A few weeks ago I posted about how we “outsource control of behavior to the environment.” This made me think about the concept “distributed cognition.” Distributed cognition proposes that knowledge is not confined to an individual, but rather is distributed throughout an environment. That is, we use external sources including other people, materials, and other tools and supports within the environment to help us in critical thinking and decision-making.
Distributed cognition always plays into my instructional design thinking. What and who do learners have at hand to support their thinking, ergo support their performance?
Recently, I heard the term “transactive memory” which proposes that groups of people collectively encode, store, and retrieve knowledge. This term is meant to explain the processes behind “hive mind” or “group think.” It’s not really a new idea either, but to me it seemed like another phrasing of distributed cognition.
A lot has been made that we are losing our memorization capabilities due to the easy and immediate access to information. My colleague Matt wrote about “second screens”; I find myself looking up information ever more frequently on my smart phone as I watch TV, read a book, listen to music, or take a walk outdoors. What is that flower, or tree, or snake!?
(more…)
At Enspire Learning, we pride ourselves on creating learning experiences that directly impact a specific target audience, designated by each valued client. So when we design those experiences, we take a great deal of care to investigate and understand who those end-users are.