Learning Technology: Learning "With": Cognitive Tools

Cognitive Tools

• Overview:  Technologies of instruction have traditionally been used as conveyors of information, communicators of knowledge, or tutors of students. The field of educational communications is founded on the premise that communicating content to students will result in learning. In educational communications, information or intelligence (in many different forms) is encoded visually or verbally in the symbols systems employed by each technology. During the "instructional" process, learners perceive the messages encoded in the medium and sometime "interact" with the technology.
  
  Historically, educational communications have been developed and marketed to teachers by teams of educators, including instructional designers, subject matters specialists, media producers, and media managers. In the past, instructional designers have been invested with these tools for the purpose of "designing" instruction which, in effect, only constrained the learners. The only people who significantly benefit from the design process and the use of those tools were the designers, not the learners.
  
  It is argued that we should take the tools away from the instructional designers and give them to the learners, as tools for knowledge construction rather than media of conveyance and knowledge acquisition. Computer technologies as cognitive tools represent a significant departure from traditional conceptions of technologies. Cognitive technologies are tools that may be provided by any medium and that help learners transcend the limitations of their minds, such as memory, thinking, or problem solving limitations.
  
  Rather than using the limited capabilities of the computer to present information and judge learner input (neither of which computers do well) while asking learners to memorize information and later recall it (which computers do with far greater speed and accuracy than humans), we should assign cognitive responsibility to the part of the learning system that does it the best. When cognitive tools function as intellectual partners, the performance of the learner is enhanced, leaving some "cognitive residue" in the learners which will likely transfer in situations where they encounter the tool again.
  

More...............................  Technology as Cognitive Tools: Learners as Designers