human and non-human). Experts can be expert practitioners, who can be consulted through such technologies as video conferencing, instant messaging, or email; some knowledge can emerge from technologies such as calculators, spread sheets, and expert systems; new insights can originate from the teacher or students or both.The key is having expertise somewhere within the distributed learning environment and making sure students understand how to access and deploy it. Applications of the distributed cognition perspective to education suggest that students must learn the affordances of different tools and information technologies, and know which functions tools and technologies excel at and in what contexts they can be trusted. Students need to acquire patterns of thought that regularly cycle through available sources of information as they make sense of developments in the world around them. Distributed intelligence is not simply a technical skill, although it depends on knowing how to use tools effectively; it is also a cognitive skill, which involves thinking across “brain, body, and world.”The term “distributed intelligence” emphasizes the role that technologies play in this process, but it is closely related to the social production of knowledge that we are calling collective intelligence. What Might Be Done
The theory of distributed cognition informs educational research and practice when it provides a perspective for envisioning new learning contexts, tools, curricula and pedagogy, participant structures, and goals for schooling. • Augmented reality games represent one potential application of distributed intelligence to the learning process. Klopfer and Squire (2005) developed a range of games in which students use location-aware, GPS-enabled handheld computers to solve fictional problems in real spaces. For example, in Environmental Detectives, students determine the source of an imaginary chemical leak, which is causing environmental hazards on the MIT campus. Students can use their handhelds to drill imaginary wells and take readings on the soil conditions, but to do so, they must travel to the actual location. Data drawn from the computer is read against their actual physical surroundings—the distance between locations, the slope of the land, its proximity to the Charles River—and multiple players compare notes as they seek to resolve the game scenario. • Students in the Comparative Media Studies Program have experimented with the use of handhelds to allow tourists to access old photographs of historic neighborhoods and compare them with what they are seeing on location (Jenkins, 2004a). Elsewhere, students travel across the battlefield at Lexington conducting interviews with historical personage to better understand their perspective on what happened there in 1775 (Shrier, 2005). In each case, direct perceptions of the real world and information drawn from information appliances are mutually reinforcing.The players combine multiple information sources in completing the tasks at hand. • Byline (Hatfield & Shaffer, in press) is an Internet-based publishing and editing tool designed to focus attention on the organizational and structural features of journalism. By
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