Mediation, meaning making and digital tools

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LinCS
The Linnaeus Centre for Research on Learning,
Interaction and Mediated Communication in
Contemporary Society

• Mediation, meaning making and digital tools
• Roger Säljö

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Background

• An interest in the social and interactive shaping
  of minds
• Semiotic mediation and the role of intellectual
  tools and artefacts
• The building up a social memory in complex
  societies

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Learning/collective remembering in a
sociocultural perspective

• How individuals, organisations, and society at
  large, retain information, knowledge and skills,
  transform them, and make them available to new
  generations.
• The issue of how people come to share the
  experiences of their society the funded capital
  of socialization (John Dewey) through various
  forms of communication and social activities

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Starting point

• In these processes the most important mechanism
  has always been, and will always be, the mundane
  face-to-face interaction.

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• How societies build up a collective or social
  memory
• The cumulation of social experience (knowing,
  information, skills)
• How our minds and intellectual/communicative
  practices are shaped by our interaction with the
  social memory

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Time
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• A key process in the development of human knowing
  and sharing of experiences is externalisation
  through the design of cultural tools

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Cultural tools .

• Experiences converted into
• Linguistic/discursive tools (such as concepts,
  categorizing practices, narratives, social
  languages)
• Material artifacts (technologies)

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Cultural tools

• Many, if not most, externalisations are
  simultaneously physical and discursive
  (intellectual). That is, it is impossible to
  maintain a distinction between the two
  dimensions.

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• All cultural tools rely on interpretive practices
  and interpretive communities
• Semiotic mediation

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• External symbolic storages (ESS)
• Artificial memory systems (AMS)

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External symbolic storages (ESS)

• Books
• Libraries
• Maps and charts
• Registers
• Databases
• Instruments (clocks, compasses, etc.)
• .

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• Cultural (or re-presentational) tools
• Inscriptions
• Processes of reification/fixation of meaning

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Externalization or objectification of .

• Information (texts, spoken narratives etc.)

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Externalization or objectification of

• . human thought processes

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Externalization of cognitive functions

• Computer software (spell and grammar checks,
  statistical analysis packages etc.)
• Search engines
• Book-keeping programs
• Graphical and symbol-manipulating calculators
• Navigators
• Facerecognition devices
• Medical and scientific technologies
• .

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Technologies come in as

• Cultural and cognitive amplifiers
• Access points to cultural knowing

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• How much is GBP 1243,73 in Swedish kronor if one
  pound is worth 11.35 kronor?
• Three different conditions
• Mental arithmetic
• Paper and pencil
• Mini-calculator

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Transformations of learning

• We master complex tasks without understanding the
  sequential steps
• Technology functions as a black box (trust)
• We increasingly learn from the complex to the
  elementary
• We understand as part of practices, we do not
  necessarily understand as part of hierachically
  organized knowledge (such as in the disciplines)