Abstract
What does it mean to be a resourceful and skilful professional in an environment saturated with intelligent devices and connected to diverse knowledge resources and human networks? This chapter discusses the roles of mobile technology in professional work and learning from an extended hybrid mind perspective. We argue that professional knowledge and skills extend beyond individual humans to their physical, technological and social environment. Learning to be a professional means learning to extend and entwine one’s knowledge and skills with ‘intelligence’ that is embedded and embodied in a distributed technology–human environment. In doing so, we argue that practitioners become ‘professional-plus’. They need capabilities to work with different kinds of knowledge and embrace diverse ways of knowing that are distributed across humans with different expertise and machines. We call this capability ‘epistemic fluency’.
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Notes
- 1.
We use words ‘intelligence’ and ‘intelligent’ in the broadest sense to denote those intellectual faculties that are often attributed uniquely to humans (reasoning, understanding, judgement, etc.), including those that used to be seen as uniquely human, but now are increasingly performed by digital tools (recognition of similarities and differences, comparison, logical inference, symbolic operations, etc.) and joint activity systems of humans and technologies (e.g. reasoning with an interactive decision support tool).
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Trede, F., Markauskaite, L., McEwen, C., Macfarlane, S. (2019). Epistemic Fluency and Mobile Technology: A Professional-Plus Perspective. In: Education for Practice in a Hybrid Space. Understanding Teaching-Learning Practice. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7410-4_12
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