The document discusses theories of embodied cognition and experience-based learning. It argues that cognition arises from the dynamic interaction between people and their physical environment. Thought and language are shaped by embodied experiences and activities. Meaning and learning are based on people's subjective experiences of their bodies in action. A social semantic server is proposed as a way to model learning from experiences, though it cannot fully represent how embodied creatures experience and think. The document also discusses Peirce's theories of signs and semiotics.

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Learning Layers
Scaling up Technologies for Informal Learning in SME Clusters
Experience – meaning – learning
Social Semantic server and experiences as bases for learning
Bauters M.

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Experience & Embodiment
People’s subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide
part of the fundamental grounding for language and thought.
Cognition is what occurs when the body engages the physical,
cultural world and must be studied in terms of the dynamical
interactions between people and the environment. Human language
and thought emerge from recurring patterns of embodied activity
that constrain ongoing intelligent behavior. We must not assume
cognition to be purely internal, symbolic, computational, and
disembodied, but seek out the gross and detailed ways that
language and thought are inextricably shaped by embodied action
(Gibbs, 2006, p. 9).
Gibbs, R. (2006). Embodiment and cognitive science. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Experience & Embodiment
• What does it mean?
– Peirce (1839-1914) and Dewey (1859-1952) have point
to say to us
– Sift thinking, start from the fact that any thought is
embodied without that there is no thoughts
– That all thoughts however abstract and analytic are
emotional
– Meaning derives from the embodiment and emotions,
namely in broad sense from experiences
– Making sense of experiences is conscious and future
oriented, based by past experiences

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SSS & modelling the previous
presented learning
• So far not possible (Hutchins & Johnson 2009;
Ley 2014)
• Which does not mean we should nothing
• What we try to provide are attempted to be
useful but we need to keep in mind the
system does not represent nor reflect
“creatures’” way of experiencing/thought

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Misunderstandings in Hutchins &
Johnson 2009
• Signs by Peirce:
– Are triadic relations: the sign, its meaning is the
relations between object, sign and interpretant
– Repsentamen, Object, and Interpretant. The dynamic
relations between these three elements is sign-action
or in other words semiosis (CP 5.484)
– Its not between form and meaning, that is dyadic and
structuralistic view
• Icon, index and symbol belong to the
phaneroscopic categories
• Icon, index and symbol never appear alone

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Phaneroscopic categories:
• Firstness: Qualities of feeling, colours quality in itself, a possibility, or
the idea of e.g., hardness in itself:
– Icons, emotional interpretants: the feeling caused by the sign,
Dewey’s qualitative immediacy
• Secondness: Experience of resistance, reaction, actuality, existence
– Indices, Energetic interpretants: a concrete event or action caused
by the sign, Dewey’s experience is intertwined Firstness and
Secondness
• Thirdness: Future, law or concept which guides, mediation,
representation
– Symbols, Logical: Signs rational or conceptual effect, Dewey’s
conscious building on experience

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Phaneroscopic categories:
Thirdness is never there without intertwined,
integrated Firstness and Secondness, these are not
separable
Thus, Icons cannot be grasped unless reflective
processing of experiences

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Arbitrary – symbols - NO
• Since objects determine the sign and Interpretant, it
means no symbol is fully arbitrary, not to mention that
all signs are used in context (e.g. the cultural context
that you often mention)
• There is a – lets say – an area/scope, where
agreements can be made but fully arbitrary signs do
not exists, even mathematical sign are not fully
arbitrary
• Objects are something that exists in the environment,
so we have direct access to them and they determine
what we can interpret as do our bodies enhanced or
not

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Body-brain not as bad as body-
mind
• No need to make a separation, as Peirce placed it
• “I believe it comes decidedly nearer the truth
(though not really true) that language resides in
the tongue. In my opinion it is much more true
that the thoughts of a living writer are in any
printed copy of his book than that they are in his
brain.” (CP 7.364).
• Albert Einstein, pointed out ”my pen is smarter
than I am” (Skagestad, 1999, p. 552)
• Skagestad, P. 1999. Peirce‘s inkstand as an external embodiment of mind.
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 35(3), 551-561.

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SSS – Ach so!
• What already helps, supports learning by
1. reducing input that the users have to make
2. by changing automatic data into more pleasant one for
the users
• Automatization of groupings, could be done by extracting
often used terms from the attention markers (annotations), or
when search exist by what terms people use to search things,
match those to the titles and attention marker texts
• Above relates also to recommendations just add location and
who, what else that who has been recording, annotating,
sharing and sharing with whom or by whom

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SSS – Ach so!
• Location, because the location is GPS it could be
transformed into what is there around, name of
the building, image, map etc., something that
makes better sense than GPS coordinated
• The main point is:
– NOT to ask user for more input to provide something
from the system
– to transform and combine that kind of automatic
information that is senseless (or hard to make sense
off) into clear and familiar looking – pointing to
positive past and coming experiences

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Feedback from interviews
• The ease reporting, documenting, adding metadata, by
e.g. attention marked video clips, which hold location,
user, artefact information was seen as supporting
element to allow more space for reflection
• Reusing attention marked video clips from the field
was seen as good way to built up familiarity, positive
expectations on the coming field training phases on
training
• Video clips were seen as a good medium for sharing
how to do skills and for discussion on/about what has
been experienced