title: The Practice of Knowing and Knowing in Practices
author: Bengt Molander
description: Bengt Molander, Professor of Philosophy at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, studied philosophy in Uppsala and Oxford. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Konstanz, the University of Pittsburgh, Harvard University and the University of Cambridge.
zlib_text: Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning
  JOHN SEELY BROWN ALLAN COLLINS PAUL DUGUID 
  The breach between learning and use, which is captured by the folk categories ''know what'' and "know how"
  may well be a product of the structure and practices of our education system. Man! methods of didactic
  education assume a separation between knowing and doing, treating knowledge as an integral, self-sufficient
  substance. theoretically independent of the situations in which it is learned and used. The primary concern of
  schools often seems to be the transfer of this substance, which comprises abstract. decontextualized formal
  concepts. The activity and context in which learning takes place are thus regarded as merely ancillary to
  learning--pedagogically useful, of course, but fundamentally distinct and even neutral with respect to what is
  learned.
  Recent investigations of learning, however, challenge this separating of what is learned from how it is learned
  and used.' The activity in which k