Smart Schools by David Perkins

Author:David Perkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2003-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

THE IDEA OF DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE

Lest we take schools too much to task for a unique shortfall, there is at least one other bastion of the person-solo perspective. It is, regrettably, psychological theory and experimentation. The classic question of psychology is “What goes on in the mind,” or, from the standpoint of B. F. Skinner’s behaviorist psychology (which does not believe in minds), “How does the individual organism react to stimuli?” Just as in the classroom, psychological experiments typically proceed with a minimum of physical and social support for the subject. Psychologists wonder what the subject can and will do without much equipment, and certainly without another person, to help. There are exceptions, but they hardly impugn the reality of the trend.

However, in several quarters a new assessment has been made of this entrenched “personcentric” view of the human organism. Roy Pea of Northwestern University has written recently about what he calls “distributed intelligence.” Others, including myself, have picked up this theme. We argue that human cognition at its richest almost always occurs in ways that are physically, socially, and symbolically distributed. People think and remember with the help of all sorts of physical aids, and we commonly construct new physical aids to help ourselves yet more. People think and remember socially, through interaction with other people, sharing information and perspectives and developing ideas. The work of the world gets done in groups! Finally, people sustain thinking through socially shared symbol systems—speech, writing, the technical argot of specialties, diagrams, scientific notations, and so on.

A more modest term than distributed intelligence for this dispersal of intellectual functioning across physical, social, and symbolic supports is “distributed cognition.” But there is a point to Pea’s more provocative use of the term intelligence. Taken broadly, intelligence refers simply to effective cognitive functioning. And intelligence is at stake here. People can function more intelligently in person-plus than in person-solo kinds of ways.

Defenders of classic notions of intelligence would complain, “But this isn’t real intelligence. Real intelligence is in people’s heads. Part of what you’re talking about lies in the hand calculator or the notebook, not in the person.” The rebuttal would be, “But the person-with-calculator-and-notebook is the actual functioning system. The person-plus system is what gets things done in the world. Its intelligence is more to the point than that of the person-solo.”

Another contribution to the notion of distributed intelligence or distributed cognition comes from University of Arizona researcher Gavriel Salomon, long-time observer and investigator of the role of technologies in learning, writing with Tamar Globerson and myself. The authors draw a distinction between the effects with and of technology, including computers and television but also such ordinary technologies as paper and pencil. Effects of are the residues left when we are away from the technology. Perhaps, for example, we speak more articulately because we have written so many paragraphs. Effects with a technology are the empowerment that results when we have the technology at hand, actually thinking on paper, writing with word processors, communicating with telecommunications systems, and so on.

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