One of the theoretical constructs that’s been going around for the last couple of years, but remains under the radar of most educators is the idea of distributed representation. I wrote about it last year (and the year before).
Distributed Representation
One of the things I was trying to wrap my melon around was how this all related to Zone of Proximal Development and there doesn’t seem to be any conflict. If we stipulate that an knowledge domain has a set of potential connects then ZPD is represented by the relative proportion of those connects that have been realized. If an individual has realized all potential connections, that would define the condition of “known.” If an individual has realized none of the potential connections, that would represent “unknown.” Someplace in between would represent the zone of proximal development, that is, a place where new knowledge could be linked in. For the purposes of the network representation, that would be “the edge.”
I really like the idea of knowledge as network. It gives us a view of learning that’s more process oriented than objective oriented. While it’s true that most people have some kind of objective in mind while engaged in learning activities (“how do I get a home loan?” or “how do fix the kitchen sink?”), it’s equally true that a huge proportion of learning falls into the “I wonder what *this* does…” category. The theory of distributed representation gives us an operational definition of learning that’s consistent with both notions — that is, learning is the process of adding connections.