Thus, I hypothesize that distributed cognition is crafted informally and faster and faster as technology has increasing becoming a larger part of people's everyday lives. People, artifacts and technology coming together almost constantly. I can't tell you how many times I've been walking somewhere and a question about the place comes up and i whip out my trusty blackberry, one click to Google and voila I've go 326 links in .98 seconds to potentially answer my question. Or the other option, text a friend. Or another option, poll on twitter or facebook. This is resembling who wants to be a millionaire more and more, yet no really money to be made.
However, the winning is the informal learning or rather informal constant knowledge building.
We've somehow come to create an insatiable need for answers to our questions here and now. Long gone are the days of when i would go home, ask my parents, or pull out the index book of our Collier's Encyclopedia collection and proceed to find the key work that would lead me to the correct volume, page and paragraph in which i would hope to find my answer. If I didn't well, then it was back to the drawing board of solutions.
Today, we can't leave home without our smart phones, tables, netbooks or laptops. Is this truly a good enabler of informal learning and distributed cognition or are we just going to burn ourselves out with?
Hollan, Huchins, and Kirsh of the University of California, discuss this relationship further in: Distributed Cognition: Toward a New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research .
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