Seminar on the foundations of L³D

One way of conceptualizing “lifelong learning” is to say it involves the increasingly complex activity of learning to understand, use, and extend “cognitive artifacts.”

Cognitive artifacts are physical and symbolic objects that embody humanly interpretable, socially shared meanings. Words (including L³D jargon terms) are cognitive artifacts. So are street maps. So are software applications. A culture (of a society or of a community of practice) is a system for understanding a specific set of cultural artifacts – hence, the real difference between humans and other animals is our ability to learn to use artifacts. Schooling consists largely in the attempt to enculturate children in the use of artifacts – e.g., reading, writing, and arithmetic are skills for using some of the major traditional cultural artifacts.

L³D has always been artifact-centered. Domain-oriented design environments (including the EDC, AgentSheets, HyperGami) represent and incorporate an artifact being designed. Also, these software systems are themselves cognitive artifacts. The emphasis on design raises issues about how to structure a new artifact so that it can augment or support cognition. The Center’s name implies the need to couple such design considerations with considerations of supporting the on-going learning required to make effective use of these artifacts.

The advent of globally networked media (Shared cognitive artifacts) opens exciting new potentials for collaborative knowledge-building. Let us distinguish “learning” as the activity of an individual person gaining the ability to understand and manipulate cognitive artifacts that exist in the cultural environment from “knowledge-building” as the activity of a community to extend the meaning or functionality of a cognitive artifact beyond its current state. As an example, new-comers to L³D “learn” to use the jargon that embodies the L³D perspective, while the L³D community “builds knowledge” by extending the shared understanding of that jargon through its research and discussions.

In recent years, research at L³D has increasingly focused on supporting collaborative knowledge-building, in which individual learning plays a secondary role: e.g., the EDC, the AgentSheets Behavior Exchange, the DynaSites systems, and WebGuide. This effort raises even more forcefully questions about the interpretation, use, and design of the cognitive artifacts that play key roles in collaborative knowledge-building.

There is a trans-disciplinary body of theory that is relevant to broad issues of human-computer communication, computer-mediated communication, artificial intelligence, intelligence augmentation, and human cognition – as well as to the nature of cognitive artifacts. This theory comes from philosophy, cognitive science, cultural psychology, cultural studies, communications, social theory, anthropology. It includes contrasting perspectives like situated action, phenomenology, post-modernism, activity theory, distributed cognition, cultural criticism, etc.  Although this theory stresses the importance of cultural artifacts in capturing, preserving, transmitting, and facilitating shared understanding, it does not yet include an adequate description of how these artifacts actually work. How can a physical object “embody” meanings from one person’s mind and cause them to appear in another person’s mind? We need to engage in some collaborative knowledge-building to synthesize and extend the assortment of theoretical fragments currently available into an adequate understanding of how cognitive artifacts work.

Such an extended theory would have potential consequences – for software design as well as for education. Imagine SimRocket (an AgentSheets simulation of rocket launches) introduced into a middle school science project. To the students, it will at first appear to be a limited amusement, good for holding rocket races and cheering rocket crashes. How does it become a tool for scientific knowledge-building: for collecting and analyzing data, for isolating causal factors, for predicting future results? Or imagine WebGuide introduced into a graduate seminar. To the students, it will at first appear to be a limited discussion medium, barely adequate for stating personal opinions. How does it become a tool for real knowledge-building: developing and sharing perspectives, formulating and critiquing theories, defining and sharing terminology, writing and distributing textual artifacts?

This semester, we will be addressing these issues in an interdisciplinary seminar for graduate students, researchers, and faculty. We will review the body of relevant theory – thirty-six brief texts sampling the contemporary intellectual landscape. We will use these theories as starting points to build knowledge collaboratively about the nature of cognitive artifacts. We will also engage in micro-analysis of a video of SimRocket being used as a cognitive artifact by seventh grade students. Much of the seminar will take place in the WebGuide medium, providing first-hand experience with a networked artifact for collaborative knowledge-building. The use of WebGuide will allow a limited number of individuals or small groups who are not at CU to participate in the seminar virtually.

Please consider participating in this seminar. It should provide a unique opportunity to explore the central role of cognitive artifacts, to reflect on the theoretical foundations of L³D, to engage intellectually with seminal texts of theory, and to analyze the educational use of cognitive artifacts.

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This page last modified on August 01, 2003