruses” might be thought of as either causes of or manifestations of informational cascades. I now think manifestation is the right characterization rather than cause. I am persuaded by this fascinating and frightening piece of research [PDF] showing that legislators tend to try to garner support for their positions by creating informational cascades within the legislative body. It’s not quite a classic idea virus in the sense that it isn’t a new idea that each recipient “catches,” but it does reflect a contagion of an opinion or position.
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RSS and the Power Law
I share James Farmer’s frustration that some of the Power Law blogs don’t have RSS feeds. There was a time when I would regularly surf dozens of sites every day to see if they had been updated but that time has long passed. Now, with my beloved NetNewsWire RSS newsreader, I can skim updates from a half a dozen sites in the same amount of time that it takes me to surf to one site using my browser to see if it even has an update.
(By the way, Dear Reader, if you do not use an RSS feed reader then you simply must get with the 21st Century. Particularly if you are a news junky, I guarantee that it will change your life. Probably the easiest way to start would be with an online service like Bloglines. Alternatively, just Google the problem to find a reader that meets your particular needs and works on your particular computer platform.)
At any rate, I’d love to see somebody do a study correlating Technorati ratings with the presence or absence of an RSS feed for a given site.
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Powerful and Easy-to-Create Instructional Narratives
Interactive Narratives (a great site that is well worth exploring) points this morning to this compelling piece of multimedia photojournalism about layoffs at a factory in North Carolina and their impact on the people. While this particular essay looks like it was produced by professionals using custom Flash designs, its possible to create an approximation of the same effect using something like Macromedia Breeze.
It’s a simple but powerful way of telling a story.
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Yet Another Take on Emergence
This piece by Richard Seel (found by way of the Wrede article referenced in the previous post) is yet another version of emergent learning that seems to live roughly in the same neighborhood as Kathleen Gilroy’s and Godfrey Parkin’s (though I’m not suggesting that he precisely agrees with either of them). Seel suggests a small-group brainstorming method that he calls “emergent inquiry.” It has the following process elements:
- Everyone speaks with many others.
- Relevant and ‘irrelevant’ inputs
- Many short ’rounds
- Safe, egalitarian environment
- Clear question, tight time-keeping
- Relevant topic, desire for answer
- Wait for the question…
Some of these aren’t explicit in their meaning, but you can get the gist. Now, this looks like a fine way to do brainstorming. But it seems to reduce the concept of “emergence” to good ideas that come out of a well-functioning group discussion. Yeah, sure, some ideas come from the product of conversation; they don’t belong to any one person in the group. And yeah, sure, it seems like magic when that happens. But it’s not a new phenomenon that’s just been discovered or newly explained by some paradigm-shifting theory, and I’m not sure what’s gained by calling it “emergence.”
My understanding of emergence is phenomena like the one described in Jay Cross’ eLearn article:
You’re witnessing bottom-up decision-making in the swift turn of a school of fish but we’re not used to seeing it in business. MIT Professor Tom Malone equipped an audience with hand-held paddles whose position could be read by a computer. On the screen up front, he projected a flight simulator. A hundred people jointly took the controls of the plane and, against all expectation, flew the plane without a pilot and without a crash.
This is surely emergence and it is surely not emergent learning. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be any learning going on here at all. Nobody is claiming that the individuals who entered the demonstration not knowing how to fly a plane left the demonstration ready to jump into the cockpit. Nor would the speed at which the group arrived at their collective piloting judgments indicate that they were consciously teaching and learning from each other; that would have taken much more time. In fact, we have no reason to believe that there was a single skilled pilot in the room or, if one was in the room, that he or she directly influenced the judgments of the non-pilots. What is emergent here is knowledge, and the reason that it is emergent is not because the people in the group learned from each other (they didn’t) and not because they came to an explicit consensus through discussion (though it may be fair to say that they pooled–not transferred, but pooled–tacit knowledge in the moment) but because the group as a whole was able to exercise judgment that was better than that of most or all of its individual members. You could say that piloting skill “emerged” from the group because the group members did not individually posess the skill either before or after the exercise.
I’m probably beating a dead horse here, but I just feel like we won’t benefit from the insights of new scientific discoveries if we’re not careful to characterize them correctly. Seel’s method is probably dandy; I just don’t think that what it cultivates can be fairly called “emergence.”