ABSTRACT
Humans have an impressive talent for learning. We are able to cumulate experiences and insights in ways that have no counterpart among other species. Through our ability to communicate by means of a symbolic language, we are also able to share knowledge and information with each other in ways that must be considered as unique. For instance, we can learn about nature and significant historical events through stories that other people tell us, and, even more remarkably, we can read about such events in books, newspapers and magazines. We
do not have to be present at the site of an event to know a lot about it; we learn through virtual experiences. An important ingredient of this talent for learning and sharing of knowledge is
technology. Scientists may tell us that our DNA is very close to that of our closest relatives among the primates (chimpanzees), but our next of kin in a biological sense do not read and write, they have no printing press or libraries, nor do they make or watch television programs or surf the Internet to find out what is happening in the world. Only humans have such resources and engage in practices that involve collaboration, information sharing and community building between large numbers of individuals, many of whom do not know each other personally. And technology plays a vital role in all such activities. In most theories of learning, and cognition more generally, of the past century,
technology plays little or no role. Even though they are different in most respects, representatives of behaviorist, cognitivist and neuroscience perspectives study learning at the level of the individual as changes in behaviors, as the acquisition of new concepts or cognitive schemata or in terms of changes in synaptic connections and/or neurobiological processes in the brain. Knowledge, skill and human capacities are seen as residing within the individual, and the locus of learning, accord ingly, must be sought there, in behaviors, minds or brains. An alternative perspective, and the one that will be pursued here, is to view humans as tool-makers and tool-users, and as capable of collaborating with – and through – technologies, artefacts designed for specific purposes. And these tools are significant for the manners in which we think, learn and communicate; we design the world we live in, and our ways of learning and thinking adapt to these designed environments. Thus, learning and cognitive capacities more generally are not purely intra -
cranial phenomena; rather what we construe as mental processes, when inspected more closely, rely on ‘mergers and coalitions’ (Clark, 2003, p. 3) with technologies, or what in the Vygotskian tradition is referred to as cultural tools (Vygotsky, 1978). For instance, and as an illustration, our capacity to remember is no longer limited by how good we are at memorizing. Paper and pencil and/or a digital device, such as a smartphone, dramatically extend how much information we are able to store and recall, and for how long we will remember. In the latter case, our remembering takes place in collaboration with a technology to which we have outsourced some of the cognitive burdens of storing information. In fact, by collaborating with such tools – External Memory Systems or EMS (Donald, 2010) – most of the limit - ations in capacity, accuracy and permanence that apply to the human memory no longer play any decisive role. Such examples of mergers between minds and technologies could be multiplied by looking at how we make calculations, keep time, navigate and engage in a range of other practices.
