Distributed Cognitions in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

Distributed cognition refers to a way of thinking about cognitions as being distributed across the human brain and body, communications among individuals, and interactions with others and artifacts in external social and physical environments. Early in the 20th century, Hugo Münsterburg provided examples of distributed [Page 234]cognitions by focusing attention on the roles of books, newspaper articles, and personal letters as mediators of human communications and understandings of chronicled events and ideas for social groups and in influencing future social actions and thought. In parallel developments, Alexei Leont’ev and Lev Vygotsky put forward the notion of cognition as being distributed across cultural-historical activity systems, and John Dewey argued that individual experiences were distributed not only across an individual’s mind and body, but also shaped by the use of artifacts in the context of current social activities, as well as by previous human activities.

In the late 20th century, Yrjö Engeström developed these theories of distributed cognitions into an expanded model of activity theory that also considers the roles of rules, community, and division of labor in activity systems. Within Engeström’s representation of an activity system, particular ways of accomplishing specific goals or tasks can become the norm when they are established as recognizable cultural practices, in which distributions of cognitions follow familiar patterns. For example, in a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment cognitions may be routinely distributed across learners, their teacher, community resources, and technologies through patterns of interactions, discourses, and problem-solving activities. However, at any point in time, tensions, disruptions, or innovations may disrupt the activity system and result in breakdown or change.

The salience of considering the concept of cognition as something that not only occurs within an individual’s consciousness but is also distributed across an activity system, which in turn is situated in a social and physical environment, denotes a shift in focus (unit of analysis) from conceptualizing cognitions as events that occur within an individual learner to conceptualizing cognitions as occurring across broader social, technical, and material contexts. In the field of CSCL, this shift has been interpreted, developed, and applied in a variety of ways. This entry discusses differing conceptualizations of distributed cognitions, designs for CSCL learning environments, and the implications for learning of distributed cognitions in CSCL.