Mediation of Group Cognition

Gerry Stahl

College
of Information Science
and Technology

Drexel University, Philadelphia,
PA

[email-masked]

1. Mediation of Group Cognition

The term “community-based learning” can refer to
a variety of forms of learning. One can, for instance, insist on an
individualistic notion of learning and argue that individual learning can be
enhanced by factors that may influence it from a supportive community
environment. At the other theoretical extreme, one can propose a social
conception of learning and claim that most important knowledge building takes
place at the community level, while individual learning is a secondary matter
of internalization, acculturation or increased participation in community.
Here, we will stake out a middle ground: that community-based learning should
be analyzed at the intermediate level of small groups of individuals within the
community.[1]
We point out that small groups typically mediate the relationship of
communities to their members and we propose a consideration of small group
cognition as an alternative methodological focus to either cognition in the
head of individuals or the cultural knowledge of a whole community. This
approach has practical implications for CSCL and CSCW: collaboration is taken
to be a potential emergent phenomenon of small group interaction, and the
computer support of collaboration is analyzed as an enabling technology whose
design and use forms and transforms the nature of the interactions.

Let us consider this article’s title a word at a time.
Mediation is the most complex and
unfamiliar term. In popular and legal usage, it might refer to the intervention
of a third party to resolve a dispute between two people. In philosophy, it is
related to media, middle and intermediate. So in CSCL or CSCW, we can say that a software
environment provides a medium for
collaboration or that it plays an intermediate
role in the midst of the
collaborators. The contact between the collaborators is not direct or im-mediate, but is mediated by the software. Recognizing that when human interaction
takes place through a technological medium the technical characteristics
influence—or mediate—the
nature of the interaction, we can inquire into the effects of various media on
collaboration. For a given task, for instance, should people use a text-based,
asynchronous medium? How does this choice both facilitate and constrain their
interaction? If the software intervenes between collaborating people, how
should it represent them to each other so as to promote social bonding and
understanding of each other’s work?

The preposition in the phrase is ambiguous. Is of to be taken in a passive or
possessive sense? Does the mediation of
group cognition refer to how the group cognition is mediated by the technology?
Or, conversely, does it refer to how collaboration and shared meaning are
mediated by the group cognition’s act of mediating? This ambiguity is not
accidental: in processes of mediation, that which is mediated, that which
mediates and the mediation itself tend to merge into a process of
co-determination in which each is defined and refined by the others.

By itself, the term group
is quite straight-forward. In this context, we can take it to refer to a small
set of people, usually numbering about three to six. But combined with the term
cognition, it strikes many people as
counter-intuitive. This is because cognition is often assumed to be associated
with psychological processes in individual minds.

The usual story about cognition, at least in the Western
culture of the past three hundred years, goes something like this: an
individual experiences reality through his (sic,
the paradigmatic rational thinker in this tradition is often assumed to be
male) senses. He thinks about this experience in his mind; cognition, stemming from the Latin cogito for “I think,” refers
to mental activities that take place in the individual thinker’s head. He
may articulate a mental thought by putting it into language, stating it as a
linguistic proposition whose truth value is a function of the
proposition’s correspondence with a state of affairs in the world.
Language is a medium for transferring meanings from one mind to another by
representing reality. The recipient of a stated proposition understands its
meaning based on his own sense experience as well as his rather unproblematic
understanding of the meanings of language.

The story based on the mediation of group cognition is
rather different: in this view, language is an infinitely generative system of
symbolic artifacts (words, phrases, genres, etc.) that embody the cultural
experiences of a community. It is a social product of the interaction of
groups—not primarily of individuals—discussing and acting in the
world in culturally mediated ways. Individuals who are socialized into the
community learn to speak and understand language as part of their learning in
order to participate in that community. In the process, they internalize the
use of language: e.g., as silent self-talk, internal dialog, rehearsed talk,
narratives of rational accountability, senses of morality, conflicted dream
lives, habits, personal identities and their tacit background knowledge largely
preserved in language understanding. In this story, cognition takes place
primarily in group processes of inter-personal interaction, including
mother-child, best friends, husband-wife, teacher-student, boss-employee,
extended family, social network, gang, tribe, neighborhood, community of
practice, etc. The products of cognition—thoughts—exist in
discourse, symbolic representations, meaningful gestures, patterns of behavior;
they persist in texts and other inscriptions, in physical artifacts, in
computer databases, in cultural standards and in the memories of individual
minds. Individual cognition emerges as a secondary effect, although it later
seems to acquire a dominant role in our introspective narratives.

Most people have trouble accepting the group-based story at
first and then starting to view collaborative phenomena in these terms. Let us
take a closer look at the philosophical view which is sedimented in the term
“mediation.” It belongs to a tradition that undertook a fundamental
critique of the individualistic perspective that goes back to Descartes and even
Plato, and that underlies common folk theories about cognition.

2. Deconstructing Mediation

We can start to deconstruct the term mediation as used in CSCL and CSCW by looking at its use in Lave
& Wenger’s seminal Situated
Learning [2]:

“Briefly, a theory of social
practice emphasizes the relational interdependency of agent and world,
activity, meaning, cognition, learning and knowing…. Knowledge of the
socially constituted world is socially mediated and open ended.”

This theory of social practice can be traced back to Hegel
and Marx by way of Vygotsky. Vygotsky described what is distinctive to human
cognition, psychological processes that are not simply biological abilities, as
mediated cognition. He analyzed how
both signs (words, gestures) and tools (instruments) act as artifacts that
mediate human thought and behavior—and he left the way open for other
forms of mediation: “A host of other mediated activities might be named;
cognitive activity is not limited to the use of tools or signs” [5]. Vygotsky recommended replacing the exclusive
focus on individual development with a “zone of proximal
development” that assessed group cognition, the ability of small groups
to achieve intellectual results [5].

Vygotsky attributes the concept of indirect or mediated activity
to Hegel and Marx. Where Hegel loved to analyze how two phenomena constitute
each other dialectically—such as the master and slave whose identity
arises through their relationship to each other—Marx always showed how
the relationships arose in concrete socio-economic history, such as the rise of
conflict between the capitalist class and the working class with the
establishment of commodity exchange and wage labor. The minds, identities and
social relations of individuals are mediated and formed by the primary factors
of the contexts in which they are situated.

The term mediation
takes on a variety of interrelated meanings and roles in discussions of social
theory. The point here is to start to think of group collaboration software as
artifacts that mediate the cognition of their individual users and support the
group cognition of their user community.

3. Mediation by Groups

Small groups are the engines of knowledge building. The
knowing that small groups build up in manifold forms is what becomes internalized
by their members as individual learning and externalized in their communities
as certifiable knowledge. At least, that is a central premise of this article.

Although we can see many examples of the decisive role of
small groups, their pivotal function is rarely acknowledged. For instance, the
two prevailing paradigms of learning in CSCL—which may be referred to as
the acquisition metaphor and the participation metaphor [3]—focus
on the individual and the community respectively, not on the intermediate small
group. In the acquisition metaphor, learning consists in the acquisition of
knowledge by an individual; for instance, a student acquires facts from a
teacher’s lesson. In the participation metaphor, learning consists in
knowledgeable participation in a community of practice; for instance, an
apprentice becomes a more skilled practitioner of a trade. But if one looks
closely at the examples typically given to illustrate each paradigm, one sees
that there is usually a small group at work in the specific learning situation.
In a healthy classroom there are likely to be cliques of students learning
together in subtle ways, even if the lesson is not organized as collaborative
learning with formal group work. Their group practices may be structured in ways
that support individual participants to learn as the group builds knowledge.
The peer group may also resist the official educational goals; the small group
defines what is to be valued as learning. In apprenticeship training, a master
is likely to work with a few apprentices, and they work together in various
ways as a small group; it is not as though all the apprentice tailors or
carpenters or architects in a city are being trained together. The community of
practice functions through an effective division into small working groups.

Some theories, like activity theory [1],
insist on viewing learning at both the individual and the community level.
Although their examples again typically feature small groups, the general
theory highlights the individual and the large community, but has no
theoretical representation of the critical small groups in which individuals
carry on their concrete interactions and into which the community is
hierarchically structured.

My own experience in research collaborations and in my
apprenticeships in philosophy and computer science impressed me with the
importance of working groups, reading circles and informal professional
discussion occasions for the genesis of new ideas and insights. The same can be
seen on a world-historical scale. Quantum jumps in human knowledge emerge from
centers of group interaction: the Bauhaus designers at Weimar,
the post-impressionist artists in Paris salons,
the Vienna Circle,
the Frankfurt School—in the past these
communities were necessarily geographic locations where people could come
together in small groups at the same time and place.

The obvious question, once we recognize the catalytic role
of small groups in knowledge building, is: can we design computer-supported
environments to create effective groups across time and space? In order to
achieve this, we need a degree of understanding of small group cognition that
does not currently exist. In order to design effective mediated collaboration,
we need to develop a theory of mediated collaboration based on a design
research agenda of analysis of small group cognition.

Most theories of knowledge building in working and learning
have focused primarily on the two extreme scales: the individual unit of analysis as the acquirer of knowledge and the community unit of analysis as the context within which participation takes place. We now need
to focus on the intermediate scale: the small
group unit of analysis as the discourse
in which knowledge actually
emerges.

Following are some research hypotheses for a theory of small
group cognition:

The
small group is the unit that mediates between individual learning and community learning.

Community
participation takes place
primarily within small group activities.

Individual
learning is acquired
through participation in these small group activities.

Both
individual identities and community practices are formed through small group activities.

Here are some theoretical issues to be investigated in such
a research program focused on the small group unit of analysis:

Can
we make learning visible in group discourse (so we do not have to rely
upon measures of indirect learning outcomes)?

Can
we identify meaning-making and knowledge-building at the group unit?

Can
we say that it is possible for a group, as such, to think, learn, build
knowledge or construct meanings that cannot be attributed to any of the
group members individually?

Can
processes of group cognition provide a basis for individual cognition and
learning?

The size of groups can vary enormously. Our examples tend to
be of small groups of a few people meeting for short periods. Given the
hypothesized importance of this scale, it is surprising how little research on
computer-supported collaboration has focused methodologically on this unit.
Traditional approaches to learning measure effects on individuals. More recent
writings talk about communities of practice. Many studies of collaboration that
do talk of groups look only at dyads, where interactions are easier to describe
and qualitatively different from those in larger small groups.

The emphasis on the group as a unit of analysis belongs at
the foundation of a science of collaboration. It is not just a matter of
claiming that it is time to focus software development on groupware and to
develop appropriate techniques (e.g., for assessment of groupware). It is also
a methodological rejection of individualism as a focus of empirical analysis
and cognitive theory. Software should support cooperative work and
collaborative learning; it should be assessed at the group level and it should
be designed to foster group cognition. For that, we need a fitting theoretical
framework centered on an understanding of the role of small groups and the
mediation of group cognition.

4. References

[1.]
Engeström, Y. 1999. Activity theory
and individual and social transformation. In Y. Engeström, R. Miettinen
& R.-L. Punamäki (Eds.), Perspectives
on activity theory Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 19--38.

[2.] Lave, J., & Wenger, E. 1991. Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral
participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

[3.] Sfard, A. 1998. On two metaphors
for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27(2): 4--13.

[4.] Stahl, G. (in press). Group cognition: Computer support for
collaborative knowledge building. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Retrieved from http://www.cis.drexel.edu/faculty/gerry/mit/.

[5.] Vygotsky, L. 1930/1978. Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.

[1]
This paper is excerpted from (Stahl, in press), where issues of group
cognition are considered at length [4].