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Epistemic Fluency and Mobile Technology: A Professional-Plus Perspective
Abstract
What does it mean to be a resourceful and skilful professional in an environment saturated with intelligent devices and connected to diverse knowledge resources and human networks? This chapter discusses the roles of mobile technology in professional work and learning from an extended hybrid mind perspective. We argue that professional knowledge and skills extend beyond individual humans to their physical, technological and social environment. Learning to be a professional means learning to extend and entwine one’s knowledge and skills with ‘intelligence’ that is embedded and embodied in a distributed technology–human environment. In doing so, we argue that practitioners become ‘professional-plus’. They need capabilities to work with different kinds of knowledge and embrace diverse ways of knowing that are distributed across humans with different expertise and machines. We call this capability ‘epistemic fluency’.
... This capacity to move across boundaries and combine different kinds of knowledge is described by Markauskaite and Goodyear as 'epistemic fluency' (2017). Epistemic fluency is the bedrock of interdisciplinarity as it enables practitioners to combine different kinds of knowledge and coordinate different ways of knowing (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017;Trede et al., 2019). The concept of epistemic fluency provides a way of understanding how people can move across and between disciplines and their associated practices and identity formations. ...
This paper is about interdisciplinary collaboration in a higher education context. The authors have investigated their own experiences of interdisciplinary collaboration through reflexive autobiographical narrative writing and co-generative dialogue. The experience of working in a project which brought together students from different parts of the university was analysed with reference to critical readings about interdisciplinary work. The authors have identified moments of boundary crossing or ‘nodes of tension’ through which relationships were being negotiated and knowledge was being produced. The analysis of these moments shows that interdisciplinary work is intensely relational and dialogic; it takes time and involves significant labour. The authors contend that this labour is essential to building trust and openness to what is unfamiliar, and that universities which seek to promote interdisciplinary collaboration must acknowledge the significant additional work necessary to negotiate nodes of tension.
In this article, we contribute to a processual understanding of knowledge integration in interdisciplinary collaboration by foregrounding the role of dialogue in dealing with epistemic uncertainty. Drawing on an ethnographic study of collaboration among scientists involved in developing a highly novel bioreactor, we suggest that knowledge integration is not a homogeneous process but requires switching between different knowledge integration practices over time. This is particularly notable in the case of ‘epistemic breakdowns’ – deeply unsettling events where hitherto-held understandings of the nature of problems appear unworkable. In such cases, it is not sufficient to deal solely with coordination issues; collaborators need to find ways to address generative knowledge integration processes and to venture, collectively, into the unknown. We demonstrate how this generative quest of knowledge integration is achieved through a dialogical process of drawing and testing new distinctions that allows actors to gradually handle the epistemic uncertainty they face.
Background:
People living with HIV (PLWH) with a substance use disorder (SUD) tend to receive inadequate medical care in part because of a siloed healthcare system in which HIV and substance use services are delivered separately. Ideal treatment requires an interdisciplinary, team-based coordinated care approach, but many structural and systemic barriers impede the integration of HIV and SUD services. The current protocol describes the development and preliminary evaluation of a care coordination intervention (CCI), consisting of a tablet-based mobile platform for HIV and SUD treatment providers, an interagency communication protocol, and a training protocol. We hypothesize that HIV and SUD treatment providers will find the CCI to be acceptable, and that after receipt of the CCI, providers will: exhibit higher retention in dual care among patients, report increased frequency and quality of communication, and report increased rates of relational coordination.
Methods/design:
A three phase approach is used to refine and evaluate the CCI. Phase 1 consists of in-depth qualitative interviews with 8 key stakeholders as well as clinical audits of participating HIV and SUD treatment agencies. Phase 2 contains functionality testing of the mobile platform with frontline HIV and SUD treatment providers, followed by refinement of the CCI. Phase 3 consists of a pre-, post-test trial with 30 SUD and 30 HIV treatment providers. Data will be collected at the provider, organization, and patient levels. Providers will complete assessments at baseline, immediately post-training, and at 1-, 3-, and 6-months post-training. Organizational data will be collected at baseline, 1-, 3-, and 6-months post training, while patient data will be collected at baseline and 6-months post training.
Discussion:
This study will develop and evaluate a CCI consisting of a tablet-based mobile platform for treatment providers, an interagency communication protocol, and a training protocol as a means of improving the integration of care for PLWH who have a SUD. Results have the potential to advance the field by bridging gaps in a fragmented healthcare system, and improving treatment efficiency, work flow, and communication among interdisciplinary providers from different treatment settings.
Trial registration:
NCT02906215.
This book, by combining sociocultural, material, cognitive and embodied perspectives on human knowing, offers a new and powerful conceptualisation of epistemic fluency – a capacity that underpins knowledgeable professional action and innovation. Using results from empirical studies of professional education programs, the book sheds light on practical ways in which the development of epistemic fluency can be recognised and supported - in higher education and in the transition to work.
The book provides a broader and deeper conception of epistemic fluency than previously available in the literature. Epistemic fluency involves a set of capabilities that allow people to recognize and participate in different ways of knowing. Such people are adept at combining different kinds of specialised and context-dependent knowledge and at reconfiguring their work environment to see problems and solutions anew.
In practical terms, the book addresses the following kinds of questions. What does it take to be a productive member of a multidisciplinary team working on a complex problem? What enables a person to integrate different types and fields of knowledge, indeed different ways of knowing, in order to make some well-founded decisions and take actions in the world? What personal knowledge resources are entailed in analysing a problem and describing an innovative solution, such that the innovation can be shared in an organization or professional community? How do people get better at these things; and how can teachers in higher education help students develop these valued capacities? The answers to these questions are central to a thorough understanding of what it means to become an effective knowledge worker and resourceful professional.
Background
Smartphones are ubiquitous and commonly used as a learning and information resource. They have potential to revolutionize medical education and medical practice. The iDoc project provides a medical textbook smartphone app to newly-qualified doctors working in Wales. The project was designed to assist doctors in their transition from medical school to workplace, a period associated with high levels of cognitive demand and stress. Methods
Newly qualified doctors submitted case reports (n = 293) which detail specific instances of how the textbook app was used. Case reports were submitted via a structured online form (using Bristol Online Surveys - BOS) which gave participants headings to elicit a description of: the setting/context; the problem/issue addressed; what happened; any obstacles involved; and their reflections on the event. Case reports were categorised by the purpose of use, and by elements of the quality improvement framework (IoM 2001). They were then analysed thematically to identify challenges of use. ResultsAnalysis of the case reports revealed how smartphones are a viable tool to address clinical questions and support mobile learning. They contribute to novice doctors’ provision of safe, effective, timely, efficient and patient-centred care. The case reports also revealed considerable challenges for doctors using mobile technology within the workplace. Participants reported concern that using a mobile phone in front of patients and staff might appear unprofessional. Conclusion
Mobile phones blur boundaries between the public and private, and the personal and professional. In contrast to using a mobile as a communication device, using a smartphone as an information resource in the workplace requires different rituals. Uncertain etiquette of mobile use may reduce the capacity of smartphone technology to improve the learning experience of newly qualified doctors.
Digital technologies in combination with ‘big’ data and predictive analytics are having a significant impact upon professional practices at individual, organisational, national and international levels. The interplay of code, algorithms and big data are increasingly pervasive in the governing, leadership and practices of different professional groups. They are reshaping the relationships between professional grouping and between professionals and their clients/users/students. New forms of accountability and responsibility are emerging as a result of these trends, raising important questions about culpability and decision-making in professional practice. However, to date, despite the introduction of many professional codes on the use of digital data and social media, these issues have received limited examination in research addressing professional education. This article aims to explore some of these trends, how they are manifested in different professions and what might be the educational implications. Our argument is that new digital technologies are reconfiguring professional practice and responsibility, but that the education of professionals has yet to adequately reflect these changes.
In a wide range of fields, professional practice is being transformed by the increasing influence of digital analytics: the massive volumes of big data, and software algorithms that are collecting, comparing and calculating that data to make predictions and even decisions. Researchers in a number of social sciences have been calling attention to the far-reaching and accelerating consequences of these forces, claiming that many professionals, researchers, policy-makers and the public are just beginning to realise the enormous potentials and challenges these analytics are producing. Yet, outside of particular areas of research and practice, such as learning analytics, there has been little discussion of this to date in the broader education literature. This article aims to set out some key issues particularly relevant to the understandings of professional practice, knowledge and learning posed by the linkages of big data and software code. It begins by outlining definitions, forms and examples of these analytics, their potentialities and some of the hidden impact, and then presents issues for researchers and educators. It seeks to contribute to and extend debates taking place in certain quarters to a broader professional education and work audience.
Within debates about student professionalism and how to develop it in higher education (HE), increasing focus has turned to students' uses of social media. While social media skills are promoted by some HE educators, most emphasis is still given to perceived hazards and abuses of social media in practice. These are typically framed as a matter of professional ethics; some have argued for new codes of ‘e-professionalism’. This article problematizes the dynamics being conflated in these debates, drawing from three theoretical sources: current debates about professionalism; critical digital media studies that provide nuanced analyses of social media engagements; and sociomaterial concepts that reconfigure the issues to suggest new possibilities. The argument is theory-based and exploratory, not empirical. The aim is to pose new directions for research and teaching that open, not foreclose, new issues and enactments of professionalism.
In this paper we make a case for the use of multiple theoretical perspectives – theory on boundary objects, epistemic objects, cultural historical activity theory and objects as infrastructure - to understand the role of objects in cross-disciplinary collaboration. A pluralist approach highlights that objects perform at least three types of work in this context: they motivate collaboration; they allow participants to work across different types of boundaries; and they constitute the fundamental infrastructure of the activity. Building on the results of an empirical study we illustrate the insights that each theoretical lens affords into practices of collaboration and develop a novel analytical framework that organizes objects according to the active work they perform. Our framework can help shed new light on the phenomenon, especially with regards the shifting status of objects and sources of conflict (and change) in collaboration. After discussing these novel insights, we outline directions for future research stemming from a pluralist approach. We conclude by noting the managerial implications of our findings
This paper describes how people make sense of and use constellations of technologies in a nomadic setting, and it illustrates how maintaining and orchestrating a variety of applications and devices becomes an essential part of nomadic practices. The data were collected over a period of 3 years at a technical university by means of two field studies. Particular attention is drawn to how the situated orchestration of devices and applications within a group’s constellation reflects university students’ concern to manage their projects at a number of locations, as well as issues of time and circulation of resources. The analysis brings into focus how constellations of technologies emerge and dissolve within collaborative ensembles that only exist for the duration of a project, and how this can cause appropriation issues within groups.
We examine how technologies, particularly computer technologies that aid in cognitive processing, can support intellectual performance and enrich individuals’ minds. We distinguish between effects with and of a technology: Effects with occur when people work in partnership with machines, whereas effects of occur when such partnerships have subsequent cognitive spin-off effects for learners working away from machines. It is argued that effects both with and of depend on the individual's mindful engagement in the partnership. Such mind-machine collaborations also invite reexamination of prevailing conceptions of intelligence and ability: Are they properties of the individual or of the joint system? We respond to these dilemmas by offering two views, one emphasizing mainly the upgraded performance in a person-machine system of partnership, the other emphasizing more the educationally valued cognitive residue that can result. The use of computer tools to extend the reach of minds is briefly discussed within wider normative, theoretical, and practical contexts.
Much current work on organizational knowledge, intellectual capital, knowledge-creating organizations, knowledge work, and the like rests on a single, traditional understanding of the nature of knowledge. We call this understanding the "epistemology of possession," since it treats knowledge as something people possess. Yet, this epistemology cannot account for the knowing found in individual and group practice. Knowing as action calls for an "epistemology of practice." Moreover, the epistemology of possession tends to privilege explicit over tacit knowledge, and knowledge possessed by individuals over that possessed by groups. Current work on organizations is limited by this privileging and by the scant attention given to knowing in its own right. Organizations are better understood if explicit, tacit, individual and group knowledge are treated as four distinct and coequal forms of knowledge (each doing work the others cannot), and if knowledge and knowing are seen as mutually enabling (not competing). We hold that knowledge is a tool of knowing, that knowing is an aspect of our interaction with the social and physical world, and that the interplay of knowledge and knowing can generate new knowledge and new ways of knowing. We believe this generative dance between knowledge and knowing is a powerful source of organizational innovation. Harnessing this innovation calls for organizational and technological infrastructures that support the interplay of knowledge and knowing. Ultimately, these concepts make possible a more robust framing of such epistemologically-centered concerns as core competencies, the management of intellectual capital, etc. We explore these views through three brief case studies drawn from recent research.
This book brings together contributions from researchers within various social science disciplines who seek to redefine the methods and topics that constitute the study of work. They investigate work activity in ways that do not reduce it to a 'psychology' of individual cognition nor to a 'sociology' of societal structures and communication. A key theme in the material is the relationship between theory and practice. This is not an abstract problem of interest merely to social scientists. Rather, it is discussed as an issue that working people address when they attempt to understand a task and communicate its demands. Mindful practices and communicative interaction are examined as situated issues at work in the reproduction of communities of practice in a variety of settings including: courts of law, computer software design, the piloting of airliners, the coordination of air traffic control, and traffic management in underground railway systems.
The algorithms of machine learning, which can sift through vast numbers of variables looking for combinations that reliably predict outcomes, will improve prognosis, displace much of the work of radiologists and anatomical pathologists, and improve diagnostic accuracy.
Responsibility and professionalism are increasingly issues of concern for professional associations, employers and educators alike. When bad things happen, professionals are often held personally accountable for complex situations. Professional Responsibility and Professionalism advances our approaches to professional responsibility from individual-centred, virtue-based prescriptions towards understanding and responding effectively to the multifaceted challenges encountered today by professionals working in dynamic complexity. The author applies a sociomaterial examination to specific examples drawn from different professional contexts of practice. She examines important implications for what professional responsibility and accountability might mean individually and collectively, and what it might be becoming when demands increasingly conflict, and when we accept that capacities for action are performed into existence in emergent and precarious webs of both human and non-human forces. The chapters explore some of the most prominent questions in professional responsibility, including: • What does professional responsibility, and accountability, mean in the escalating complexities and conflicts confronting today's professionals? • How does professional responsibility become developed and enacted, and through what social and material entanglements? • How should responsibility be determined in multi-agency and interprofessional practice? • What happens when professional decisions are delegated to software algorithms and diagnostic instruments? • How are new governing regimes of professional work, such as innovation imperatives, excessive audit and logics of blame and scapegoating, reconfiguring responsibility? • How can professionals respond simultaneously to individuals in need, the obligations of their profession, the demands of their employer and an anxious society? A major concern addressed by each chapter, and the book as a whole, is educating professionals in and for responsibility. Specific dilemmas and strategies are offered for educators in universities, workplaces and professional development contexts who seek new approaches to helping professionals learn to critically understand and practise responsibility today. This book will appeal to a wide audience of education researchers and post-graduate students studying professional practice, professionalism and education across a wide range of disciplines. Health professionals, professionals working in private practices, such as law, architecture and engineering, newer professions such as social work and policing, and educational professionals at all levels will find stories and strategies reflecting key issues of their practice in this detailed exploration of professional responsibility and accountability.
In many societies, artificial memory systems are essential resources for preserving information and developing knowledge. Such systems imply that information is documented outside the human body by means of graphic signs on material artifacts (texts, images). The concept of hybrid minds points to the manner in which human cognitive and communicative activities are dependent on, and integrated with, increasingly complex and powerful symbolic and material cultural tools. Users of such resources need to develop specific epistemic practices and literacy skills that are coordinated with the affordances of their tools. In the present article, some of the ways in which cultural tools and people's literacy skills have co-developed are discussed. It is argued that current external memory systems add powerful processing capacities and analytical functions to previous technologies. This implies that notions of learning and literacy skills are undergoing change as people adapt to, and reconfigure, the functionalities of recent digital tools.
This book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date look at problem solving research and practice over the last fifteen years. The first chapter describes differences in types of problems, individual differences among problem-solvers, as well as the domain and context within which a problem is being solved. Part one describes six kinds of problems and the methods required to solve them. Part two goes beyond traditional discussions of case design and introduces six different purposes or functions of cases, the building blocks of problem-solving learning environments. It also describes methods for constructing cases to support problem solving. Part three introduces a number of cognitive skills required for studying cases and solving problems. Finally, Part four describes several methods for assessing problem solving. Key features includes: Teaching Focus - The book is not merely a review of research. It also provides specific research-based advice on how to design problem-solving learning environments. Illustrative Cases - A rich array of cases illustrates how to build problem-solving learning environments. Part two introduces six different functions of cases and also describes the parameters of a case. Chapter Integration - Key theories and concepts are addressed across chapters and links to other chapters are made explicit. The idea is to show how different kinds of problems, cases, skills, and assessments are integrated. Author expertise - A prolific researcher and writer, the author has been researching and publishing books and articles on learning to solve problems for the past fifteen years. This book is appropriate for advanced courses in instructional design and technology, science education, applied cognitive psychology, thinking and reasoning, and educational psychology. Instructional designers, especially those involved in designing problem-based learning, as well as curriculum designers who seek new ways of structuring curriculum will find it an invaluable reference tool.
This chapter provides an overview of some influential perspectives on the relationships between professional work and professional knowledge. We build upon a number of recent developments in theories of knowledge, skill, expertise, capability and action to help reframe understandings of professional knowledge as culturally and socially situated and materially grounded. We draw on ideas from cognitive ecology and developmental psychology to argue that effective professional action often depends upon tools and resources that come to hand in the workplace – it is the accomplishment of an “extended mind”. We also use recent research on the active nature of perception to argue that professional expertise is often highly dependent on “conceptual perception” and “sensory intelligence”. We suggest that employers and providers of professional education, and quite possibly students themselves, expect too much from the kinds of knowledge that can most readily be acquired in formal education settings: explicit, conceptual and principles-based knowledge. When employers comment negatively on the sharp contrast between the practical capabilities of new graduates and the capabilities of their more experienced workers, part of what they are noticing is – we argue – emergent from, and constitutively entangled with, the workplace setting. A richer understanding of how effective and innovative professional practitioners do what they do is needed, to make progress in the design and evaluation of professional education programs.
For a long time, the sociological analysis of professional work has differentiated professionalism as a special means of organizing work and controlling workers and in contrast to the hierarchical, bureaucratic and managerial controls of industrial and commercial organizations. But professional work is changing and being changed as increasingly professionals (such as doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers) now work in employing organizations; lawyers and accountants in large professional service firms (PSFs) and sometimes in international and commercial organizations; pharmacists in national (retailing) companies; and engineers, journalists, performing artists, the armed forces and police find occupational control of their work and discretionary decision-making increasingly difficult to sustain. The paper begins with a section on defining the field of professional work, professional practice and its learning. The paper continues with a second section on the concept of professionalism, its history and current developments. The third section of the paper considers the changes, challenges and opportunities of the practice of professional work within employing organizations. The fourth section of the paper identifies some of the important contributions made by researchers on professional work to public policy developments, assessment and evaluation.
When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain- bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.
This 2007 book considers how agencies are currently figured at the human-machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Contrary to the apparent enlivening of objects promised by the sciences of the artificial, the author proposes that the rhetorics and practices of those sciences work to obscure the performative nature of both persons and things. The question then shifts from debates over the status of human-like machines, to that of how humans and machines are enacted as similar or different in practice, and with what theoretical, practical and political consequences. Drawing on scholarship across the social sciences, humanities and computing, the author argues for research aimed at tracing the differences within specific sociomaterial arrangements without resorting to essentialist divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while recognizing the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are constituted.
One of the key characteristics of such forms of work, and particularly information work, is the potential for nomadic practices, since workers mainly deal with something that can be represented digitally and taken to or accessed from different locations. Beside the development and evaluation of computer technologies for nomadicity, studies within this frame also pay attention to issues such as the use and management of different technologies available for different contexts of interaction and different activities. The second frame one identifies abstracts the use of technologies and the practices involved in nomadicity into a nomadic strategy. Researchers adopting this position pay attention not only to the structured work activities that people have to perform and get paid for, but also to all the activities they need to complete in order to mobilize their work and to get work accomplished in and across different locations.
In this essay, I begin with the premise that everyday organizing is inextricably bound up with materiality and contend that this relationship is inadequately reflected in organizational studies that tend to ignore it, take it for granted, or treat it as a special case. The result is an understanding of organizing and its conditions and consequences that is necessarily limited. I then argue for an alternative approach, one that posits the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday life. I draw on some empirical examples to help ground and illustrate this approach in practice and conclude by suggesting that a reconfiguration of our conventional assumptions and considerations of materiality will help us more effectively recognize and understand the multiple, emergent, and shifting sociomaterial assemblages entailed in contemporary organizing.
Effective problem solving, sound decision making, insightful invention—do such aspects of good thinking depend more on deep expertise in a specialty than on reflective awareness and general strategies? Over the past thirty years, considerable research and controversy have surrounded this issue. An historical sketch of the arguments for the strong specialist position and the strong generalist position suggests that each camp, in its own way, has oversimplified the interaction between general strategic knowledge and specialized domain knowledge. We suggest a synthesis: General and specialized knowledge function in close partnership. We explore the nature of this partnership and consider its implications for educational practice.
The articles in this special issue make valuable contributions toward a scientific understanding of concepts that is broader than the traditional view that has focused on categorizing by individuals. I propose considering concepts for categorization as a special case of concepts. At their clearest, they can be referred to as formal concepts, or concepts used formally,which have explicit definitions and are used in formal deductive reasoning and argumentation. A label for broader aggregations of concepts is functional concepts, or concepts used functionally. This distinction is nearly parallel to Vygotsky's (1934/19876.
Vygotsky , L. S. 1987. “Thinking and speech”. In The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky. Volume 1: Problems of general psychology, Edited by:
Rieber , R. W. ,
Carton , A. S. and
Minick , N. 39–285. New York: Plenum. Original work published in Russian 1934 View all references) distinction between scientific concepts and everyday concepts. Formal (uses of) concepts are important products and resources in subject matter disciplines, especially in science and mathematics. I suggest that the distinction between formal and functional (uses of) concepts can support a useful interpretation and organizing frame for efforts to provide meaningful instruction in disciplinary domains.
Physics and management are disciplines deeply implicated in the domination of the physical and social world. This book is the product of ethnographic fieldwork that studied physics and management programs as points of entry that give access to larger processes that constitute and reproduce disciplines and center around the incorporation of students into discipline-specific temporal and spatial organizations of knowledge. Chapter 1, "Knowledge in Space and Time," attempts to dismantle a network of assumptions about knowledge and learning. Chapter 2, "Producing Material Space-Time and Constructing Students in Physics," examines how the physics program zoned students' activities into a set of material and social spaces and compressed their time to foster the development of exclusive within- program social ties. Chapter 3, "Connecting Students To Practice: Mobilization in Physics," develops an account of problem-solving as a way of integrating students into the discipline's way of organizing the world through textual representations. Chapter 4, "Constructing and Isolating Academic Space in Management," shows how the management program fragmented academic space-time and organized it into distinct short-term units. Chapter 5, "Mobilizing Bodies for Management," shows how non-academic portions of the program created lines of connection between the program and the business world by mobilizing students in distinctive systems of material practice. Chapter 6, "Knowledge in Motion," is a reflective commentary on major themes of the book and a look beyond it. (Contains 167 references.) (JRH)
This book proposes a theory of human cognitive evolution, drawing from paleontology, linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, and especially neuropsychology. The properties of humankind's brain, culture, and cognition have coevolved in a tight iterative loop; the main event in human evolution has occurred at the cognitive level, however, mediating change at the anatomical and cultural levels. During the past two million years humans have passed through three major cognitive transitions, each of which has left the human mind with a new way of representing reality and a new form of culture. Modern humans consequently have three systems of memory representation that were not available to our closest primate relatives: mimetic skill, language, and external symbols. These three systems are supported by new types of “hard” storage devices, two of which (mimetic and linguistic) are biological, one technological. Full symbolic literacy consists of a complex of skills for interacting with the external memory system. The independence of these three uniquely human ways of representing knowledge is suggested in the way the mind breaks down after brain injury and confirmed by various other lines of evidence. Each of the three systems is based on an inventive capacity, and the products of those capacities – such as languages, symbols, gestures, social rituals, and images – continue to be invented and vetted in the social arena. Cognitive evolution is not yet complete: the externalization of memory has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think. This is changing the role of biological memory and the way in which the human brain deploys its resources; it is also changing the form of modern culture.
Proposes a 3-level model of cognitive processing to account for complex monitoring when individuals are faced with ill-structured problems (i.e., problems on which opposing or contradictory evidence and opinion exists). At the 1st level—cognition—individuals compute, memorize, read, perceive, and solve problems. At the 2nd level—metacognition—individuals monitor their own progress when they are engaged in these 1st-order tasks. At the 3rd level—epistemic cognition—individuals reflect on the limits of knowing, the certainty of knowing, and criteria of knowing. Epistemic assumptions influence how individuals understand the nature of problems and decide what types of strategies are appropriate for solving them. While cognitive and metacognitive processes appear to develop in childhood and are used throughout the life span, research on adult reasoning suggests that epistemic cognitive monitoring develops in the late adolescent and adult years. (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The purpose of this article is to offer some reflections on the relationships between digital technologies and learning. It is argued that activities of learning, as they have been practised within institutionalized schooling, are coming under increasing pressure from the developments of digital technologies and the capacities to store, access and manipulate information that such resources offer. Thus, the technologies do not merely support learning; they transform how we learn and how we come to interpret learning. The metaphors of learning currently emerging as relevant in the new media ecology emphasize the transformational and performative nature of such activities, and of knowing in general. These developments make the hybrid nature of human knowing and learning obvious; what we know and master is, to an increasing extent, a function of the mediating tools we are familiar with. At a theoretical and practical level, this implies that the interdependences between human agency, minds, bodies and technologies have to serve as foundations when attempting to understand and improve learning. Attempts to account for what people know without integrating their mastery of increasingly sophisticated technologies into the picture will lack ecological validity.
Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena in context. In particular, it points to the web of mutual dependence among the elements of a cognitive ecosystem. At least three fields were taking a deeply ecological approach to cognition 30 years ago: Gibson’s ecological psychology, Bateson’s ecology of mind, and Soviet cultural-historical activity theory. The ideas developed in those projects have now found a place in modern views of embodied, situated, distributed cognition. As cognitive theory continues to shift from units of analysis defined by inherent properties of the elements to units defined in terms of dynamic patterns of correlation across elements, the study of cognitive ecosystems will become an increasingly important part of cognitive science.
This article profiles an important class of generic cognitive structures, “epistemic games.” These are general patterns of characterization (e.g., verbal description, algebraic notation), explanation (e.g., covering-rule explanation, analogical explanation), and justification (e.g., deduction, statistical justification) that inform inquiry within and across disciplines. They are necessary although not sufficient for effective inquiry, and learners often have trouble with them. Their importance challenges a highly situated view of cognition, but with qualifications. Epistemic games often constitute areas of expertise in themselves, and often assume distinctive styles within disciplines.
Many teaching practices implicitly assume that conceptual knowledge can be abstracted from the situations in which it is learned and used. This article argues that this assumption inevitably limits the effectiveness of such practices. Drawing on recent research into cognition as it is manifest in everyday activity, the authors argue that knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used. They discuss how this view of knowledge affects our understanding of learning, and they note that conventional schooling too often ignores the influence of school culture on what is learned in school. As an alternative to conventional practices, they propose cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, in press), which honors the situated nature of knowledge. They examine two examples of mathematics instruction that exhibit certain key features of this approach to teaching.
Development of professional expertise: Toward measurement of expert performance and design of optimal learning environments
- K A Ericsson
The wearable life 2.0: Connected living in a wearable world
- Pwc
Epistemic fluency and constructivist learning environments
- D Morrison
- A Collins
- B Wilson
Learning through epistemic practices in professional work: Examples from nursing and engineering
- M Nerland
- K Jensen