Roy Pea’s article, Practices of distributive intelligence and design for education, argues that tools, environments and activities in education should be designed in such a manner that they are useful in encouraging student learning. He explains that distributed intelligence is gained from the activities that one engages in day-to-day and have a social and material dimension. Intelligence can be inherent in designed artifacts such as measuring tape that indicates diameter instead of length, legos that are designed to only be connected in away which informs their use.
According to Pea, learning can be viewed as much more than “problem solving” and more broadly in terms of each of the desires. This can take the form of activities of play that create and find as much problems they “solve”. Similarly, the design of new technologies can support human activities by serving as experimental platforms in the evolution of intelligence – by opening up new possibilities for distributed intelligence. Pea’s research optimism constructs learners as inventors of distributed-intelligence-as-tool, rather than receivers of intelligence as substance- ready not only to adapt to change but to contribute substantially to it (p. 82.)
Technology should be designed to enhance the exchange of intelligence. By designing better devices or applications we have a greater impact on the sharing and creation of intelligence via our interactions with the technologies we have created. Pea argues that we cannot only emphasize the effects of working with technology because that is similar to emphasizing the effects of working with tools like pencils or measurement scales. If we are comfortable teaching students how to exploit those tools (pencils, measuring tapes etc.), then why the uneasiness with electronic tools?
The NMC and ELI 2010 Horizon Report is illustrative and supports Pea’s article. The issues makes it clear that there are and there will be technologies designed to further our abilities in certain areas, such as accessibility to learning materials through the use of electronic books and other. These technologies can be seen as tools for distributing intelligence (gesture-based computing, visual analysis tools, augmented reality) or to aid in access to distributed intelligence (mobile computing, open content, electronic books). The overall impact of the Horizon Report is to inform and challenge us to strive for and investigate what technologies are available and how we can use them to enhance the learning experience for the individuals we educate.
In his book, Design for the Real World, designer and educator Victor Papanek (1985), exclaims that we are all designers and that designing is integral to all human activity because it is “the conscious effort to impose meaningful order.” That meaningful order however is very much caught up in the tools, materials and the process that we use. As an example, he offers up the case of early Swedish settlers who when they began building in Delaware, “had at their disposal trees and axes. The material was a round tree trunk, the tool an axe, and the process a simple kerf cut into the log. The inevitable result of this combination of tools, materials, and process is a log cabin.” This definition of design therefore further supports Roy Pea’s view of distributive intelligence which emphasizes that educators should attempt to make use of their environment in designing learning and creating activities that promotes the acquisition of intelligence and therefore knowledge.
Both Pea and the Horizon Report have valuable points talking about utilization and integration of technology design in education. This is evident here at Penn State, where we have designed technologies that are enabling us to provide education to the global market. We can discuss any variety of subjects with students from around the world. This also speaks to Pea’s discussion on how the technologies we design have the ability to transform the world in which we live. By interacting on a global level, we have new opportunities for understanding others, exchanging ideas, and enhancing our knowledge to better improve our environments. As human understanding of the world becomes more complex, we’ll need more and more tools to off-load intelligence in order to deal with the complexity.