Lisa Gitelman offers a model of media that works on 2 levels. 1) The Tools that enable communication, like a television and 2) the Protocols, which are the social and cultural practices, that grows up around it.  These protocols include the shifting content and the changing audience.

Do you own one of these tools?
•    Record player
•    Radio
•    Still Analog Camera - like a Polaroid
•    VHS

If so, how are you using these tools?  

Are you using them with their original intent (such as a record player is a place to listen to music) or have you looked at today's social and cultural practices and shifted the content with the changing audience.  DJs sampling music with the record player is an example of the tool taking on new protocols.

I don't think that when the Internet began, they foresaw how people use it today.  It's those that used distributed cognition and asked the right questions to encourage new protocols to emerge, like social networking, and new audiences, like Cosplayers, to find their niche in this delivery mechanism.  So as teachers, a key attribute to foster is to look at the tools that you have available and ask new questions on how they can be used to meet your learning objectives.  But this doesn't have to reside solely on the teachers, What do you think would happen if you offered your students a tool and ask them what they would do with it without a pre-determined learning outcome?

As new tools develop, society shifts to include these new tools to tell new stories; and yet the old tools remain and take on new purposes than what they originally were for.  The medium that tells the story may shift and the audiences that participates in that medium also shifts... so it is in our classrooms similar with new tools and how we engage our audience, the students, in these new practices.

But distributed cognition doesn't just use language as a tool.  Using tools allows us to look at bigger problems and expand our knowledge because we now have new capacities to do things that were not available to us before.

Are you wearing a watch?  

You might not realize this because it is second nature to us now, but telling time is a form of distributed cognition.  How many of you are wearing a digital watch versus an analog watch where you have to know how to read the clock hands?

Before we had clocks, people still knew the time of day.  Perhaps it wasn't exact as we have it now, down to the millisecond but through reading the sun and having sundials, they knew if it was mid-day or evening.  The watch, whether it's the clock on our computer or the watch on our wrist or because our favorite television program is on tells us the time and we believe it.  We take it at face value and we don't consider the cognition that is happening in that tool to keep track of that process for us.

Do any of you know Ken Robinson, he often speaks at Ted and he tells this great story about his 20-year old daughter who doesn't understand why anyone would wear a watch, it only does one thing - tells time.  Think about the young people in your life ...do they wear a watch?  More importantly, when they ask what time it is in class, do they ever look up at the clock on the wall?  There are so many ways now to find out the time of day ...it's often embedded into many of the new tools that we have at our fingertips.  This understanding of what time it is becomes second nature because there are so many means of gaining this knowledge.  

As I was thinking through this presentation, I decided to ask my son, what time it was?  On his own, he knew to just read the digital time on my computer, but then I asked him to read the watch on my wrist and he didn't understand why I was showing him that way when he could gain the information another way.  So much for that watch I bought him for Christmas, I don't think he'll ever want to wear it.  But should I be upset that he might not learn how to read an analog clock? Here is a new example of a shift in our culture.  New tools have given way to letting go of old tools - and that thinking is still being done for us by a tool.

There's a healthy, on-going debate that relates to distributed cognition. People who study distributed cognition are not technological determinists nor social determinists. They're interested in what cognition is. In all versions of the theory it is about how people and tools act together to accomplish thinking and doing. The debate for them is in whether the "essence" of cognition is solely in people's heads or whether it is actually *in* the integrated brain-body-world systems of extended processing, including combinations of thinking with our brain, physical gestures, our relationship with others and the objects we use.

When I joined NML, I came because in my role as a practitioner, I had gotten to a point where when I created new ways to engage children in their learning, it worked and they loved it.  I knew using social media as a tool for learning was powerful but I wanted to better understand why it was working.  In taking up the new media literacies, distributed cognition was not one that I actually understood at first.  It was one that I had to grapple with over time.  But having done that, I think that this new media literacy is part of answering the why in my initial questions that put me on this track in my career.

This is a list of guiding ideas for how NML uses the term, distributed cognition:

• Technologies don't change how we think; it's how we use technologies that changes how we think. 
  

McLuhan notes, technologies are often put out before they are thought out and thus they can have unintended consequences.  These consequences can also be good, especially when people see beyond the original intent of a tool and use it for new benefits to humanity.  

• Even when technologies can do many things, it's humans who are at the helm and who need to take responsibility for their actions. 
  

At NML, we worry about the tendency to make causal claims about how technologies change how we think.  It bothers us when we read articles that say technology makes us dumber, makes us more violent, and so forth -- including Obama's recent mistake in his address to students graduating. I think right now there is a far greater tendency to exaggerate the impact of technology than to under-estimate it. Humans for a range of reasons want to deny their own agency and accountability for their actions where technologies are concerned.

• Human nature is dynamic; as we act within new sorts of extended networks of people and tools, human nature, itself changes.
  

Looking at the history of storytelling showed that what it is to be human can be qualitatively different in different eras and tools play a key role in enabling change (always keeping in mind that it is how humans use the tool that matters).

• We need to resist a humanizing of technologies; machines have capacities, not minds.
  

Technologies do have agency though they have capacity only in regards to what a human does with it.  This idea is the one we most debate internally at NML.

• Think holistically and be aware of the entire system. 
  

Work to identify and understand everything that is contributing to the process of thinking.

Participants in the webinar added to the discussion and I encourage you to listen to the archived recording in Elluminate to hear the whole discussion that happened.  Also, feel free to pass this link along to others: https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2010-07-15.1632.M.ABCA45F9F0C0248640F8705DA5109D.vcr&sid=voffice.

We hope the above has sparked your interest.  Please join us in furthering the conversation. The Live Chat Follow-up to this session will be tomorrow, this Tuesday, July 20th, from 4-5PM EST / 1-2PM PST. During this time we'll focus our discussion on the three core concerns NML has identified as the participation gap, the transparency problem and the ethics challenge - specifically in relation to the practice of distributed cognition in education.

So, please join us for this session:
https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/launch/meeting.jnlp?sid=voffice&password=M.0D40B502DA193CDA7C5579F7D8173A