I couldn't find much related to practice or what distributed intelligence looks like in the classroom: it seems to manifest in collaborative learning practices like group projects, doing research with multiple sources, peer feedback and an iterative writing process where one learns to both incorporate feedback and give it. It is closely related to all the other theories we talked about this week regarding collaborative learning, like collective intelligence and situated cognition.

As a theory, distributed intelligence is different from collective intelligence in that it emphasizes not just that we are smarter and can do more when we work as a community, but also that knowledge "in the world" is an important part of our learning workflow, and starts before we are in formal school. This is closely related to the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky's idea that there is intelligence "in the world" and "in the head", and that these two types of intelligence are mediated through the use of tools, by which we affect our environment, and symbols and language, by which we can do things like formulate problem solving strategies and plan deliberate movements, from motor movement to higher-order processes. Vygotsky found that childrens' ability to use symbols and external aids strategically to help their problem solving took a large jump at the age of around 7-8.

In the classroom, applying this theory looks like acknowledging that the goal should NOT be that students have all the knowledge they gain "in their head" - this is what we emphasize when we ask that students do well on closed-book tests of their individual knoweldge. Instead, we should allow students to use the aids that they would have in the real world if they were working on these problems, like computers, reference materials, manipulatives, research capabilities, their notes, etc. We want to train students to solve problems collaboratively and effectively in the real world, not for a test. Crucially, this involves teaching them to *use well the tools available to them* - an emphasis on research methods and planning what resources are most needed, rather than cramming or relying only on one's own limited memory capacity.

This is related to the idea that Google is changing our brains and making us more reliant on "knowledge in the world", which is readily available to anyone with internet access. Because the flood of information on the internet is overwhelming, the key skill is to be a "search guru", knowing how to get efficiently to the knowledge you really want and filter out what is irrelevant.

A key note: Many college students, in my experience, report that open-book tests were some of the hardest tests they ever took. Contrary to the idea that open book is "cheating", it instead forces students to move beyond just regurgitating information to synthesizing and analyzing it, applying it to novel problems, and attacking more complex problems than are possible to expect answers to on a short, closed-book exam. I want to get better at writing these sorts of problems - as a beginning teacher, I sometimes default to more fact-heavy tests because they are so much easier to write and interpret.

References:

Vygotsky, L. S. (1980). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard university press.