For various reasons, mostly PhD related (and somewhat related to procrastination), I’m taking the time to read a bit more about situated cognition. Not sure how far it will go. The following are some ad hoc reflections and essentially a diary of what I’m reading. Not aiming for this post to fulfil any purpose beyond being a place to dump observations.

The wikipedia page

So far, the Wikipedia page on situated cognition seems fairly extensive and a reasonable place to start.

Misapplication of community of practice?

The wikipedia page has the following definition of community of practice

The concept of a **community of practice** (often abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs and shared sociocultural practices that emerge and evolve when people who have common goals interact as they strive towards those goals.

I find this somewhat interesting in that my experience with CoPs around university learning and teaching has been with special groups set up for specific purposes above and beyond normal teaching. i.e. rather than have a CoP around teaching at university X, where the common purpose is to teach. A CoP is set up around attrition, graduate attributes etc and focuses on that as the goal, rather than the teaching.

I do wonder whether this on-going ad hoc creation of CoPs around special topics that are important, but haven’t been embedded into common institutional practice is a symptom of CoP misuse. i.e. if normal practice of teaching within an institution was more like a CoP, would you really need a separate CoP on retention etc? Does the need for separate CoPs indicate that the normal practice of teaching within an institution isn’t like a CoP and hence, perhaps there isn’t a sense of a common purpose amongst those involved in the process of normal teaching? Instead of a common purpose, do the actors within an institution’s normal practice of teaching and learning have their own different purposes?

The glossary from which this definition comes highlights the amount of though and subsequently special language that has arisen around situated cognition. Also has some interesting resonance with the need for design theories to have a constructs section.

Affordances

Interesting to see some of the origins of the concept of affordances beyond Norman and HCI/usability. The idea that affordances are the individual’s interpretations about what action is possible within the given environment through their perception of the environment connects strongly with some of the problems I have around the stereotypical university environment around teaching and the nature of e-learning systems. i.e. I think the affordances seen by many teaching staff aren’t good in terms of improving learning and teaching.

The relationship between affordances and schemata seems an area of some disquiet and more reading – Glenberg and Robertson (1999)

Perception

This section was a little disappointing, it only mentions visual perception. While this is apparently an importent influence on situated cognition, even from my limited reading and knowledge there appears to have been a lot more work done on perception.

Memory

Again I feel there could be more here. But it does pose the interesting question of how situated cognition is downplaying the importance of stored, symbolic representations in memory. Instead having a belief that perception and action are co-determined by effectivities and affordances… Raises the question about what is
learning and knowing (which are covered next). Also links back to the disquiet about the link between affordances and schemata.

Knowing and learning

So knowing is not a think, a memory, but a verb, it is action/participation of an agent in an environment. This is where the idea that knowledge cannot be separate from context. It gives rise to the importance of context.

This is interesting, challenging and somewhat comforting. It is comforting because to some aspect it represents an idea embedded in how Webfuse worked. For Webfuse, context was important. Webfuse wasn’t a general purpose tool that could be used elsewhere, Webfuse could not be separate from its context. Mmm, situated cognition as a kernel theory for the ISDT and Webfuse?

It does seem that some of these sections have been made specifically very narrow and focussing on language/literacy learning.

Pedagogical implications

So, situated cognition is the theory of “mind/knowing/learning etc”, while cognitive apprenticeship etc are instructional design theories drawing on that theory, it appears.

Critiques

A small section on critiques close off the page. On the face of it, the critiques do a reasonable job of removing many of the assumptions on which situated cognition is based. Need to have a look further into Anderson et al (2000).

Of course the criticisms arise from cognitivists – more information processing types – who hold a perspective that has also been challenged. Interesting that it appears that Herbert Simon is one of the critiques (last author on Anderson et al).

References

Anderson, J. R., Greeno, J. G., Reder, L. M., & Simon, H. A. (2000). Perspectives on learning, thinking, and activity. Educational Researcher, 29, 11-13.