ABSTRACT
In earlier times, practically everything was taught by apprenticeship: growing crops, running trades, administering governments. Schools are a recent invention that use many fewer teaching resources. But the computer enables us to go back to a resource-intensive mode of education, in a form we call cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989). As we argued in Collins, Brown, and Newman (1989), cognitive apprenticeship employs the modeling, coaching, and fading paradigm of traditional apprenticeship, but with emphasis on cognitive, rather than physical skills. My basic thesis in this chapter is that technology enables us to realize apprenticeship learning environments that were either not possible or not cost-effective before.
