Writing this article was a bit serendipitous really, I worked on the extended mind thesis and its implications in education in my Philosophy of Education MA at (what is now) the UCL Institute of Education ([dissertation here]1). When I moved to Sydney I came across an article by Richard (my co-author on this piece), “[The Internet, Cognitive Enhancement, and the Values of Cognition]2“, and saw he was down the road at Macquarie so dropped him a note. A few drinks and a year latter, and we’ve got a paper, in which we discuss some of the ways in which an ‘extended mind’ perspective on cognition might have implications for how we think about education and assessment. **The paper can be downloaded open access ** The published version is:
Heersmink, R., & Knight, S. (2018). Distributed learning: Educating and assessing extended cognitive systems. Philosophical Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2018.1469122
Abstract: Extended and distributed cognition theories argue that
human cognitive systems sometimes include non-biological objects. On
these views, the physical supervenience base of cognitive systems is
thus not the biological brain or even the embodied organism, but an
organism-plus-artifacts. In this paper, we provide a novel account of
the implications of these views for learning, education, and assessment.
We start by conceptualizing how we learn to assemble extended cognitive
systems by internalizing cultural norms and practices. Having a better
grip on how extended cognitive systems are assembled, we focus on the
question: If our cognition extends, how should we educate and assess
such extended cognitive systems? We suggest various ways to minimize
possible negative effects of extending one’s cognition and to
efficiently find and organize (online) information by adopting a virtue
epistemology approach. Educational and assessment implications are
foregrounded, particularly in the case of Danish students’ use of the
internet during exams. Photo by
Thad Zajdowicz
