Making Internal Processes External for Constructive Collaboration

Information technology has the potential to promote joint creation of new ideas. It has become widely recognized that the workings of human cognitive processes heavily rely on physical externalization of the interaction of those processes with outside environments, including other people in those environments. Such ex-ternalization takes various forms, from conversation, written texts, sketches and memos to simple physical \records" of actions taken in the world. For example , the mere location of a tool recently used can be interpreted, for instance, as a sign of the progress of the work. Externalized records are useful because they serve as sharable and concretely manipulable objects for constructive collaboration. Recently developed information technology can help people keep better records of such externalizations, reeect upon them for making changes and restore them when necessary. Altogether, these records and operations feed into constructive collaboration. In this presentation I give examples of collaborative externalization of cognitive processes and show how they lead to deeper levels of understanding and creation of new ideas. 1 Conceptual resources and sensory resources Human cognitive processes rely on two types of resources: conceptual and sensory. Conceptual resources are the vast knowledge human beings keep inside of their heads, including what is called common sense and everyday skills accumulated through long-term experiences. Sensory resources, on the other hand, provide the information representing what is outside of the body, and its interpretation, which depends on each situation. According to the situated perspective of cognition, human cognitive processes are known to take advantage of these sensory resources. Some typical applications of this view can be seen in the development of constructs like \aaordance" in the studies of cognitive engineering, where the shape of an object \aaords" some action onto the person who approaches it and makes some types of use easier than others. The notion of virtual reality opens promising and intentional applications of these two resources. The idea of Xanadu by Ted Nelson symbolizes the possibilities of maximum utilization of externalized human knowledge, made sharable in the form of the electronic and networked digital library. By the realization of this kind of externalization and sharing, it becomes possible for the rst time for the human beings to \see, compare, and edit" the conceptual knowledge which has been kept only inside of each person's brain, inaccessible to the others. An example of the eeective application of the sensory resources is the use of …