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in psychological, social, and cultural processes. Thus learning is distributed across
learners, through artifacts and shared languages. Three themes have emerged in
distributed cognition: (a) the increasingly important role that technology plays in
handling intellectual tasks to ease individual cognitive load, (b) the emphasis of
Vygotsky's socio-cultural theory which describes how social interactions and exter-
nally mediated actions make explicit processes that are then internalized, and (c)
the dissatisfaction with the view of cognition as residing in the minds of individual
learners. Pea (1993) argues that cognition is not a quality of solitary minds but rather
the product of relationships among mental structures and culturally constructed
intellectual tools. Distributed cognition is represented in tools, modes of presen-
tations, and other artifacts that are created by offloading heavy cognitive demands.
In Pea's view, external resources change the nature and function of systems from
which activities arise. The principles of distributed cognition are often applied in
the design of artificial intelligence or computer-based learning environments in
order to reduce the cognitive load of learners. Web 2.0 social technologies embody
and facilitate the distribution of cognition across environments, artifacts, and
communities.
Learning Through Communication, Participation, and Interaction
Communities of practice
are defined as “groups of people who share a concern, a
set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and
expertise in this area by interaction on an ongoing basis” (Wenger, McDermott, &
Snyder, 2002, p. 4). Members of communities care about common domains and
how they interact and collaborate (Laferrière et al., 2004). Therefore, membership
in communities of practice is derived from mutual engagement (Wenger, 1999).
Practice is what members of the community are developing to be effective in their
domain. That is, “practice is a set of frameworks, ideas, tools, information, styles,
language, stories and documents that community members share” (Wenger et al.,
2002). Practices comprise shared repertoires, which are defined as “routines, words,
tools, ways of doing things, stories, gestures, symbols, genres, actions, or concepts
that the community has produced or adopted in the course of its existence, and
which have become part of its practice” (Wenger, 1998, p. 83). Practices also include
discourse practices which are shared among members in practice as well as the
styles which express the forms of membership and member identities.
A
cultural-historical theory
of learning focuses on social interaction and its
relation with the internalization of cognitive developments. Learning has a cultural-
historical origin. It begins in social interaction and is then internalized. Vygotsky
(1978) proposed that cognitive development should be explored as social, cultural,
and historical processes. His concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is
particularly useful for understanding the mechanisms of social learning. According
to Vygotsky, peer interaction, scaffolding, and modeling are important ways of
facilitating individual cognitive development and knowledge construction. ZPD can
