PhD Note #1 - Initial thoughts - Designing for Epistemic Cognition

 

This first week of my PhD I've been exploring ideas around the tangible and intangible nature of designs for learning/education. 

I examined two papers:  Explicating Affordances:  A conceptual framework for understanding affordances in Communication Research (2017) by Sandra Evans and I attempt to get a clear definition of epistemic cognition from the Handbook of Epistemic Cognition (2016), edited by Greene, Sandoval and Bråten.  

I've decided to use the approach, initially at least, to iteratively develop an annotated bibliography to:

a) define epistemic cognition

b) explore the design concept of affordances instrumental in designing environments for engaging students with epistemic cognition

The handbook's introduction is readable and begins with the observation that we need to know why knowledge as opposed to what knowledge and I immediately think, well you can't have the why without the what.  This might seem obvious, but as a learning designer, I tend to break things down for a potential student who has never engaged with the concept before.  

An example from politics:

Foundational knowledge (what):  

Separation of powers in Australian democracy.  The state is divided into branches each with independent powers and governing different areas of responsibility, such as, in Australia we have the Parliament, the Executive and the Judiciary.

Justification and Reasoning (why?): 

• Australia has a separation of powers to stop one branch of government from becoming too powerful. It provides checks and balances. 
• It ensures accountability, each branch can hold the others accountable, again, ensuring that power is not concentrated in one branch and lessening the chance of abuse of power.
• It provides efficiencies, each branch has its own specialty: the Parliament makes laws, the Executive enforces the laws passed by the Parliament and the Judiciary reviews decisions enforced by the Executive.

Designing for such knowledge shows the challenge of designing for the what, the tangible, concrete knowledge intertwined with the why, the procedural and often tacit knowledge specific to knowledge work, required to define "truthy" conditions.   These types of knowledge are not separable; we cannot prise the why from the what, they cohabitate in the same landscape, they are situated.  

So, any design framework that attempts to design for epistemic cognition would need to account for the landscape, the environment that the knowledge being 'cognated' about.

I created this conceptual diagram to illustrate my thought process on designing "for"* epistemic cognition. The affordances and constraints provided for in design, when applied to design for learning can be split into two parts. The design affordances and the psychological affordances. The design affordances pertain to artefacts of learning, whilst the psychological affordances pertain to the environment.  The environment necessarily also contains artefacts, but for this piece at least I will conceptualise it as the space in which people engage with knowledge work.

I turn to the Evans paper here, which defines an affordance as "the connection between objects — in coordination with human goals — and outcomes".

Criteria #1: Confirm Proposed Affordance is Neither the Object Nor a Feature of the Object - people have agency, and affordances belong to neither the environment nor the individual but the relationship between individuals and their perceptions of environments.  Individuals might agree on the common features of an object but disagree about its affordances (e.g. a pen is long and thin with a pointy end but can equally be used for writing as it can be for punching holes in a piece of paper).

Criteria #2: Confirm the Proposed Affordance is Not an Outcome: affordances invite behaviours but are not an outcome in and of themselves, "an outcome need not be an action but needs to be connected with the goals of the actor".  Here Evans gives the example of visibility and searchability of social media profile pictures; they are neither properties of the object (e.g. criteria #1) and they are not an outcome, they instead represent a relationship between the object, user and outcome.  Evans also notes that an identified affordance can be related to numerous outcomes/goals, e.g. when looking for a profile image you might also look at the individuals' social network and the activities of those in the social network.

Criteria #3: Confirm the Proposed Affordance has Variability: this is the idea that an affordance can have range e.g. visibility can be high or low depending on conditions. Here Evans notes that an affordance is not binary, as features are, but are "gradations of affordances".  Affordances sit between the object and the goal of using the object, they are relational. Evans here gives an example of social media use in organisations and the different affordances of social media such as "liking" and responding to mentions.  This affected their visibility in the organisation and the perception of availability to colleagues. Affordances also vary between users of a technology, since some technology requires more training than others to engage with.  

I'm going to spend the next week examining how social epistemic cognition, particularly in instruction could potentially be framed with design thinking.  I will, later on, look at how this might align with the Lancara declaration on learning design which defines Learning Design Frameworks, Learning Design Conceptual Maps and Learning Design Practice.

* I say 'for' here because epistemic cognition (and learning) can only be guided, not "designed", participants of learning always have agency and agency should be encouraged.