ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how scaffolding with fading as one of its integral components relates to distributed intelligence more generally. As C. A. Stone highlighted and I. Tabak highlights, scaffolding is not at all a theoretically neutral term. Perhaps scaffolding has become a proxy for any cultural practices associated with advancing performance, knowledge, and skills whether social, material, or reproducible patterns of interactivity are involved. The chapter argues that the social conception of between-people scaffolding and support for learning is not primarily about the uses of technological artifacts but about social practices that have arisen over millennia in parenting and other forms of caring. As computer tools have become increasingly used for supporting learning and educational processes in school and beyond, the concept of scaffolding has been more commonly employed to describe what features of computer tools and the processes employing them are doing for learning.
