Distributing cognition over humans and machines

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DILLENBOURG P. (1996) Distributing cognition over brains and machines. In S. Vosniadou, E. De Corte, B.
Glaser & H. Mandl (Eds), International Perspectives on the Psychological Foundations of Technology-Based
Learning Environments. (Pp. 165-184). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Distributing cognition over humans and machines
Pierre Dillenbourg
TECFA, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Science,
University of Geneva
. This chapter considers computer-based learning environments from a socio-
cultural perspective. It relates several concepts from this approach with design
principles and techniques specific to learning environments. We propose a metaphor
intended to help designers of learning environments to make sense of system features
within the socio-cultural perspective. This metaphor considers

the software and the
learner as a single cognitive system, variably distributed over a human and a machine.
. Computer based learning, collaborative learning, distributed cognition,
artificial intelligence, socio-cultural approach.
1. The Socio-Cultural Approach
The socio-cultural approach to human cognition has recently gained influence in the
field of educational technology. This emergence can be explained by the renewed
interest in America for Vygotsky's theories since the translation of his book (Vygotsky,
1978) and by the attacks against the individualistic view of cognition that dominated
cognitive science (Lave, 1988). Moreover, the actual use of computers in classrooms
leads scientists to pay more attention to social factors: teachers often have to put two
or more students in front of each computer because schools generally have more
students than computers! This situation was originally viewed as a restriction to the
potential of computer-assisted instruction, since it was contradictory to the principle of
individualization. Today, it is perceived as a promising way of using computers
(Blaye, Light, Joiner and Sheldon, 1991).
The socio-cultural approach postulates that, when an individual participates in a social
system, the culture of this social system and the tools used for communication,
especially the language, shape the individual's cognition, and constitute a source of
learning and development. The social influence on individual cognition can be
analyzed at various levels: participation in a dyadic interaction (hereafter inter-
psychological plane), participation in a 'community of practice' (e.g. colleagues) (Lave,

Address for correspondance: TECFA, PFSE, Université de Genève, Route de Drize,
9, 1227 Carouge. Switzerland. E-mail: pdillen@divsun.unige.ch
1991), and participation in increasingly larger social circles until the whole society and
its inherited culture is included (Wertsch, 1991). In the dyadic interaction, one also
discriminates between studies of collaboration between peers (i.e. subjects with even
skills) and studies of apprenticeship (where one partner is much more skilled than the
other). Within the socio-cultural perspective, one can examine interactive learning
environments from different angles:
(1) The user-user interaction as a social process, mediated by the system.
When two human users (two learners or a learner and a coach) interact through the
network or in front of the same terminal, the system influences their interaction. How
should we design systems that facilitate human interaction and improve learning?
Which system features could, for instance, help the co-learners to solve their
conflicts? This viewpoint has been adopted in 'computer-supported collaborative
learning'. It is receiving a great deal of attention because of the increasing market
demand for 'groupware' (Norman, 1991).
(2) The user-designer relation as a social process, mediated by the system.
When a user interacts with a system (e.g. a spreadsheet), his reasoning is influenced
by the tools available in this system. These tools embody the designer's culture. How
should we design tools in such a way that users progressively 'think in terms of these
tools' (Salomon, 1988) and thereby internalize the designers' culture? This viewpoint
relates to the concept of
semiotic mediation
proposed by Wertsch (1991) to extend
Vygotsky's framework beyond the inter-psychological plane.
(3) The user-system interaction as a social process.
When the learner interacts with a computerized agent performing (from the designer's
viewpoint) a social role (a tutor, a coach, a co-learner,...), does this interaction have a
potential for internalization similar to human-human conversations (Forrester, 1991;
Salomon, 1990)? If the answer is yes, how should we design these agents to support
learning ?
This chapter concentrates on the third viewpoint: the design of computerized agents
which are engaged with the learner in a 'pseudo-social' relationship. One could object
that the discrimination between the second and third view, i.e. the extent to which a
program is considered as a tool (second view) or as an agent (third view) is purely
metaphorical. Of course, it is. The 'tool' and 'agent' labels are images. Agents are
supposed to take initiatives while tools are only reactive, but initiatives can be
interpreted as sophisticated responses to previous learner behaviours. Actually, it is the
user who determines whether he feels involved or not in a social relation with the
"... the personification of a machine is reinforced by the way in which its
inner workings are a mystery, and its behaviour at times surprises us"
1987, p. 16). This issue is even more complex since many Intelligent Learning
Environments (ILEs) include both tools and agents. For instance, People Power
(Dillenbourg, 1992a) includes both a microworld and a computerized co-learner.
However, the first experiments with this ILE seems to indicate that learners are able to
discriminate when the machine plays one role or the other.
The main impact of the socio-cultural approach on ILEs is the concept of an
'apprenticeship' system. The AI literature refers to two kinds of apprenticeship
systems: expert systems which apply machine learning techniques to integrate the
user's solutions (Mitchell, Mabadevan and Stienberg, 1990) and learning environments
in which it is the human user who is supposed to learn (Newman, 1989). We refer here
to the latter. For Collins, Brown and Newman (1989), apprenticeship is the most
widespread educational method outside school: in schools, skills are abstracted from
their uses in the world, while in apprenticeship, skills are practised for the joint
accomplishment of tasks, in their 'natural' context. They use the concept of 'cognitive
apprenticeship' to emphasize two differences from traditional apprenticeship: (1) the
goal of cognitive apprenticeship is to transmit cognitive and metacognitive skills
(while apprenticeship has traditionally been more concerned with concrete objects and
behaviors); (2) the goal of cognitive apprenticeship is that the learners progressively
'decontextualize' knowledge and hence become able to transfer it to other contexts.
2. The metaphor: Socially Distributed Cognition
This chapter is concerned with the relation between the socio-cultural approach and
learning environments. We review several concepts belonging to the socio-cultural
vocabulary and translate them in terms of the features found in learning environments.
These concepts are considered one by one for the sake of exposition but they actually
form a whole. To help the reader to unify the various connections we establish, we
propose the following metaphor (hereafter referred to as the SDC metaphor):
View a human-computer pair (or any other pair) involved in shared
problem solving as a single cognitive system
Since the boom in object-oriented languages, many designers think of the ILE as a
multi-agent system. Similarly, some researchers think of a human subject as a society
of agents (Minsky, 1987). The proposed metaphor unifies these two views and goes
one step further. It suggests that two separate societies (the human and the machine),
when they interact towards the joint accomplishment of some task, constitute a society
of agents.
Two notions are implicit in this metaphor. First, a cognitive system is defined with
respect to a particular task: it is an abstract entity that encloses the cognitive processes
to be activated for solving this particular task. The same task may be solved by several
cognitive systems, but the composition of a cognitive system is independent of the
number of people who solve the task. The second implicit notion is that agents (or
processes) can be considered independently from their implementation (i.e. their
location in a human or a machine): a process that is performed by a subject at the
beginning of a session can be performed later on by his partner. Studies of
collaborative problem solving have shown that peers spontaneously distribute roles
and that this role distribution changes frequently (Miyake, 1986; 0'Malley, 1987; Blaye
et al., 1991). We use the term 'device' to refer indifferently to the person or the system
that performs some process.
The following sections attempt to clarify how this model relates to the socio-cultural
framework at one end, and at the other end, what it means in terms of implementation.
3. Learning environments
In the remainder of this chapter, we will refer frequently to three systems we have
designed: PEOPLE POWER (Dillenbourg, 1992a; Dillenbourg and Self, 1992),
MEMOLAB (Mendelsohn, this volume) and ETOILE (Dillenbourg, Hilario,
Mendelsohn, Schneider and Borcic, 1993). We briefly describe these systems now in
order to make later references shorter. Some features of these systems make sense
within the socio-cultural perspective, even though these systems were not designed
specifically to address socio-cultural issues.
3.1. People Power
PEOPLE POWER is a learning environment in which the human learner interacts with
an artificial learning companion, hereafter referred to as the 'co-learner'. Its
pedagogical goal is that the human learner discovers the mechanisms by which an
electoral system is more or less proportional. The system includes four components
(see figure 1): (1) a microworld in which the learner can design an electoral
experiment (i.e. choose parties, candidates, laws, etc.), run the elections and analyze
the results; (2) an interface by which the human learner (and conceptually the co-
learner) plays with the microworld; (3) the co-learner, named Jerry Mander, and (4) an
interface that allows the human and the computerized learners to communicate with
each other.
Micro-World Interface
The goal of MEMOLAB is for psychology students to acquire the basic skills in the
methodology of experimentation. The learner builds an experiment on human memory.
A typical experiment involves two groups of subjects each encoding a list of words.
The two lists are different and these differences have an impact on the recall
performance. An experiment is described by assembling events on a workbench. Then,
the system simulates the experiment (by applying case-based reasoning techniques on
data found in the literature). The learner can visualize the simulation results and
perform an analysis of variance.
This artificial lab constitutes an instance of a microworld. Most learners need some
external guidance to benefit from such a microworld. We added computational agents
(coach, tutors and experts) to provide this guidance. But we also explored another way
of helping the learner: by structuring the world. MEMOLAB is actually a sequence of
microworlds. The relationship between the objects and operators of two successive
microworlds parallels the relationship between developmental stages in the neo-
piagetian theory of Case (Mendelsohn, this volume). At the computational level, the
relationship between successive worlds is encompassed in the interface: the language
used in a microworld to describe the learner's work is used as the command language
for the next microworld. This relationship, referred to as a 'language shift', will be
explained in section 4.5.
A goal of this research project was to generalize the solutions developed for
MEMOLAB and to come out with a toolbox for creating ILEs. We achieved domain
independence by defining teaching styles as a set of rules which activate and
the interaction between an expert and the learner
. The technical solutions chosen for
obtaining a fine-grained interaction between the expert and the learner will be
described in section 4.2. This toolbox is called ETOILE (Experimental Toolbox for
Interactive Learning Environments).
4. From concepts to systems
In this section, we review several key concepts from the socio-cultural approach and
attempt to translate them in terms of ILE design. We therefore use the proposed
metaphor: view two interactive problem solvers as a single society of agents.
4.1. Zone of proximal development, scaffolding and fading
We start our review of socio-cultural concepts with Vygotsky's (1978) concept of '
of proximal development
' (ZPD). The ZPD is the difference between the child's
capacity to solve a problem alone and his ability to solve it under adult guidance or in
collaboration with a more capable peer. Although it was originally proposed for the
assessment of intelligence, it nowadays inspires a great deal of instructional
organisation (Wertsch, 1991).
is the process of providing the learner with
the help and guidance necessary to solve problems that are just beyond what he could
manage independently (i.e. within his ZPD). The level of support should progressively
decrease (fading) until the learner is able to solve the problem alone.
The process of scaffolding has been studied by Rogoff (1990, 1991) through various
experiments in which children solved a spatial planning task with adults. She measured
the performance of children in a post-test performed without adult help. She
established a relationship between the type of adult-child interactions and the post-test
results. Children scored better in the post-test in the cases where the problem solving
strategy was made explicit by the adult. These results are slightly biased by the fact
that the proposed task (planning) is typically a task in which metaknowledge plays the
central role. Nevertheless, on the same task, Rogoff observed that children who
worked with an adult performed better than those who worked with a more skilled
peer. Similarly, she found that efficient adults involved the child in an explicit decision
process, while skilled peers tended to dominate decision making.
In terms of the SDC metaphor, scaffolding can be translated as activating agents that
the learner does not or cannot activate. Fading is interpreted as a quantitative variation
of the distribution of resources: the number of agents activated by the machine
decreases and the number of agents activated by the learner increases. In ETOILE for
instance, a teaching style determines the quantitative distribution of steps among the
expert and the learner (and its evolution over time). However, Rogoff's experiments
show it is not relevant to count the number of agents activated by each partner, unless
we take into consideration the hierarchical links between agents. Some agents are more
important than others because they play a strategic role: when solving equations, the
agent 'isolate X' will trigger several subordinated agents such as 'divide Y by X'. This
implies that the agents society must be structured in several control layers. The issue of
making control explicit has been a key issue for several years in the field of ILEs
(Clancey, 1987). In other words, fading and scaffolding describe a variation in learner
control, but this variation does not concern a quantitative ratio of agents activated by
each participant. It refers to the qualitative relationship between the agents activated on
each side.
Tuning the machine contribution to the joint accomplishment of a task may affect the
learner 's interest in collaboration. What one can expect from a partner partially
determines one's motivation to collaborate with him. The experiments conducted with
People Power showed interesting phenomena of this kind. Initially, the subjects who
collaborated with the machine did not always accept that the computer was ignorant.
Two subjects even interrupted their session to tell us that the program was buggy. They
were surprised to see a computer suggesting something silly (though we announced
that this would be the case). Later on, subjects appeared to lose their motivation to
collaborate if the co-learner was not improving its suggestions quickly enough. Our
machine-machine experiments showed that the co-learner performance depended on
the amount of interactions among learners. In People Power, the cost of interaction
with the co-learner was very high. The subjects reduced the number of interactions and
hence the co-learner learned slowly. All dialogue patterns elaborated by the co-learner
during these one-hour sessions were much more rudimentary that the patterns built
with another artificial learner (where there was no communication bottle-neck). These
patterns depend on the quantity and variety of interactions. They determine the level of
elaboration of Jerry's arguments and hence the correctness of its suggestions. Jerry
continued to provide the learners with suggestions that were not very good, and
decreased the subjects' interest in its suggestions. In terms of the SDC model, these
observations imply that
the agents implemented on the computer should guarantee
some minimal level of competence for the whole distributed system, at any stage of
This 'minimal' level is the level below which the learner loses his
interest in interacting with the machine.
4.2. Participation and appropriation
A core idea in the socio-cultural approach is the notion of participation: "the skills a
student will acquire in an instructional interaction are those required by the student's
role in the joint cognitive process." (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1989, p. 383). The
challenge is to understand why participation in joint problem solving may sometimes
change the understanding of a problem. Rogoff (1991) explains it by a process of
'appropriation'. Appropriation is the socially-oriented version of Piaget's biologically-
originated concept of assimilation (Newman, Griffin and Cole, 1989). Appropriation is
mutual: each partner gives meaning to the other's actions according to his own
conceptual framework. Appropriation constitutes a form of feed-back: if two persons,
A and B, interact, when A performs the first action and B the next one, B's action
indicates to A how his first action is interpreted by B. In other words, B's action is
information on how A's action makes sense within B's conceptualization of the
problem. Fox (1987) reported that humans modify the meaning of their action
retrospectively, according to the actions of others that follow it. This form of feed-back
requires that problem solvers are opportunistic, i.e. able to escape from an established
plan in order to integrate their partner's contribution into their own solution path.
The difference between this kind of feed-back and the behaviourist kind of feed-back
is that the partner may have no didactic intention. In MEMOLAB, the expert's actions
are purely egocentric, the expert wants to solve the task. These actions may constitute
some kind of feed-back for the learner, but the expert does not teach. This different
conception of feed-back gives more importance to collaboration than to diagnosis
(Newman, 1989). We can illustrate the difference between diagnosis-based feedback
and collaboration-oriented feed-back by the difference between a mal-rule and a repair
- A mal-rule is something like 'if the problem state has these features, then do
something wrong' or, more concretely, 'If you want to go from Paris to
Brussels, fly West'. A mal-rule sets a hypothesis concerning the cognitive
cause of an error. This concept has been frequently used in student modelling.
- In MEMOLAB, we used the concept of a repair rule to support certain types of
expert-learner interactions. The format of a repair rule is 'if the problem state is
wrong then correct it this way', or more concretely 'If you fly from Paris to
Brussels and see London, then turn to the East'. As any ordinary rule, a repair
rule generates some expert's action. Note that we use this term independently
from Brown's and Van Lehn's use of it (Brown and Van Lehn, 1980).
The specificity of an interactive expert system is that interaction may lead the expert
outside its normal solution path. A genuine expert rule-base generates an optimal
solution path. If this expert collaborates with a human learner, it may encounter
problem states that do not belong to this optimal path, but which are still correct. The
expert therefore has sub-optimal rules that are considered after the optimal rules have
been evaluated (rules have a priority parameter). Repair rules are concerned with a
third situation, when the interaction leads the expert to an incorrect problem state that
would belong neither to the optimal nor to the sub-optimal solution path.
One must be careful with regard to the benefits expected from interactions which look
collaborative but where partners execute processes independently from each other.
"The presence of a partner may be irrelevant, unless the partners truly share their
thinking processes in problem solving." (Rogoff, 1991, p. 361). The SDC metaphor
provides us with a framework within which we implemented a 'shared thinking
process', i.e. we distributed sub-processes over partners. Sharing processes implies a
high level of
granularity and opportunism
. Granularity refers to the size of agents. The
limit for granularity is defined by a pedagogical criterion: learners must be able to talk
about what an agent does. Opportunism means that each agent integrates in his
reasoning any new element brought by its partner.
How to obtain a high level of granularity and opportunism? Technical solutions are
emerging in 'distributed artificial intelligence' (Durfee, Lesser and Corkill, 1989) for
collaboration between computational agents. Regarding collaboration between a
human and a machine, we learned from our observations made with subjects using
PEOPLE POWER. As we designed it, the object of discussion was the set of
arguments that constituted Jerry's naive knowledge. Actually, we observed that the
main activity of learners was to look at the table showing the data for each party in
each ward. Reasoning about the effect of moving a ward was more than simply
manipulating arguments or rules, it was mentally moving a column of a table and re-
computing the sums to check whether this new ordering led to the gain of a seat. The
interaction with the co-learner would have been more relevant if it had been about
moving columns. The interface should, for instance, provide facilities to move columns
and recompute sums by constituencies. Hence, in MEMOLAB, we have chosen a
solution based on what can be the most easily shared between a person and a machine:
the interface. Let us imagine two production systems that use a common set of facts.
They share the same representation of the problem. Any fact produced by one of them
is added to this common set of facts. Hence, at the next cycle of the inference engine,
this new fact may trigger a rule in either of the two rule-bases. Now, let us replace one
computerized expert by a human learner. The principle may still apply provided we
use an external problem representation instead of the internal one. The common set of
facts is the problem representation as displayed on the interface (see figure 2).
Figure 2: Opportunism in human-machine collaboration in MEMOLAB
All the conditions of the machine's rules refer only to objects displayed on the screen.
The actions performed by the rules modify the problem representation. In short, the
shared representation is visible by both partners and can be modified by both partners.
We do not claim that they share the same 'internal' representation. Sharing an external
representation does not imply at all that both partners build the same internal
representation. The shared concrete representation simply facilitates the discussion of
the differences between the internal representations and hence improves the co-
ordination of actions.
4.3. Internalization
The mechanism underlying the appropriation process is the process of internalization,
a central concept in Vygotsky's framework: "Every function in the child's development
appears twice: first, on the social level, and later on the individual level; first, between
people (inter-psychological) and then inside the child (intra-psychological)"
(Vygotsky, 1978). Internalization refers to the genetic link between the social (or inter-
psychological) and the inner (or intra-psychological) planes. Social speech is used for
interacting with humans, inner speech is used to talk to ourselves, to reflect, to think.
Inner speech has a function of self-regulation.
The SDC model is based on the relationship between social speech and inner speech: if
an individual and a group are both modelled as a society of agents, inner speech and
social speech are two instances of communication among agents. Inner speech is
communication among agents implemented on the same device (intra-device
communication), social speech occurs between agents belonging to different devices
(inter-device communication). These levels of speech are two instances of the class
'communication among agents'. There is however a difference: communication
between agents from different devices is external, it is observable. Patterns of inter-
device communication can hence be induced and applied to intra-device
communication. These ideas can be summarized as follow:
1.An individual is a society of agents that communicate. A pair is also a
society, variably partitioned into devices.

Technically, we use an object-oriented inference engine. Any rule variable is defined
with respect to a class. This variable can only be instantiated by the instances of its
attached class. Objects of class X that are displayed on the screen are actually defined
as instances of a subclass of X, the class Displayed-X.
2.The device border determines two levels of communication: agent-agent
communication and device-device communication. Inter-agent and inter-
device communications are isomorphic.
3. Inter-device communication is observable by each device. Therefore, inter-
device communication patterns generate intra-device communication
The three postulates of the SDC model have been implemented for designing JERRY
MANDER, the computerized co-learner in PEOPLE POWER. Jerry talks with the
human learner (or another artificial learner) about the relation between the features of
an electoral system and the results of elections. During this dialogue, Jerry stores
relations between arguments. A network of arguments constitutes what we called a
'communication pattern'. Let us assume Jerry claims that Ward-5 should be moved
from 'Southshire' to 'Northshire', because this would increase the score of his party in
'Northshire'. His partner may raise the objection that the party would lose votes in
'Southshire'. Jerry will then create a 'refutation' link between the first argument and its
counter-argument. Similarly, dialogue patterns include 'continue-links' between
arguments that have been verbalized consecutively in a successful argumentation. Jerry
Mander reuses these dialogue patterns when it reasons alone. For instance, when it
considers another move, Jerry Mander retrieves the counter-argument connected by a
refutation-link and checks whether this counter-argument is valid in the new context. If
it is, it refutes itself
. Using a refutation-link between arguments (stored as rules)
corresponds to a mechanism of specialization (adding a condition), while the use of
continue-links corresponds to a form of chunking.
To implement the isomorphism between inner speech and social speech (second axiom
of the SDC model), we used the following trick: Jerry Mander uses the same procedure
for talking with his partner and talking with itself. It uses a single procedure 'dialogue'
which accepts two entries, a 'proposer' and a 'refuter'. The procedure call 'dialogue
learner-X learner-Y' gives a real dialogue while the call 'dialogue learner-X learner-X'
corresponds to individual reasoning (monologue). The implementation is actually a bit
more complex. Each link is associated with a description of the context in which the
connected arguments have been verbalized and has a numeric weight. This numeric
weight evolves according to the partner's agreement ('social sensitivity') and to the
electoral results ('environmental sensitivity'). A complete description of the learning
mechanisms and their performance can be found in Dillenbourg and Self (1992).
4.4. Private speech and reification
Between inner speech and social speech, psychologists discriminate an intermediate
level termed 'egocentric speech' by Piaget and 'private speech' by Vygotsky. These
concepts are not completely synonymous (Zivin, 1979). The most familiar examples of
private or egocentric speech are the conversations conducted aloud by children who
play alone. We might also refer to the verbal productions of people using computers on
their own. Egocentric or private speech still has a rather social form (it is verbalized, it
has some syntax, ...), but it has lost its social function (it is produced in the absence of
any other person). For Piaget, it corresponds to some kind of uncontrolled production,
while for Vygotsky, it has a self-regulating function (Zivin, 1979). The interest in this
intermediate level is that psychologists may extrapolate differences between social and
private speech to speculate on the features of inner speech.

It backtracks in the process of proving that its proposition will lead to gaining a seat.
There is an interesting similarity between private speech and the idea of
, a
technique used in ILEs to support reflection. Reflection, i.e. the process of becoming
aware of one's own knowledge and reasoning, is receiving growing attention from ILE
designers (Collins and Brown, 1988). Systems that attempt to promote reflection often
present some trace of the learner's activities and of the environment's responses.
Systems such as ALGEBRALAND (Collins and Brown, 1988) or the GEOMETRY
TUTOR (Anderson, Boyle and Yost, 1985) facilitate the learner's reflection by
displaying the learner's solution path as a tree structure. This representation shows that
solving an equation or proving a theorem are not straightforward processes, but require
numerous attempts and frequent backtracking. Such a representation reifies, makes
concrete, some abstract features of the learner's cognition. It is not neutral, but results
from an interpretation by the machine of the learner's action. Through this
interpretation, the learner can understand how his action makes sense within the system
conception of the domain (see section 4.2 on appropriation).
This graphical representation of behaviour has the ambiguous status of private speech.
In systems such as ALGEBRALAND, TAPS (Derry, 1990) or HERON (Reusser
Kampfer, Sprenger, Staub, Stebler and Stussi, 1990), this graphical representation
serves both as a way of communicating with the system and as a tool for self-
regulation. One can argue whether Vygotsky's theories on (verbal) speech are
compatible with graphical languages used in modern interfaces. For Salomon (1988),
"all tools that we consider as prototypical and as intuitively appealing candidates for
internalization have also a distinctive spatial form".
4.5. Language shift
Wertsch (1985) reports an interesting study which investigates the role of languages in
internalization. This study zooms in the inter-psychological plane, observing mothers
helping their children (2 1/2 and 3 1/2 year old) to construct a puzzle in accordance
with a model (the same puzzle already built). Wertsch contrasted the language used by
mothers to refer to puzzle pieces according to the child's age: mothers of younger
children designate directly the piece by pointing to it or by its colour (e.g. "a green
piece"), while mothers of older children refer to pieces with respect to the problem-
solving strategy (e.g. "one colour that's not the same"). For Wertsch, the cognitive
processes required to participate in a strategy-oriented dialogue are virtually equivalent
to the cognitive processes necessary to apply this strategy without the mother. This
study confirms Rogoff's view that participation changes understanding. It weakens the
dichotomous distinction between the social and internal planes, since changes inside
the social plane may be more important than the social-internal transition.
We suggested that a mechanism of shifting between two language levels, as observed
by Wertsch, could be applied to the design of ILEs (Dillenbourg, 1992b). Let us
decompose the difference between a novice and an expert into several levels of skills.
When learners solve problems at level X, they interact with the system through some
command language CLx. The system, as the mothers in Wertsch's observations, has a
second language available, called the description language (DL). The description
language reifies the implicit problem solving strategy by displaying a trace of the
learner's activities. The system uses this description language in feed-back in order to
associate the two descriptions of the same solution, one expressed in the command
language and the second in the description language. The language shift occurs when
the system moves up in the hierarchy of expertise levels. After a move to the next level
), learners receive a new command language which includes the concepts that
were introduced by the description language at level
. This language shift can be
expressed by the equation CL
= DL
. After the language shift, learners are
compelled to use explicitly the operators or strategies that where previously implicit
(but reified in the description language). We illustrate this principle with two instances:
- Let us imagine a courseware for learning to solve equations. At the first level,
the learner would manually perform algebraic manipulations (CL
). Sequences
of transformations would be redisplayed as higher order operators, such as
'move X to LHS' (DL
). After the language shift, the learner would transform
equations by applying directly these operators (CL
= DL
- This principle has been applied to the definition of the microworlds in
MEMOLAB (Mendelsohn, this volume). MEMOLAB includes three
successive microworlds or levels, with increasingly powerful command
languages (and increasingly complex problems to solve). At level 1, a
psychological experiment is built by assembling chronological sequences of
concrete events. At level 2, the learner does not describe each concrete event
but builds the treatment to be applied to each group of subjects. At level 3, the
learner directly defines the experimental plan, i.e. the logical structure of the
experiment. At levels 1 and 2, when an experiment design has been completed,
the experiment is 'redisplayed' with the formalism used at the next level.
4.6. Social grounding
In PEOPLE POWER, the internalization mechanism has been implemented as the
simple storage of dialogue patterns. It is clear however that internalization is not a
simple recording process, but a transformation process. There exist interesting
similarities between the transformations which occur during internalization and those
which occur during social grounding, although these processes been studied
independently from each other. Social grounding is the mechanism by which two
participants in a discussion try to elaborate the mutual belief that their partner has
understood what they meant to a criterion sufficient for the current purpose (Clark and
Brennan, 1991).
For Vygotsky, inner speech has a functional similarity with social speech but loses its
structural similarity. For Luria (1969), "inner speech necessarily ceases to be detailed
and grammatical" (p. 143). The difference between social and inner speech is due to
the fact that "inner speech is just the ultimate point in the continuum of communicative
conditions judged by the degree of 'intimacy' between the addresser and addressee"
(Kozulin, 1990, p. 178). The main transformation observed as a result of the intimacy
between the addresser and addressee is a process of
(Kozulin, 1990;
Wertsch, 1979, 1991). Interestingly, Krauss and Fussell (1991) found the same
abbreviation phenomena in social grounding. They report several experiments in which
subjects have to establish expressions to refer to 'non sense figures' and to use these
references later on, in various conditions. Subjects first refer to a particular picture by
saying "Looks like a Martini glass with legs on each side". Later on, this reference
becomes "Martini glass with the legs", then "Martini glass shaped thing", then "Martini
glass" and finally "Martini". Krauss and Fussell show that the decrease in expression
length is a function of the feed-back given by the listener. Another interesting
experiment compares expressions built by the subjects for themselves or for peers.
They observe that personal messages were less than half as long as social messages.
Why does abbreviation occur both during internalization and during social grounding?
The explanation may be that internalization and social grounding are two phenomena
during which the addresser acquires information about the addressee's understanding
of his messages.
The work on grounding is very important for designers of ILEs, it is even at the heart
of recent debates in artificial intelligence. The symbol grounding crisis (Harnad, 1990)
launched intensive research to design situated robots (Maes, 1990), i.e. robots which
can physically ground their symbols in the environment, through actors and sensors.
Less attention has been paid to the possibility of social grounding, i.e. grounding the
system symbols in the user's experience. Any communication is ambiguous, it works
because humans constantly detect and repair communication breakdowns, but
computers have far fewer resources than humans for detecting and repairing
communication failures (Suchman, 1987). Previous sections placed great expectations
on the cognitive benefits of using graphical languages, but how do we guarantee that
learners correctly interpret these symbols? Wenger (1987) defined the
of a representation as the degree of consistency between the physical
representation of some phenomena and the expert's mental representation of this
phenomena. Roschelle (1990) attempted to apply this principle to the design of the
Envisioning Machine (EM), a direct-manipulation graphical simulation of the concepts
of velocity and acceleration. He successively designed several representations for the
same set of physical phenomena (particle movements). The first EM design focused on
epistemic fidelity. However, because mapping physical and mental representations is
an inherently ambiguous interpretation process, the users did not read representations
as experts did. Representations do not hold some trivial meaning but, inversely, can be
used to support social grounding. Roschelle (1992) observed that learners use the
computer to test under increasingly tighter constraints the degree to which their
interpretation of physical phenomena were shared. Roschelle refers to this property of
representations as 'symbolic mediation'.
Two implications can be derived. The first has been quoted before: collaboration
should be concerned with what is happening on the screen (not some hidden
knowledge), since the screen is the main reference to establish shared meanings (see
section 4.2). The second implication is that dialogue should be more about
understanding than about agreement. In PEOPLE POWER, our dialogue patterns were
rudimentary, including only agreement or disagreement. This indicates a Piagetian
bias. Doise and Mugny (1984) have extended the notion of conflict between a subject's
beliefs and the world events to include conflict between opposite beliefs held by
different subjects. This socio-cognitive conflict is more likely to be perceived and
solved because of the social pressure to maintain partnership. However, in her thesis,
Blaye (1988) found very little evidence of real conflict in pairs. The concept of
conflict is not operationally defined. Where is the frontier between a divergence of
focus (Miyake, 1986), some disagreement (Blaye, 1988) and an open conflict? There
is no clear answer to that question. Actually, disagreement in itself seems to be less
important than the fact that it generates communication between peer members (Blaye,
1988; Gilly, 1989). Bearison et al. (1986, quoted by Blaye, 1988) reported that non-
verbal disagreement (manifested for instance by moving the object positioned by the
partner) was not predictive of post-test score increase. Blaye (1988) suggests that
"oppositions give rise to verbalizations that regulate the partner's activities and may
possibly contribute to the internalization, by the producer, of an adequate regulation
(p. 398). The notion of conflict results from a bipolarisation of the continuum
which goes from a total absence of understanding to fully shared understanding.
Collaboration among agents should not be simplified to agreement or disagreement. It
should be considered a complex social grounding process. Of course, artificial
intelligence handles dialogue moves such as "continue" or "refute" more easily than it
encodes meanings. Intermediate solutions could be to extend richer sets of dialogue
moves able to generate sub-dialogues aiming to elaborate, disambiguate or repair
communication (Baker, 1992). The person-machine interface must have some 'noise
tolerance', some space where the meaning of concepts can be negotiated.
Some recent experiments with MEMOLAB (Dillenbourg et al., 1993) revealed
mechanisms of human-machine grounding: the learner perceives how the machine
understands him (i.e. he makes a diagnosis of the machine diagnosis) and reacts in
order to correct eventual misdiagnosis. However, in the current implementation of

My translation.
MEMOLAB, rule variables unambiguously refer to screen objects. To support social
grounding, the instantiation of rule variables by displayed objects should not be a
completely internal process, but the result of some interaction with the learner.
5. Synthesis
Let us integrate these various connections between theories and systems within the
SDC model. The learner and the system form a single cognitive system. This system is
a society of agents, characterized by high granularity (agents have narrow skills). All
agents are implemented on the machine and on the learner. Implementing a
computerized agent-X 'on the learner' means designing an interface function by which
the learner may perform the same operation as agent-X. The total number of activated
agents remains constant, in such a way that, from the beginning, the learner and the
computer jointly achieve meaningful and motivating tasks. The machine agents are
activated to complement the agents activated by the learner (scaffolding). An agent
activated by the learner is deactivated by the machine (fading). Some agents
encompass and make explicit the problem solving strategy.
The agents interact about what is on the screen. The behaviour of the computerized
agents is determined by what is on the screen. The interface is the permanent updated
representation of the problem which serves as the basis for activating computerized
agents. Agents use the interface as a reference to establish mutual understanding
(social grounding). The communication among agents is not didactic in itself, it serves
the accomplishment of the task, but it may indirectly fulfil a didactic function
The forms of communication among agents are inspired by the reasoning processes the
learner should acquire: the system-learner interactions are the source of the learner's
future self-regulation mechanisms. To support this internalization, reified graphics
serve both for reflection and communication with machine agents (private speech).
More generally, we argue that metaphors are useful for designers. Designers often
complain about the lack of formal models of learning and teaching (with a few notable
exceptions), which would generate clear design specifications. We do not believe that
the design of a learning environment will ever be a deductive process. Design is a
creative process during which one attempts to make sense of learning activities or
system features within a theoretical framework.
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