The Baseline

Cognition involves an interaction between the external environment, the psycho-neural system, and internal cognitive structures which are relatively stable. Stimuli from the external environment are perceived by sensory receptors; irrelevant patterns are filtered out; and then important information is stored for a few seconds in short term memory. If it is useful, it is linked, encoded, and stored in short term memory; if not, it is either rejected or held in short term memory for another pass. If it is not related to prior knowledge structures, it is stored as inert knowledge and becomes difficult to recall later on. Long term memory consists of knowledge structures, including schemas, affects, and some parts of metacognition. It is not accessible to conscious control, though unconscious processes are taking place continually.

To perform an action, an impression in short term memory may be linked with a recalled item from long term memory. Under the direction of metacognition, this would be considered a purposeful action. A signal is sent from short term memory to a response generator, which, in turn, sends another signal to a motor effector such as the mouth, hands, arms, or any part of the body that is still electrically connected to the brain. The motor organ then performs the action, which becomes part of the external environment.

Since the process above describes a looping structure, it can also explain the formation of habits. The karmic cycle fits in very nicely here. An external stimulus initiates an action that produces an impression stored in short term memory. Is it favorable or not? Here, a decision must be made. If it is favorable, then a favorable attitude regarding the action is created, which initiates a tendency to repeat the action (i.e., it creates a potential for action) whenever the same stimulus is perceived. If it is unfavorable, the loop stops. The more often the loop is repeated, the stronger the pattern in the brain, and the harder the habit is to break. As with any collapsed procedure, much of this is no longer under conscious control or direction.

The karmic cycle idea fit in quite nicely with Perkins, Jay, and Tishman's (1993) New conceptions of thinking, in which there are three kinds of mindware. First of all, there is the natural language of thinking: verbal terms and related concepts, just like the propositions and ordered lists that Gagne (1993) speaks of. These allow for discrimination and metacognition, as well as providing management and communication of thinking. Second, there are abstract conceptual structures: forms and patterns, schemas, epistemic forms to be filled out, activated by situational cues. These provide general goal structures for organizing context-appropriate inquiry. Then there are the thinking dispositions that activate the other types of mindware. They are distinct from effectivities or capabilities, because without the inclination to put ideas into practice, potential for action will never be realized.

So much for cognitive psychology. It is nicely reductionist, individual in nature, and amenable to scientific explanations by communication engineers such as Claude Shannon or professional communications specialists such as William Horton. And it works. Good teachers have good systems of pedagogy. They stimulate the recall of inert knowledge so students can discuss it, and then introduce students to a new situation that produces cognitive dissonance. Once students can explain the phenomenon using a more critical and mature reasoning, the new information is linked to the prior knowledge structure and replaces it. A combination of didactic and constructivist teaching usually works well. All about neurons

This all made perfect sense until I started reading the book about neurons. In Sylwester's (1995) view, the brain is an adaptive, self-organizing system, filled with potential waiting to be actualized. Individual consciousness emerges from (or is created by) purely physical neural networks within that system. Like cognition, the philosophy is still individual rather than social, but the whole notion of free will, controlling the senses, and the sense of the self is lost. I may be a cognitivist, but I still believe in an immanent, transcendent self, so the neurons philosophy was a bit hard to take at first. Sylwester does admit that what we can learn is how and when to use rational processes to override our emotions or hold them in check, so at last we are on the same wavelength.

Sylwester's emphasis on the affective domain took me by surprise, even though I had seen the NOVA show about the brain, including how a shot of adrenaline strengthens a rat's memory of how to find his way out of a maze. This issue was again brought out in AECT, where the panel admitted that the conceptual models of affective domain and its functions are presently in about the same state as cognition was when Skinner was running the psychology department at Harvard. It is definitely something that needs further exploration. In fact, it is one of the key issues to be dealt with when learning about technology and adopting its use. Not only do individuals feel uncertainty and discomfort when dealing with a new innovation; they may feel threatened by the "techno gurus" who are speaking an unfamiliar language filled with mystical jargon, they are afraid of breaking a computer, and they are worried about how the use of a new technology may affect them and their colleagues.

No amount of information can prod a resister into adopting something when the resister has good, valid reasons to maintain the status quo - one of which is to keep the discomfort level fairly low. I am rather fascinated by the initial results of my research, and I intend to continue to explore affective barriers to adoption for part of my dissertation. Thus, I realize I need to get into a whole new area of the psychology literature, and I need to do it fairly soon.

The study of neurons also leads to the study of neural networks and the whole field of connectionism. I had read Jeremy Roschelle's (1992) work about two years ago, but I really couldn't relate to it at the time. I knew the basics: neural nets can learn across trials so that learning and activity are connected. Neural nets can function with incomplete information. That's OK - so can a hologram. Here, information is distributed and redundant, just as in the brain. But do neural nets somehow resemble human information processing? Well, I wasn't quite sure. If information is truly distributed, and if knowledge is recreated anew rather than being recalled from a stable structure, then what ever happened to all those nice little schemas and propositions? As they say in Catch-22, "somebody disappeared them!"

That was a rude awakening - just about the time I thought I understood psychology pretty well. However, in retrospect, I cannot argue with Roschelle, or with Sylwester, or with the neural network gurus. Organic structures, and many inorganic structures as well, are self-organizing - witness Prigogine's termite tunnels, or snowflakes, or fractals. I've also played around enough with evolution of life games on the computer to know that it really doesn't take much to make a self-organizing system work. Moreover, if information is constantly recreated anew, rather than recalled in its pristine form, that actually makes the teaching/learning process easier for the teacher and the learner alike. It also strongly supports a constructivist approach to learning, so it is an idea that bears further investigation.

Where is knowledge stored?

Externalizing the function of acquiring and storing vital information, or offloading the work of information storage and processing to the environment itself, has survival value. The less work needed to maintain internal representations of the environment by storing them in the environment, the more energy is available for the person or organism to effectively exploit and use that information. Now I have a M.S. in physics, and I know that Brock Allen has a few weird ideas about physics, but when he started talking about thermodynamic efficiency, he was speaking my language. He made a lot of sense.

Mezirow (1991), too, notes that each transformation of a meaning scheme or paradigm makes more efficient use of energy, which, in turn, provides greater adaptability to the environment and the context in which one finds one's self. So that was another reality check on Brock Allen's ideas.

Representations are created and given meaning in a shared perceptual space, where they are spoken, written, and drawn in the context of social activity. Back to Jeremy Roschelle - here are the beginnings of social learning. Perhaps knowledge wasn't stored in nice cognitive structures after all, but it could still be transmitted in the form of nicely delineated representations via the environment, so I didn't worry too much about this bit of cognitive dissonance. Not until this year's AECT, that is. It all started when I loaned Brent my Margaret Wheatley (1992) book on Leadership and the new science, and Brent decided to loan me another book in return - Out of Control by Kevin Kelly (1994). Brent, the Zen master, came up with this koan: "Read the section on hive mind; you don't have to read the whole book. Then tell me, where is the knowledge stored?" I read the chapter and I couldn't answer the question.

Bees are autonomous. They have minds of some sort. They make decisions. Each bee reacts individually according to its own internal rules and the state of its local environment. There are no orders coming from a center because there is no center. It is a peer network, with management distributed throughout the system. Yet the hive or the swarm functions as a whole. My dad was a beekeeper. I've seen swarms of bees, so I was aware that Kelly knew what he was talking about. Each bee is autonomous; there's no central control; but all the bees are connected and communicating with one another as in a network. Peers influence peers in highly nonlinear ways; they keep adjusting to one another's movements. Where is the mind, the self of the hive? It is spread over the entire network so that no part of it can say "I am the center, I am the self!"

It was getting worse now. Not only weren't there any nice little knowledge structures in the mind; there wasn't even a mind! It's counter-intuitive.

Social learning

I'd read some of Charles Crook's (1994) writings last year, and I retrieved my Xerox copies of his chapters 5 and 6 just after I read Lave's book. I wish I had read Lave last year, when I was struggling with the idea of social cognition, social dynamics, and collaborative design. I know the metacognition area was weak; Steve Alessi (personal communication) pointed that out in the AERA VIRTCON online conference, so I know I needed to do some homework. Crook helped, with the idea of longitudinal continuity in mediated environments. Lave's ideas meshed with Crook's, and somehow she seemed to have all the answers. I knew about the strategies, but I hadn't seen the philosophy underlying those strategies so nicely laid out before.

Individuals pass their knowledge on to newcomers - not just to the individuals per se, but to the entire community of practice that is learning. Thus, consciousness, and the sense of self, is a group construct as well as an individual construct. As the old Indian proverb explains it, "the water is in the vessel and the vessel is in the ocean". An extended period of legitimate peripherality provides learners with opportunities to participate in a culture of practice, and to make that culture of practice their own. Therein lies their identity - their "self" - as a legitimate member of the learning community. The community is both situated and sociocultural, with shared understandings and multiple relationships among members, with specific types of power relationships, power struggles, and conditions for legitimacy. The key to this is "shared understandings".

To Crook, knowledge is stored in the longitudinal continuity that is created by a group of learners within a mediated environment. What is this longitudinal continuity, dispersed in time and space? It is a narrative state, a co-constructed, shared mental context for joint problem-solving efforts, a set of principled understandings that apply widely across settings and lead to greater reflective self-awareness. This common ground of shared experiences and understandings is constructed across sustained and orchestrated patterns of talk. It depends on a conscious investment of discursive effort that is exercised over extended periods of shared time and space, facilitated by a mediated environment such as electronic conferencing, e-mail, groupware, chat rooms, and the like It incorporates mutual understandings that are "inter-mental" because they have arisen from whatever history of joint activity is common to those who are engaging in the discourse.

This is much like Bereiter's (1994) idea of progressive discourse, of Bohm's (1990) and Isaacs' notion of dialogue, in which discourse takes place to push the frontiers of knowledge, understanding, and mutual cooperation. This is the glue that holds a community of learners together and binds them in their common effort at knowledge-building. In such a community, teachers become co-learners and co-explorers with their students, and in Roy Pea's (1994) estimation, all parties are transformed in the process. As Pea and John Seely Brown say in the preface to Lave's book, "the new interactive technologies redefine...what it means to know and understand..." (Lave & Wenger, 1996: 12).

So, you may ask, why am I so passionate about the interactive technologies? This is why - because they raise our consciousness, they allow us to become legitimate members in a global community of learners, each following our own path - pushing the frontiers of knowledge as we continue to co-construct it. Isn't that our mission as Ph.D's???

References

Bereiter, C. (1994). Implications of Postmodernism for science, or science as progressive discourse. Educational Psychologist, 29(1), 3-12.

Bohm, D. (1990). On Dialogue. Unpublished manuscript. Available: David Bohm Seminars, P.O. Box 1452, Ojai CA 93023.

Gagne, E., Yekovich, C., & Yekovich, F. (1993). The Cognitive Psychology of School Learning, Second Edition. NY: Harper Collins.

Isaacs, W.N. (1996, January-February). The process and potential of dialogue in social change. Educational Technology, 20-30.

Kelly, K. (1994). Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1996). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Pea, R.D. (1994). Seeing what we build together: Distributed multimedia learning environments for transformative communications. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 3(3), 285-299.

Perkins, D., Jay, E., & Tishman, S. (1993). New conceptions of thinking: From ontology to education. Educational Psychologist, 28(1), 67-95.

Roschelle, J., & Clancey, W.J. (1992). Learning as social and neural. Educational Psychologist, 27(4), 435-453.

Spielberger, C., & Starr, L.M. (1994). Curiosity and exploratory behavior. In H.F. O'Neil, Jr., & M. Drillings (Eds.), Motivation: Theory and Research. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Sylwester, R. (1995). A Celebration of Neurons: An Educator's Guide to the Human Brain. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Wheatley, M.J. (1992). Leadership and the New Science. San Francisco: Berret:Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Back to Home Page