Technology as Tool: Distributed Learning

Purpose: To raise questions about distributed learning in relation to new learning technologies.

Reference: 61

1. In the course construction, what account is taken of the fact that inscriptional systems [e.g. mathematical notation] often cause problems for the learner, rarely revealing their affordances for the activity?
2. What recognition is given to the fact that programmes such as LOGO-LEGO have considerable intelligence built into these interpart relations as a means of constraining what actions are possible with the parts in combination?
3. What recognition is given to the fact that Polya’s six-stage problem-solving model: finding the problem, representing the problem, planning a problem solution, executing the plan, checking the solution, reflecting to consolidate learning — should be seen as a cyclic system rather than a linear process?
4. How do learners enact the cultural practices for designing, constructing, and displaying distributed intelligence in activity?
5. How should learners acquire such cultural practices?”
6. Are educational aims to foster intelligence that is executed “solo,” is tool-aided, or is collaborative, or in what combination?
7. What are the underlying assumptions about the patterns of distributed intelligence in society into which learners must enter and productively use what they have learned?
   

Concerning the static definition of tasks versus evolving concepts of tasks:

8. Does the course organisation allow opportunities for learners to contribute to the redesign of their working conditions and tools?

New technologies can support human activities by serving as experimental platforms in the evolution of intelligence — by opening up new possibilities for distributed intelligence.

9. How well does the course accommodate exploration and play, in order to create and find problems as well as to solve them?
10. Could it be said that the educational emphasis has been reoriented from individual, tool-free cognition to facilitating individuals’ responsive and novel uses of resources for creative and intelligent activity alone and in collaboration?
11. Is there a metacurriculum oriented to learning about the role of distributed intelligence in enabling complex thought?
12. Can learners would come to understand and deploy heuristics for inventing cognitive technologies as participants in a knowledge-using community?
13. Can learners recognize how physical, symbolic, and social technologies may provide the supports necessary for reaching conceptual heights less attainable if attempted unaided?
14. Are learners empowered both through the reflective use of new tools and through the invention of new tools and social distributions of activities?