Welcome to Group Four's presentation on Social Approaches to Learning! |
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| Your presenters are Ada Cheung, Amber Van Der Mark, Jason Lui, Sherman Chan, and Zhi Su. |
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After reading the content, please return to the Symposium forum to discuss our topic. |
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Activity Theory |
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| Activity theory is a psychological meta-theory or a conceptual framework that was created by Russian psychologists, Vygotsky, Leont’ev, and Luria at their cultural-historical school, known as Kharkov School of Psychology today. These three founders of the school contributed to activity theory in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 30s. Activity theory was created to better account for contextuality; when people engage and interact with their environment, the production of tools result. These tools can be viewed as external forms of our mental processes. Hence, these tools become accessible and communicable to other humans and groups for social interaction. Instead of reading directly with the environment, humans react directly to objects of the environment and this environment is mediated by cultural means, tools, and signs. |
| Five Basic Characteristics of Human Activity (Spasser, 1999): |
1. Pragmatic – directed to object 2. Mediated by artifacts 3. Embedded and realized socially in a culture 4. Provisional or historically developing and changing 5. Contested – prevalence of contradiction, incoherence & dilemma 6. Hierarchial organization – chains of goal-oriented actions |
| After Vygotsky’s death, Leont’ev became the leader of the research group at Kharkov School of Psychology. He first studied animals and how they have an active relation to reality, known as activity. He later studied humans and discovered that humans engage in actions towards satisfaction of their needs. As a result, activities satisfy needs and actions constitute activities. Activity theory is used as a framework to evaluate design in the study of Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Science. In human-computer interaction, activity is broken down into steps of actions, which are further divided into operations. |
| Activity theory can be depicted as three theoretical generations. First, Vygotsky discovered the idea of mediation. Then, Leont’ev distinguished between collective activity and individual action with a 3-levelled model. |
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| The top level depicts collective activity driven by object-related motive. The middle level shows individual or group action driven by a conscious goal. The bottom level shows automatic operations driven by conditions and tools of an action at hand. A famous example for this model is the collective hunt: a group hunts for an animal at the top level, the group performs various actions because they want food at the middle level, the group divides into subgroups to complete differing operations such as shooting and luring the animal in order to accomplish their motive and goal at the bottom level. Finally, in the third theoretical generation, Leont’ev discovered that two activity systems or more can be interacting; hence, social interaction. |
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Distributed Cognition |
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| Distributed cognition is a theory of psychology developed in the mid 1980s by Edwin Hutchins. This theory emphasizes the social aspects of cognition and is a framework not a method that involves the co-ordination between individuals and artifacts. This theory has two key components: |
1. The representations that information is held in and transformed across 2. The process by which representations are co-ordinated with each other. |
| Hutchins best describes distributed cognition by proposing that human knowledge and cognition are not confined to the individual. Instead, it is distributed by placing memories, facts, or knowledge on the objects, individuals, and tools in our environment. Distributed cognition is a useful approach for (re)designing social aspects of cognition by putting emphasis on the individual and his/her environment. Distributed cognition views a system as a set of representations, and models the interchange of information between these representations. These representations can be either in the mental space of the participants or external representations available in the environment. This abstraction can be categorized into three distinct types of processes. |
1. Cognitive processes may be distributed across the member of a social group. 2. Cognitive processes may be distributed in the sense that the operation of the cognitive system involves coordination between internal and external (material or environment) structure. 3. Processes may be distributed through tyme in such a way that the products of earlier events can transform the nature of related events. |
Applying Distributed Cognition to the Classroom |
| Distributed cognition illustrates the process of interaction between people and technologies in order to determine how to best represent, store and provide access to digital resources and other artifacts. With this said distance learning or Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) and other computer-supported learning tools would be a great use of Distributed Cognition. |
| The Turing Test may be used as an auditionary test for determining distributed cognition. Distributed cognition can also be seen through cultures and communities. Learning certain habits or following certain traditions is seen as cognition distributed over a group of people. Exploring distributed cognition through community and culture is one way to understand how it may work. |
| ETEC 512 - Applications of Learning Theories to the Analysis of Instructional Settings - Section 66A |
Situated Cognition |
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| Situated cognition (a.k.a. situated learning) is a theory that suggests learning is “naturally tied to authentic activity, context, and culture” (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). Also, this theory suggests that it is more difficult to learn from un-natural activities. For example, learning one’s first language or a foreign language by immersion is widely held to be easier than learning languages from textbooks and vocabulary lists. |
| Jean Lave is often credited with starting the situated cognition movement. He believes that most learning occurs naturally through cultures, contexts, and activities; and that schools often restrict learning by providing unsituated contexts and applications (Oliver, 1999). Situated learning examples include more “apprentice-like” situations such as carpenters, mechanics, printers, and sculptors (Oliver, 1999) |
| If we are trying to think of a situated approach for teaching our school courses, we can think about how our skill or trade was taught before there were universities. Chances are that the skills were taught by way of apprentice-like situations. Architects learned to design by working with master architects. Physicians learned to operate by watching and assisting other physicians. As teachers, we have experienced situated learning by successfully completing our teaching practicum under the supervision of our teacher sponsor(s). We can create effective learning experiences for our students in this manner, too. |
| Lev Vygotsky supported apprentice-like coaching by believing that the acquirement of tasks should be situated in “zones of proximal development” just beyond what a student can accomplish alone, but not to a level of impossibility; and that there needs to be an utilization of peer and teacher scaffolding in order to reach appropriate levels of understanding and engagement (Oliver, 1999). |
| Cognitive apprenticeship is a model that provides practical steps to effectively using the situated learning theory. The steps consist of having the teacher consider expert-like strategies of the skill/task/application; the teacher designing scaffolding activities that promote students to apply strategies; the activities situated or geared toward a relevant outcome/goal; and the teacher model the strategies and coach the student to grasp them successfully (Oliver, 1999) |
| An example of cognitive apprenticeship is reciprocal teaching (Palinscar & Brown, 1984). In that study, the teacher models expert reading strategies such as making predictions, formulating questions, clarifying uncertain phrases/new vocabulary, and verbally summarizing text. Next, the teacher coaches and scaffolds students to use strategies correctly as they take turns applying them. At the end, the teacher’s consistent guiding fades as the students become proficient in reading comprehension (Oliver, 1999). |
| ETEC 512 - Applications of Learning Theories to the Analysis of Instructional Settings - Section 66A |
Theory Comparison (Situated Cognition, Distributed Cognition, Activity Theory) |
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Situated cognition, distributed cognition and activity theory all look at the interaction between learner(s) and their environment. They are all constructivist theories that declare learning happens more effectively in meaningful context. However, there are significant differences that set each theory apart. These differences lie mainly in the cognitive processes and the inclusion or exclusion of certain environmental factors. |
Situated cognition recognizes that a particular setting is the most important influence in the learning process. Individual perception is based on specific social contexts which are unique to each learner (Driscoll, 2005). On the other hand, distributed cognition does not place emphasis on the individual; rather on the interaction between the social group as a whole and the environment. Thus, the result of cognitive processes is measured from the collective, instead of the individual. Moreover, distributed cognition is based on the coordination between internal and external structure (Rogers, 1997). Situated cognition is similar in that respect; yet in distributed cognition, processes may be distributed through time in such a way that the products of earlier events can transform the nature of later events (Rogers, 1997). In activity learning, there is emphasis placed on the study of the formal or cognitive properties of artefacts, or structured social relations, or enduring cultural knowledge and values (Nardi, 1995). Essentially, activity theory takes what situated and distributed cognition proposes and takes it a step further. It builds upon what distributed cognition expanded from situated cognition. Whereas distributed cognition emphasized the relationship of the society as a whole to situations, activity theory takes into account the rest of the variables in the environment. Situated cognition emphasizes the value of certain non-technical, solutions to everyday problems that are the result of adaptivity of successful reasoning (Greeno, 1997). However, distributed cognition and activity theory do not value one-time, non-structured solutions to specific problems. Rather, there should be long-term solutions that are based on solid principals that can be used over and over again in different situations. |
| To simplify, we can look at all three theories and analyze how we measure that learning has taken place. In situated cognition, we would look at individual and what interaction occurred between them and the environment. While in distributed cognition, we would look at a group of individuals and what interaction and decisions were made as a whole. Activity theory is probably the most different, where we would look at the activity itself. Essentially, this differentiates each theory from one another, although on the surface, each theory represents constructivist learning processes. |
| References | ||
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| Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18 (1), 32-41. | ||
| Driscoll. M.P. (2005). Psychology of Learning for Instruction (pp. 153-182; Ch. 5 – Situated Cognition). Toronto, ON: Pearson. | ||
| Hutchins, E. (1995) Cognition in the Wild (ISBN 0-262-58146-9) (MIT Press). | ||
| Hutchins, E. (1995) "How a cockpit remembers its speeds". Cognitive Science, 19, 265-288. | ||
| http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/Anthro179a/DistributedCognition.pdf (June 27th 2008) | ||
| Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in practice: Mind, mathematics, and culture in everyday life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. | ||
| Nardi, B. A. (1995) Studying Context: A comparison of activity theory, situated action models, and distrubuted cognition. In B. A. Nardi (Ed.) Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 35-52). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Available online at: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~corps/phaseii/nardi-ch4.pdf | ||
| Oliver, K. (1999). Situated Cognition & Cognitve Apprenticeships. Retrieved from http://www.edtech.vt.edu/edtech/id/models/powerpoint/cog.pdf on June 28, 2008. | ||
| Rogers, Y. (1997). A Brief Introduction to Distributed Cognition. Available online at: http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/yrogers/papers/dcog/dcog-brief-intro.pdf | ||
| Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1985). Fostering the development of self-regulation in children's knowledge processing. In S. F. Chipman, J. W. Segal, & R. Glaser (Eds.), Thinking and learning skills: Research and open questions (pp. 563-577). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. | ||
| Spasser, Mark A. (1999). Informing Information Science: The Case for Activity Theory. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 50(12), 1136-1138. | ||
| University of Helsinki’s Centre for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research. (2004). What are CHAT & DWR. Retrieved June 27 2008, from http://www.edu.helsinki.fi/activity/pages/chatanddwr/ | ||
| Weizenbaum, Joseph (January, 1966), “ELIZA - A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine”, Communications of the ACM 9 (1): 36-45 | ||
| Wikipedia the free encyclopedia. (2008). Activity Theory. Retrieved June 27, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activity_theory | ||
| ETEC 512 - Applications of Learning Theories to the Analysis of Instructional Settings - Section 66A | ||
 Thought Questions Discussion |
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| 1) Looking at how you learn personally, which of the three theories (activity vs. distributed vs. situated) best suits you? OR if you are an educator, which of the three theories (activity vs. distributed vs. situated) would you be inclined to use? Why? |
| 2) What are some application examples of the theories in the classroom or beyond? |
| 3) If you were to invent or combine some of the existing theories to create your own social theory, what would it be called? Describe it. |
Thank for visiting our site! |
| Please return to the course Symposium Forum to discuss our questions. Feel free to start with any question the interests you. |
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Albert Bandura (1925 - present) Albert Bandura was born December 4, 1925, in the small town of Mundare in northern Alberta, Canada. He was educated in a small elementary school and high school in one, with minimal resources, yet a remarkable success rate. After high school, he worked for one summer filling holes on the Alaska Highway in the Yukon. He received his bachelors degree in Psychology from the University of British Columbia in 1949. He went on to the University of Iowa, where he received his Ph.D in 1952. It was there that he came under the influence of the behaviorist tradition and learning theory. |
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I earned my Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California in 1978. I joined the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD in 1988. In collaboration with Professor James Hollan, I direct the Distributed Cognition and Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. My research focuses on the nature of cognitive activity in real-world settings. |
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Leont'ev, Alexei (1904-1979)
Alexei Leont'ev’s whole life was linked to the Moscow State Lomonosov University (MGU). In 1921, he began his studies at the historical-philological Faculty of the University. The historical-philological Faculty, at the time, included a Department of Philosophy at which G. I. Chelpanov was teaching psychology, and Leont'ev studied psychology with him. In 1924, Leont'ev graduated from what became the Faculty of Social Sciences. |
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ALEXANDER LURIA was born in Kazan, an old Russian University town east of Moscow. He entered Kazan University at the age of 16 and obtained his degree in 1921 at the age of 19. While still a student, he established the Kazan Psychoanalytic Association, and planned on a career in psychology. His earliest research sought to establish objective methods for assessing Freudian ideas about abnormalities of thought and the effects of fatigue on mental processes. |
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Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich (1896-1934) Soviet psychologist who developed Genetic approach to the development of concepts in early childhood and youth, tracing the transition through a series of stages of human development, based on the development of the child's social practice. His works were published after his death in 1934 and suppressed in 1936 and were not known in the West until 1958. |
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Wikipedia - Social Learning Theory | |
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Social Construction of Technology | |
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Sociocultural Theory | |
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Turing Test | |