Gee Chapter 7

The main points of this chapter were (1) learning is social, and (2) learning is distributed. I don't really have much to say on the first point, but I thought Gee's discussion of the second point was significant. A few quotes:

"So thinking and reasoning are inherently social. But they are also inherently distributed, and more and more so in our modern technological world. By this I mean that each of us lets other people and various tools and technologies do some of our thinking for us." (page 196)

"In school we test people apart from their thinking tools, which include other people as well as texts and various sorts of tools and technologies. We want to know what they can do all by themselves. But in the modern world - and this is certainly true of many modern high-tech workplaces - it is equally more important to know what people can think and do with others and with various tools and technologies." (page 196-197)

"If we want to know how good students are in science - or how good employees are in a modern knowledge-centered workplace - we should ask all of the following (and not just the first): What is in their heads? How well can they leverage knowledge in other people and in various tools and technologies (including their environment)? How are they positioned within a network that connects them in rich ways to other people and various tools and technologies? Schools tend to care only about what is inside students' heads as their heads and bodies are isolated from others, from tools and technologies, and from rich environments that help make them powerful nodes in networks. Adrian wouldn't play a game in these circumstances, nor would most of the other players whom we have interviewed. Good workplaces in our science- and technology-driven "new capitalism" don't play this game. Schools that do are, in my view, DOA in our current world - and kids who play video games know it." (page 202)

In my work as a Java programmer, I very often need to go to the internet to find examples of how to do something. This doesn't make me a weak programmer. I would argue that my ability to find a solution to a similar problem, to read and understand the sample code, and to modify that code to solve my problem, is a difficult skill, and one which is of value to my employer. My reliance on the internet doesn't make me a weak programmer, it makes me a stronger programmer. The trick is to utilize the same techniques in the classroom; to encourage the use of distributed knowledge.

Some might call that "cheating". But I wonder how much of what we call "cheating" is a result of the social norms which we grew up with. Do we need to reconsider what constitutes "cheating" in today's world? For example, I once had a conversation with the secretary to the dean of the college of computer science at a major university. We were discussing comprehensive exams and how silly they are. She said the only reason the college of computer science used comprehensive exams was to catch all the people who cheated throughout their coursework, "especially the [members of one ethnicity]; they don't do their own work."

Indeed, members of this ethnic group have a tendency to work together on everything. It would seem to me - as an outsider looking in - that they are committed to each others' success. In their mind, they are not "cheating", but in the western mind, they are. One might argue that they are merely leveraging knowledge, and the synergistic result is that each is stronger because of it. Is that "cheating"?

I don't have the answer.