The Role of Computational Cognitive Artifacts in a CSCL Seminar

At the conclusion of his account of how the human mind has evolved, Donald (1991) conjures up a vision of a modern academic lecture to show how all the vestigial forms of mind are integrated with devices of external memory:

The minds of the participants harness every symbolic device the human race has painstakingly invented over the last 200,000 years, to the common end of modeling, in the external arena, some idea. Working memory becomes a loosely accessible, shared, and highly selective field of the external store. Individuals construct and exchange narrative commentaries and move easily within their shared mimetic framework. And ultimately the refined product of the exchange will be developed, manufactured, and stored externally. The participants in this event are clearly hybrid minds, whose hybrid structure is still in the process of evolving. (p. 357f)

But spoken lectures – and face-to-face seminars for that matter – are still fundamentally derived from oral culture. Although they are fully embedded in references to written texts and in literate scientific enterprises, their primary medium remains spoken language.

Taken as an imaginative vision statement, Donald’s description is suggestive but limited to what has long been commonplace. With the advent and increasing popularity of the Web as a globally shared external memory, much more is now possible. Obviously, an open-ended repository of graphical and even computational materials can be provided to accompany the lecture, both simultaneously or for later follow-up. These materials can change over time to present processes (e.g., simulations) or be personalized to the viewers needs, interests and abilities.

But more importantly, exchange between speaker and audience members can take place – or even among audience participants directly – so that the steps of refinement of presented ideas can take place much more rapidly. The steps do not have to follow the stodgy timelines of academic publication: journal article based on lecture, critique in later issues, adoption and transformation of ideas in future generations.

It is now possible to provide for support in the external store for the collaborative management of knowledge-building. By capturing the refinement process in computer logs and making the captured ideas available for immediate use, systems like WebGuide bring the advantages of external memory, such as persistence and intersubjective displays. They overcome the limitations of ephemeral speech and allow for more reflective, crafted expressions of ideas, whose presentation even initially has benefited from the use of external memory workspaces.

 There is, of course, still an essential role for our ancient skills in interpretation, using our visual pattern understanding and our semantic comprehension, grounded in our embodied at-home-ness in the physical, social and symbolic world. The external store does not stand on its own; it is a medium in which human intentions have been stored for other people to activate or a medium through which communications among people pass and leave their traces, which future users may be able to make sense of. So Donald is right that our new and future artifacts and abilities build on and still rely upon our vestigial capabilities.

Given this, imagine what a computational cognitive artifact could do to support collaborative knowledge-building. How should such an artifact be designed? How should its adoption and use by communities of practice be studied so as not to miss the changes that the community’s practices undergo?

Go to top of this page

Return to Gerry Stahl's Home Page

Send email to Gerry.Stahl@drexel.edu

This page last modified on August 01, 2003