Embodied Learning Systems

Embodied learning systems are designed to work the way the mind does. Theoretically derived from perspectives of embodied cognition, an embodied design approach recognizes that people learn basic knowledge through their bodies. People cognitively negotiate daily living through an inquiry cycle, using their sensory, perceptual, attentional, and motor systems. People make and test conjectures about the systems of relationships among objects, people, places, and processes. This bottom-up process interacts with a top-down effect of prior knowledge contextualized by socially constructed knowledge. People build knowledge structures through lived transactions within the self and with the external environment. Computer mediation permits the engineering of learning systems that virtually provide embodied experience. These theoretical and technical foundations support a functional definition.

Embodied learning systems cause user transactions that pair and reinforce relationships between sensory manipulation and targeted knowledge. They dynamically deliver and manage the events for embodied learning and assessment. They generate real-time assessment of user transactions within those events as immediate feedback to the learner and the system. In response, learner and system update their states. Thus, successive transactions derive from and cause new states. The process iterates as a dynamic feedback system. Because design processes derive from objectives, such embodied learning systems are instructional systems. Ideally, they are designed to support targeted learning goals and instructional objectives.

Embodied learning systems mediated by computing and communications technologies are cyberlearning technologies. Federal, corporate, and private initiatives target cyberlearning technologies as central to education reform supporting personalized learning and assessment. Embodied learning systems can be designed to leverage natural, ubiquitous, and powerful cognitive processes that make learning more intuitive. Educational technologists benefit from recognizing the characteristics of embodied learning systems, their theoretical underpinnings, instructional design approaches for engineering them, and their contribution to educational enterprise.

Knowledge Construction and Analogy

At a very basic level, people construct knowledge through transactions (e.g., cause and effect interactions) with their everyday environment. In Figure 1, the ovals on the left can represent people, places, objects, and so forth, encountered in everyday life. The directional arrows represent the relations connecting them. For example, a young child might build knowledge of hot during a too hasty gulp from a cup of hot chocolate. This is embodied knowledge construction because it is learned through human senses. The knowledge consists of perceptions of cause and effect dyads, or pairs, connected during concrete transactions. Learning is constrained and directed by opportunity to build dyads and systems of dyads. With the chocolate, hot pairs with pain. Later, the child is given a mug of freshly brewed hot cider. Hopefully, the child’s cognitive processes have transferred the relational knowledge of hotness from the cup-chocolate domain to the mug-cider domain. The process is called mapping.

Figure 1 Process and structure: mapping relational structure between domains

Source: © Debbie Denise Reese, 2007. Adapted with permission of the author.

[Page 260]Inference through transfer of relational structure from one domain to another is analogical reasoning. It is a fundamental, ubiquitous cognitive process through which people build new knowledge from old and engage in higher order reasoning. As with other cognitive processes, people often are unaware they are engaging in analogical reasoning. In Figure 1, the rectangle on the left represents a domain of knowledge; the rectangle on the right, another domain. The analogizer projects (maps) relational structure from the first (source domain) onto the target domain in one-to-one correspondence.

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