dcog+two+views

=Distributed Cognition- Two Approaches=

(see also activity theory, social cognition, situated cognition)

The term focuses the debate on individual cognitions and problem solving and that is embedded in concerted action and cannot be easily separated into what is known by any one person (Salomon, 1997). This concept gives rise to the notion that knowledge is not a possession, knowledge is not a static representation of data stored in a file cabinet in the mind. Rather knowledge is described as a more emergent property of knowing and acting, and both the knowledge and actions exist in a seamless concert of social, cultural, historical and contextual properties. So that to understand what anyone knows, we need to study socially mediated activity-- "the combination of goals, tools and settings" and understand how they "consitutue simultaneoulsly the context of behavior and the ways in which cognition can be said to be distributed in that context (Cole & Engestrom Quoted in Soloman, 1977,p.xvi)."

(Here I think we should describe the two views..anyone want to name them?)

1) Distributed Cognition as a discipline that replaces Cognitive Science. Takes the radical view that all cogntion is distributed and suggests that we might move to different models of assessment since meaningful thinking is always contextualized and distributed. All thinking is distributed. Issues...how are metacognition and reflection dealt with? Are there situations when it makes sense to talk about thinking that while clearly shaped by the social setting as gone internal and operates as Vygotsky might postulate as inner speech. Might want to make ties to activity theory

2) Social Cognition is use for the more general term or the discipline wide notion and distributed cognition is saved as a descriptive of specific social settings where people and tools act together as a system to produce an outcome. In this second sense you have talk about a more or less distributed system or the tools and that would move an activity away from the individual plane to the more distributed arena. In this use of the term there is a comparison and contrast between settings where people act many as individual and those where there an effort to have been work in a highly collaborative setting where the work is distributed by coordinated. (Learning circles might be an example here).