In essence, “the knowledgeproduction itself may become the form of mobilization” that induces indi-viduals to make the cognitive shift (Gaventa and Cornwall, 2001, p. 76) thatleads to change from within the self outward to the institution

Liberal and Conservative Representations of the Good Society: A (Social) Structural Topic Modeling Approach

although there have been many speculations about the role of compensation in adult development (e.g., see Dixon & Backman, 1995), there is still very little empirical evidence documenting the existence of age-related compensation in cognitive activities.

If it’s in the brain, it must be real.

KMO is located in the outer mitochondrial membrane.

“What, precisely, is thegoal of the game that we’re playing now?” In

cognition is thus ecological:

priori. Such is the situation with disaster.We easily dismisshow uncertainsituations of disaster areor can become, and how a goalin safety-critical work is to avert situations beforethey become problems. Much of the work in safety-and time-critical matters in CSCW appreciates the implications of this goalon vigilance, mutual awareness, and, of course, error, especially propagated error. It is all too easy to blame “pilot error” when a sequence of preceding systemic conditions took place to set a pilot up for perceiving the problem as he or she did [34,48], including one that warns of hazard. Indeed, disaster can magnifyproblems, not necessarily out of proportion, though that can happen, but rather too so that wefocusonspecific detailswhen many things are happening.

Mendonça, et al.[26] and Kendra and Wachtendorf [20] have characterized this as improvisation, whichhas strong parallels to the conversations in CSCW about the nature of situated cognition or situated work [14,44], as well as the relationship between informal as well as formal aspects of work [30,44]

Threaded throughout thesearguments is the idea of distributed cognition particularly as it materializes in the on-the-ground work, but also through prior online preparation.Through this lens, we see how ideation ofsolutions sprung from uncertainexpressions ofproblem statementswhich were quickly forwardedto the local (or local enough) domain experts—horsepeople in Colora

n particular, we note how recent extensions to Activity Theory have addressed theoretical shortcomings similar to our five challenges and suggest directions for bridging the gap between everyday practice and systems support

These extensions increase the complexity of the Activity Theory model but also help to explain tensions present in real-world systems such as when one agent plays different roles in two systems that have divergent goals. Furthermore, this approach provides Activity Theory with a similar degree of agility in representing complex, distributed cognition as competing theoretical approaches, such as Distributed Cognition (Hutchins, 1995).

Visibility of communication exchanges and of information enableslearning and greater efficiencies

Drawing on the theory of distributed cognition [5], we utilizerepresentational physical artifacts to provide a tangible interface for task planning, aural cues for time passage, and an ambient, glanceable display to convey status

Why there’s no such thing as a gifted child

There’s this thing that happened which is that there’s more diversity of ethnicity and background perhaps, but less diversity of cognitive style. If you have a certain kind of nerdy, quantitative problem-solving oriented cognitive style, that will get you more friends, and that will get you along better than if you have a more contemplative, aesthetic center. 

This is equivalent to what Montessori was saying: If you want to live in the 21st century, you’d better embody it. You can’t teach it in a classroom. And so, Papert was saying, “Hey, this is math. It’s not just learning math. It’s an environment. It has all these things.”

We do not help everyone equally—some people just seem to be more worthy of help than others. Our cognitions about people in need matter as do our emotions toward them.

Spiders appear to offload cognitive tasks to their webs, making them one of a number of species with a mind that isn’t fully confined within the head.

die Denker schon mit ihrer Hirnaktivität ausgelastet sind und sie darum weniger das Bedürfnis nach Bewegung haben

One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.

exposed two groups to a series of visual perception learning exercises

retrograde interference

Many people implicitly or explicitly use this cognitive outsourcing model to think about augmentation. It's commonly used in press accounts, for instance. It is also, I believe, a common way for programmers to think about augmentation. In this essay, we've seen a different way of thinking about augmentation. Rather than just solving problems expressed in terms we already understand, the goal is to change the thoughts we can think:

Hard work makes you feel bad in the moment. The Marine Corps has a motto that embodies this principle: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” That is, the discomfort of exertion means you’re building muscle and discipline. Superagers are like Marines: They excel at pushing past the temporary unpleasantness of intense effort. Studies suggest that the result is a more youthful brain that helps maintain a sharper memory and a greater ability to pay attention.

Of course, the big question is: How do you become a superager? Which activities, if any, will increase your chances of remaining mentally sharp into old age? We’re still studying this question, but our best answer at the moment is: work hard at something. Many labs have observed that these critical brain regions increase in activity when people perform difficult tasks, whether the effort is physical or mental. You can therefore help keep these regions thick and healthy through vigorous exercise and bouts of strenuous mental effort. My father-in-law, for example, swims every day and plays tournament bridge.

Researchers concluded that having a human guide — often referred to as having social scaffolding — helped these young children learn.

The body matters to learning.

The danger in favoring the development of 21st century skills over content knowledge (or vice versa) in school

Everyday interactions replay the Turing Test over and over. Is there a person behind this machine, and if so, how much? In time, the answer will matter less, and the postulation of human (or even carbon-based life) as the threshold measure of intelligence and as the qualifying gauge of a political ethics may seem like tasteless vestigial racism, replaced by less anthropocentric frames of reference.

It is a matter of how personsand their social and cultural worlds are inseparable, thoroughly

The classroom is physically organized to facilitate the distributionof activities and the use of multiple resources, especially books, aspart of the activities

These mundane exchanges takea variety of forms, such as labor services, access to information, in-cluding help in finding jobs or housing and knowledge about dealingwith government agencies, and various forms of material assistancebesides money such as sheltering visitors.

thinking as distributed dynamically in inter-personal relationships among people, their artifacts, and their envi-ronments

knowledge-building discourse more knowledgeable others do not stand outside the learning process (as teachers often do), but rather participate actively.

Negotiating the terrain around ideas is marked by complex interactions with others, using purposeful and constructive ways (a) to engage busy people, (b) to distribute work among members, (c) to sustain increasingly advanced inquiry, (d) to monitor advances of distant groups working in related areas, and (e) to ensure the local group is indeed working at the forefront of their collective understanding. There is also a great deal of opportunistic work, often in small groups (as opposed to legislated schoolwork of the conventional kind in which students are working individually but all doing the same thing or are subdivided in some arbitrary fashion).

focus is on problems rather than on categories of knowledge or on topics.

knowledge-building discourse into three categories: (a) focus on problems and depth of understanding; (b) decentralized, open knowledge environments for collective understanding; and (c) productive interaction within broadly conceived knowledge-building communities.

plenty of discourse in schools, but it bears little resemblance to the kind that goes on in knowledge-building communities.

knowledge-building communities, we mean schools in which people are engaged in producing knowledge objects that, though much more modest than Newton's theory, also lend themselves to being discussed, tested, and so forth without particular reference to the mental states of those involved and in which the students see their main job as producing and improving such objects

scientific practice is more like politics - an effort to marshal support for one's position.

We strongly prefer our own term, knowledge-building community. It suggests continuity with the other knowledge-building communities that exist beyond the schools, and the term building implies that the classroom community works to produce knowledge - a collective product and not merely a summary report of what is in individual minds or a collection of outputs from group work.

focusing on the individual student's abilities and dispositions, educators have failed to grasp the social structures and dynamics that are required for progressive knowledge building of the kind Whitehead referred to. In effect, they have remained fixed on a pre-19th century model of science, dependent on "the occasional genius, or the occasional lucky thought."

Conventional wisdom has it that practice makes perfect and that expertise is the natural outcome of years of practice. But few people become good writers, no matter how much they write.

But as a society, we are not concerned with novices. Eventually they will quit being novices, without our having to do anything about it. The important question is what they will become. Will they become experts in their lines of work or will they swell the ranks of incompetent or mediocre functionaries?

Sobel, D. M. & Kirkham, N.Z. (2012). The influence of social information on children’s statistical and causal inferences. In F.Xu (Ed.). Rational constructivism in cognitive development.

Kirkham, N. Z. (2009). Altogether now: Learning through multiple sources. In S. P. Johnson (Ed.), Neoconstructivism: The new science of cognitive development. New York: Oxford University Press