I observed two lessons this semester in Mr. Erich Schulz’s ninth grade world history classes at Lake Catholic High School that had particular relevance to the question of distributed cognition and affordances of technology. Mr. Schulz’s classes are privileged to have abundant technology resources, including a Clever Touch SmartBoard, laptop computers for every student, and a Google Classroom portal with Google Forms and Google Docs available for students.
Theories of distributed cognition assert that the idea of the individual as the sole learner or receptor of information is a limited manner of comprehending how human beings actually learn. While human beings are certainly capable of learning on their own through observation, study, and experience, much of learning is not person-only but person-plus. In other words, cognition is distributed between the mind and another factor, such as another person(s) or a tool(s). Human beings construct knowledge and learn in concert with other humans, as well as with items or tools, such as symbol systems, audio and visual technologies, computers, spreadsheets, and instruction manuals, as well as simple instruments, such as pencils or rulers. Human beings are able to become smarter through use of technologies that support complex cognitive processing and that lead to better cognitive performance. Cognitive technologies may assist people not only in the classroom or in an office environment but also in improving a multitude of worldly tasks, such as driving a car or landing an airplane.
Technologies involved in distributed cognition have certain effects when used, chiefly with, of, and through. Effects with technology describes the situation in which when a tool or system is not currently being used there is little cognitive change in the human being. For instance, using a calculator to divide large figures is very unlikely to make the human being using the calculator suddenly able to divide such large figures without the calculator’s assistance. The person has simply downloaded or offloaded that function to the calculator, which has temporarily amplified the person’s performance or capability. Effects with technology are usually fleeting, whereas effects of technology, while harder to quantify, result in changes in which human beings master a skill or method of doing certain things and no longer have to rely on the tool. Effects through technology are more profound and describe systemic or cultural changes brought about through the technology.
In Mr. Schulz’s unit on the Spanish-American War, he assigned students to work in groups of three in order to write collaboratively an in-class research report on the causes and outcomes of the war, using Google Docs. He instructed his students to use an affordance, the Google Docs spelling and grammar check, to review their text for errors and needed corrections before final submission of their report. Thus, the students were able to offload a task that would otherwise have taken them a much greater amount of time to complete. Though use of the Google Docs grammar and spell check could be considered as a classic case of effects with technology, it could also result in effects of technology if the students through use of this tool cognitively processed the correct spelling of the formerly incorrect words and actually learned, and later applied, the grammatical rules they had violated in their text. The effects of the technology would have to be measured by the students’ future writings without reliance on the spelling and grammar check. Mr. Schulz also had the students of his ninth grade world history class use another affordance, the Google Docs plagiarism checker, as an offloading tool to ascertain where they needed to place quotation marks and to cite their sources. Use of this plagiarism tool allows Mr. Schulz to monitor his students’ work for both unauthorized copying and failure to cite sources. This tool offers students effects with technology and also effects of technology, if through its usage they learn to properly attribute sources and provide quotations where necessary in the future. The advent of tools to monitor plagiarism may also be said to have effects through technology, as American educators have become much more aware in recent decades of how rampant plagiarism is in student work. The concept and definition of plagiarism appears to have undergone a revision among educators and students, as the phenomenon has become more understood since the advent of plagiarism monitoring technologies.
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