… and into the world. No, I’m not talking about the fact that I’ve the kids for the week, I’ve actually got that pretty well handled (or so I think, which probably means I’m missing something ;). Instead I’m talking about how we need to better recognize that our thinking and performing is not all in our head. I was reminded of this by a PhD student who pinged me about his thesis on mobile learning. The student wasn’t interested in context-sensitive as a core affordance and largely untapped opportunity, for whatever reason, and brought up grounded cognition. This reminded me of distributed cognition, and the concept behind both is really relevant for informal learning, mobile learning, and instructional design in general.
I wasn’t familiar with ‘grounded cognition’, though from the definitions I’ve found it’s similar to distributed cognition but without as much of the social component (though that’s not what I focus on in distributed cognition either). It’s apparently a reaction to the symbol-grounding problem from AI that Stevan Harnad carried the banner for, that the ‘symbols in the head’ needed a real-world referent. It may seem a bit obtuse, but the point is that when we try to build smart systems, we find out that they really can’t act in the world as they’re not connected to it. But that’s not what’s important here.
The interesting thing pragmatically is that our thinking isn’t all in our heads, but distributed across external representations (e.g. the letters associated with the keys on a phones). This is similar to connectivism, in that it’s not what you know, but what you can access, that is the determinant of success. As I’ve said before, it’s certainly a fair reflection of the fact that our brains aren’t good at arbitrary fact remembering, but instead are pattern matchers (e.g. my old claim that if I make a promise to do something for you and it doesn’t get into my PIM, we never had the conversation).
The take-home for learning is that we don’t need to carry all the information in our head, but instead we should have it available. Our courses should be designed for reference as well as learning, and we should carefully examine our performance needs to see how we should distribute information between the world and our head. Heck, too much of the elearning I’ve seen is overloaded with rote memorization, and we’ve got to do better. And, obviously, this is a great application for mobile.
The student was interested in relevant theories of cognition, and it really does illustrate a need to go beyond both behavioral and traditional cognitive and look at how people really perform. John Carroll’s minimalism was effective just for the reason that he focused on the least amount of information people needed to be successful, and took advantage of what they knew. We need to extend that to take advantage of what’s in the world already, or can be.
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