Learning in doing: Social, cognitive, and computational perspectives GENERAL EDITORS: ROY PEA JOHN SEELY BROWN The construction zone: Working for cognitive change in school Denis Newman, Peg Grrfin, and Michael Cole Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine interaction Lucy Suchman Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger Street mathematics and school mathematics Terezinha Nunes, Anahria Dim Schliemann, and David William Carraher Understanding practice: Perspectives on activity and context Seth Chaiklin andJean Lave (editors) Distributed cognitions Psychological and educational considerations Edited by GAVRIEL SALOMON University of Ha$, Israel I943 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESSPublished by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pin Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RI' 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia 0 Cambridge Universify Press 1993 First phlished 1993 Printed in the United States of America Library of Conqcsr Catalo@n~-in-Publicdion Data Disaibuted cognitions : psychological and educational considerations / edited by Gavriel Salomon. p. cm. - (Learning in doing) Includes index. ISBN 0-521-41406-7 (hard) 1. Cognition and culture. 2. Knowledge, Sociology of. 3. Cognition - Social aspects. 4. Learning. Psychology of - Social aswcts. I. Salomon. Gavriel. 11. Series. 92-41220 CIP A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-521-41406-7 hardback Contents List of contribufon Series foreword 1 A cultural-historical approach to distributed cognition MICHAEL COLE AND YRJO ENGESTR~M 2 Practices of distributed intelligence and designs for education ROY D. PEA 3 Person-plus: a distributed view of thinking and learning D. N. PERKINS 4 No distribution without individuals' cognition: a dynamic interactional view GAVRlEL SALOMON 5 Living knowledge: the social distribution of cultural resources for thinking I.UIS C. MOLL, JAVIER TAPIA, AND KATHRYN F. WHITMORE I page vii I ix xi 6 Finding cognition in the classroom: an expanded view of human intelligence 164 THOMAS HATCH AND HOWARD GARDNER46 Michael Cole and Yji; Engestrom Miinsterberg, H. 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The concept of culture. Amnhn Anthropologist, 61, 227-51. Wundt, W. (1921). Elonrnlr offilkpsyrholo~. London: Allen & Unwin. 2 Practices of distributed intelligence and designs for education Roy D. Pea Introduction Widespread conceptions of learning and reasoning invoke "intelligence" largely as a property of the minds of individuals. This belief is prevalent in educational settings, which are concerned largely with solitary intelligence. Intelligence, they say, is what testing firms test and, increasingly commonly, what schools need to be held more accountable to measuring and improving. Problems lurk in these assumptions. Anyone who has closely ob- served the practices of cognition is struck by the fact that the "mind" rarely works alone. The intelligences revealed through these practices are distributed - across minds, persons, and the symbolic and phys- ical environments, both natural and artificial. Gregory Bateson re- marked that memory is half in the head and half in the world. In this chapter, I will first lay out the central ideas of the distributed- intelligence framework and then provide a background to its devel- opment, before closing with considerations of some implications for education. How we think about these relations may change what we Portions of this chapter were originally slated to appear in a book edited by David Perkins and Becky Simmons of Harvard University's Educational Technology Cen- ter. Plans for that book subsequently foundered, and portions of my essay (Pea, 1988) appear here as a necessary pretext to subsequent work. Previous papers on this theme were first presented in April 1988 to the First Annual Cognition and Education Workshop, Bolt, Beranek and Newrnan, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusens, and at the 1988 Cognitive Science Society Meetings. Related work was described at the 1989 Social Science Research Council Conference on Social Aspects of Computing (in which Gawiel Salomon and David Perkins participated) and in the 1990 American Educational Research Association Symposium on Distributed Intelligence, which led to the plan for this book. I am indebted to Christina