A knowledge-practice perspective on technology-mediated learning

The purpose of the present paper is to examine the relations between Carl Bereiter’s and Marlene Scardamalia’s knowledge-building approach and social practices. It is argued that technology enhances learning through transformed social practices. In order to truly contribute to educational transformation, pedagogical approaches have to be embedded in locally cultivated “knowledge practices” that channel the participants’ intellectual efforts in a way that elicits collective advancement of knowledge. Consequently, knowledge advancement is not just about putting students’ ideas into the centre but depends on corresponding transformation of social practices of working with knowledge. Creation of cultures which advance knowledge presupposes sustained efforts of teacher-practitioners, collaborating with students and researchers, aimed at iteratively transforming prevailing knowledge practices toward more innovative ones.     

Linking teacher beliefs, practices and student inquiry-based learning in a CSCL environment: A tale of two teachers

The links uncovered by research connecting teacher beliefs to classroom practice and student inquiry-based learning are tenuous. This study aims at examining (a) how teacher beliefs influenced practices; and (b) how the influence on practices, in turn, impacted student inquiry learning in a CSCL environment. Through a fine-grained comparative analysis of two cases, this study explores how two teachers with different collections of beliefs enacted the same mathematics lesson on division and fractions in a CSCL environment premised on inquiry principles, and what the connections between different enactments and students’ progressive inquiry process and outcomes were. The findings suggest that the two teachers’ adherence to different beliefs led to different practices, which in turn contributed to different student learning processes and outcomes. We interpret these differences that shaped the students’ opportunities for progressive inquiry in the CSCL environment. We conclude that the teacher holding “innovation-oriented” beliefs tended to enact the lesson in patterns of inquiry-principle-based practices and technology-enhanced orchestration; these patterns interacted with each other to contribute to student inquiry learning and effective use of technology affordances.     

The Cooperative Work of Gaming: Orchestrating a Mobile SMS Game

This paper focuses on orchestration work in the first iteration of a mobile game called Day Of The Figurines, which explores the potential to exploit text messaging as a means of creating an engaging gaming experience. By focusing on orchestration we are especially concerned with the ‘cooperative work that makes the game work’. While the assemblage or family of orchestration practices uncovered by our ethnographic study are specific to the game – including the ways in which behind the scenes staff make sense of messages, craft appropriate responses, and manage and track the production of gameplay narratives as the game unfolds – orchestration work is of general significance to our understanding of new gaming experiences. The focus on orchestration work reveals that behind the scenes staff are co-producers of the game and that the playing of games is, therefore, inseparably intertwined with their orchestration. Furthermore, orchestration work is ‘ordinary’ work that relies upon the taken for granted skills and competences of behind the scenes staff; ‘operators’ and ‘authors’ in this case. While we remain focused on the specifics of this game, explication of the ordinary work of orchestration highlights challenges and opportunities for the continued development of gaming experiences more generally. Indeed, understanding the specificities of orchestration work might be said to be a key ingredient of future development.     

Wiki-supported collaborative learning in primary education: How a dialogic space is created for thinking together

This paper explores how wikis may be used to support primary education students’ collaborative interaction and how such an interaction process can be characterised. The overall aim of this study is to analyse the collaborative processes of students working together in a wiki environment, in order to see how primary students can actively create a shared context for learning in the wiki. Educational literature has already reported that wikis may support collaborative knowledge-construction processes, but in our study we claim that a dialogic perspective is needed to accomplish this. Students must develop an intersubjective orientation towards each others’ perspectives, to co-construct knowledge about a topic. For this purpose, our project utilised a ‘Thinking Together’ approach to help students develop an intersubjective orientation towards one another and to support the creation of a ‘dialogic space’ to co-construct new understanding in a wiki science project. The students’ asynchronous interaction process in a primary classroom—which led to the creation of a science text in the wiki—was analysed and characterised, using a dialogic approach to the study of CSCL practices. Our results illustrate how the Thinking Together approach became embedded within the wiki environment and in the students’ collaborative processes. We argue that a dialogic approach for examining interaction can be used to help design more effective pedagogic approaches related to the use of wikis in education and to equip learners with the competences they need to participate in the global knowledge-construction era.     

Materials with computational experience and style

This paper discusses the design of materials that utilize embedded computational techniques to demonstrate the capacity to learn, adapt and develop responsive behaviors that are shaped over time. The focus is on materials that develop time-based relationships based on a level of ‘experience’ they accumulate from long-term interaction with their users and environment. Materials with ‘computational experience’ are demonstrated with two designs: an interactive rocking chair that utilizes its material properties and computational abilities to manage its own energy production and consumption while providing physical and mental exercises to its user; and an LED-based, reconfigurable display that adjusts its content based on its interaction with its user while monitoring its internal conditions, environmental factors and usage. These examples are used to discuss the design of computational ‘styles’ for materials that would not only allow them to express signature characteristics embedded in their physical properties and computational behavior but also function as features that would evolve in response to interaction patterns and accumulated experiences. Throughout the paper, behavior-driven material practices are presented and their potential to influence the look, feel and functionalities of products and spaces are discussed.     

Unpacking Tasks: The Fusion of New Technology with Instructional Work

This paper discusses how a new technology (designed to help pupils with learning about Shakespeare’s Macbeth) is introduced and integrated into existing classroom practices. It reports on the ways through which teachers and pupils figure out how to use the software as part of their classroom work. Since teaching and learning in classrooms are achieved in and through educational tasks (what teachers instruct pupils to do) the analysis explicates some notable features of a particular task (storyboarding one scene from the play). It is shown that both ‘setting the task’ and ‘following the task’ have to be locally and practically accomplished and that tasks can operate as a sense-making device for pupils’ activities. Furthermore, what the task ‘is’, is not entirely established through the teacher’s initial formulation, but progressively clarified through pupils’ subsequent work, and in turn ratified by the teacher.

Technology and culture and possibly vigilance too

Many have bowed before the recently acquired powers of ‘new technologies’. However, in the shift from tekhnē to tekhnologia, it seems we have lost human values. These values are communicative in nature as technological progress has placed barriers like distance, web pages and ‘miscellaneous extras’ between individuals. Certain values, like the interpersonal pleasures of rendering service, have been lost as their domain of predilection has for many become fully commercially oriented, dominated by the cadence of profitability. Though the popular cultures of the artificial have surged forth to deliver us from the twentieth century, they have enabled some very superfluous dreaming—Man has succumbed to the Godly role of simulating himself and creating other beings. Communication is replaced by machines, services are rendered via many automated devices, procreation has entered the public sphere, robots and entertainment agents educate our youth and mesmerising screen-integrating ‘forms of intelligence’ even think for us. As such, this so-called culture threatens the very values Man constructed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to guide himself into the future. But what if the phenomena mentioned just reflect our new values? The author presents an investigation into this cultural shift, its impact on human practices with regards the mind and the body and evokes some pros and cons of generally accepting the ‘Culture of the Artificial’.     

Infrastructuring and Ordering Devices in Health Care: Medication Plans and Practices on a Hospital Ward

In this paper, we analyse physicians’ and nurses’ practices of prescribing and administering medication through the use of paper-based, and digitalized medication plans. Our point of departure is an ethnographic study of the implications of upgrading an electronic medication module (EMM) that is part of an electronic health record (EHR), carried out at an endocrinology department. The upgrade led to a temporary breakdown of the EMM, and a return to paper-based medication plans. The breakdown made visible and noticeable the taken-for-granted capabilities of medication plans in their paper-based and digital versions, and the distribution of functionalities between medication plans and clinicians. We see the case as an opportunity to analyse infrastructuring in health care, the process by which medical practices and artefacts become parts of social and technological networks with longer reaches and more channels through which coordination among distributed actors is enabled and formed. In this case, infrastructuring means an extended scope and intensity of the coordinative capabilities of medication plans, and an increased vulnerability to, and dependency on events outside the immediate loci of interaction. We particularly note the capacity of the EMM to facilitate different kinds of ordering of information and practices, and propose the conceptualizing of such digitalized artefacts as ‘ordering devices’. Ordering devices order information, stipulate action, and coordinate interaction across and within social worlds, and achieve this through the flexible support of different kinds of ordering.     

Expert system technology transfer strategies: Selected cases from the United States and Mexico

Expert systems are being developed in a multitude of domains worldwide. The usage of expert systems within organizations is growing; however, many expert systems projects still fail due to poor ‘institutionalization’ practices. This paper addresses various strategies for providing the transfer of expert systems technology within organizations. Specifically, this paper will address expert system technology transfer strategies using examples from United States and Mexican organizations.     

Scope control and grammatical dependencies

This paper develops a semantics with control over scope relations using Vermeulen’s stack valued assignments as information states. This makes available a limited form of scope reuse and name switching. The goal is to have a general system that fixes available scoping effects to those that are characteristic of natural language. The resulting system is called Scope Control Theory, since it provides a theory about what scope has to be like in natural language. The theory is shown to replicate a wide range of grammatical dependencies, including options for, and constraints on, ‘donkey’, ‘binding’, ‘movement’, ‘Control’ and ‘scope marking’ dependencies.     

Hegel and the extended mind

We examine the theory of the extended mind, and especially the concept of the “parity principle” (Clark and Chalmers in Analysis 58.1:7–19, 1998), in light of Hegel’s notion of objective spirit. This unusual combination of theories raises the question of how far one can extend the notion of extended mind and whether cognitive processing can supervene on the operations of social practices and institutions. We raise some questions about putting this research to critical use.     

A framework for evaluating business lead users’ virtual reality innovations in Second Life

This paper extends von Hippel’s (Manag. Sci. 32(7):791–805, 1986) concept of lead users to a virtual reality environment. Three lead user groups, site developers, business firms and avatars, have a synergistic role to play in extending virtual reality from a social networking platform to a commercial one. The paper proposes a framework for assessing the extent to which innovative practices have been demonstrated by lead user business firms in a virtual setting. It applies the framework to twenty pioneering firms that operated within Second Life in 2007, from an avatar’s perspective. The study’s findings indicate that business firms made little use of digital agents, and provided few examples of bricolage. However, they exhibited higher levels of innovation in their use of telepresence and interactivity, which contributed to the achievement of flow. As a single-avatar study, the paper has limited generalizability, however studies with a wider scope will enable further development of this framework.     

Decision Making and Management of Dynamic Risk

Managing dynamic environments often requires decision making under uncertainty and risk. Two types of uncertainty are involved: uncertainty about the state and the evolution of the situation, and ‘openness’ of the possible actions to face possible consequences. In an experimental study on risk management in dynamic situations, two contrasted ‘ecological’ scenarios – transposed from effective situations of emergency management – were compared in order to identify the impact of their ‘openness’ in the subjects’ strategies for decision making. The ‘Lost Child’ scenario presented qualitative and irreversible consequences (child’s death) and high uncertainty; it exerted high demands both in risk assessment (risk representation) and action elaboration and choice. A less open situation (‘Hydrocarbon Fire’) required a main choice between two contrasted actions, with quantitative computable consequences. The strategies of ‘experimental subjects’ (university students) and ‘operative subjects’ (professional fire-fighter officers) were compared in order to evaluate the ecological validity of experimental research in this field, from the point of view of the subjects themselves. The two scenarios appeared to be independent, so that quite different models of decision making have to be hypothesised, differing by the importance of assessing risk and defining possible actions on the one hand, and by the process of choice on the other. ‘Experimental’ subjects dramatically differed from ‘operative’ subjects when confronted with the same scenario, particularly for the less technical but more demanding scenario. It is hypothesised that three components might account for the effect of the situations and for the differences between and within groups of subjects: importance of situation assessment, spatial abilities, and global orientation of activity in managing dynamic risk.     

The city is connections: Seoul as an urban network

With the rise of ubiquitous computing in recent years, concepts of spatiality have become a significant topic of discussion in design and development of multimedia systems. This article investigates spatial practices at the intersection of youth, technology, and urban space in Seoul, and examines what the author calls ‘transyouth’: in the South Korean context, these people are between the ages of 18 and 24, situated on the delicate border between digital natives and immigrants in Prensky’s [46] terms. In the first section, the article sets out the technosocial environment of contemporary Seoul. This is followed by a discussion of social networking processes derived from semi-structured interviews conducted in 2007–2008 with Seoul transyouth about their ‘lived experiences of the city.’ Interviewees reported how they interact to play, work, and live with and within the city’s unique environment. The article develops a theme of how technosocial convergence (re)creates urban environments and argues for a need to consider such user-driven spatial recreation in designing cities as (ubiquitous) urban networks in recognition of its changing technosocial contours of connections. This is explored in three spaces of different scales: Cyworld as an online social networking space; cocoon housing—a form of individual residential space which is growing rapidly in many Korean cities—as a private living space; and ubiquitous City as the future macro-space of Seoul.     

Minor houses/minor architecture

Deleuze and Guattari develop a notion of “minor literature” in their short book on Kafka, and the opposition major/minor has been used with varying degrees of success by critics working in a range of disciplines including architectural theory. Teasing out the potentially subversive implications of the major/minor opposition requires reading it in relation to other binarisms developed by Deleuze and Guattari in those same years, e.g., state/nomadic science, striated/smooth space, optic/haptic, as well as Guattari’s useful concept “machinic heterogenesis.” Then, one ends up with a minor architecture concerned with partially subversive practices rather than with structure per se. A building’s minor status is figured through its deployment in and production of a space that is a technological, social and political pattern as well as a line of flight. This paper reads minor architecture by examining the minor house built by Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond and those currently being assembled by the Mad Housers in Atlanta, Georgia.     

Some Kind of Analogtivity: anti-simulation through design

This paper discusses and explores issues surrounding current approaches to the design of technological products and offers two critical design proposals for presentation and debate. Primarily driven by contemporary theoretical writings and thoughts on the subject of ‘technology’ and ‘simulation’, currently being offered by leading thinkers on these subjects and expressed as ‘technological objects’; they are the result of a critical investigation into the emerging design issues surrounding ‘interaction’ and ‘transparency’. By using ‘popular’ language of product design as a vehicle, they exist as ‘cultural offerings’ exploring an alternative future for technological products not necessarily governed by science and economics.     

A Representational Framework for Scenarios of System Use

Scenarios are becoming widely used in three areas of system development: software engineering, human–computer interaction (HCI), and organisational process design. There are many reasons to use scenarios during system design. The one usually advanced in support of the practice is to aid the processes of validating the developers’ understanding of the customers’ or users’ work practices, organisational goals and structures, and system requirements. All three areas identified above deal with these processes, and not surprisingly this has given rise to a profusion of scenario-based practices and representations. Yet there has been little analysis of why scenarios should be useful, let alone whether they are. Only by having such a framework for understanding what scenarios are, and what they are for, can we begin to evaluate different scenario approaches in specific development contexts. This paper is a contribution toward such a framework. We lay out a space of representational possibilities for scenarios and enumerate a set of values or criteria that are important for different uses of scenarios. We then summarise several salient representations drawn from the software engineering, HCI, and organisational process design communities to clarify how these representational choices contribute to or detract from the goals of the respective practices. Finally, we discuss how scenario representations from one area of design may be useful in others, and we discuss the relationship between these representations and other significant early-design and requirements engineering practices.     

Commitment analysis to operationalize software requirements from privacy policies

Online privacy policies describe organizations’ privacy practices for collecting, storing, using, and protecting consumers’ personal information. Users need to understand these policies in order to know how their personal information is being collected, stored, used, and protected. Organizations need to ensure that the commitments they express in their privacy policies reflect their actual business practices, especially in the United States where the Federal Trade Commission regulates fair business practices. Requirements engineers need to understand the privacy policies to know the privacy practices with which the software must comply and to ensure that the commitments expressed in these privacy policies are incorporated into the software requirements. In this paper, we present a methodology for obtaining requirements from privacy policies based on our theory of commitments, privileges, and rights, which was developed through a grounded theory approach. This methodology was developed from a case study in which we derived software requirements from seventeen healthcare privacy policies. We found that legal-based approaches do not provide sufficient coverage of privacy requirements because privacy policies focus primarily on procedural practices rather than legal practices.     

What the <0.70, 1.17, 0.99, 1.07> is a Symbol?

The notion of a ‘symbol’ plays an important role in the disciplines of Philosophy, Psychology, Computer Science, and Cognitive Science. However, there is comparatively little agreement on how this notion is to be understood, either between disciplines, or even within particular disciplines. This paper does not attempt to defend some putatively ‘correct’ version of the concept of a ‘symbol.’ Rather, some terminological conventions are suggested, some constraints are proposed and a taxonomy of the kinds of issue that give rise to disagreement is articulated. The goal here is to provide something like a ‘geography’ of the various notions of ‘symbol’ that have appeared in the various literatures, so as to highlight the key issues and to permit the focusing of attention upon the important dimensions. In particular, the relationship between ‘tokens’ and ‘symbols’ is addressed. The issue of designation is discussed in some detail. The distinction between simple and complex symbols is clarified and an apparently necessary condition for a system to be potentially symbol, or token bearing, is introduced.     

You, robot: on the linguistic construction of artificial others

How can we make sense of the idea of ‘personal’ or ‘social’ relations with robots? Starting from a social and phenomenological approach to human–robot relations, this paper explores how we can better understand and evaluate these relations by attending to the ways our conscious experience of the robot and the human–robot relation is mediated by language. It is argued that our talk about and to robots is not a mere representation of an objective robotic or social-interactive reality, but rather interprets and co-shapes our relation to these artificial quasi-others. Our use of language also changes as a result of our experiences and practices. This happens when people start talking to robots. In addition, this paper responds to the ethical objection that talking to and with robots is both unreal and deceptive. It is concluded that in order to give meaning to human–robot relations, to arrive at a more balanced ethical judgment, and to reflect on our current form of life, we should complement existing objective-scientific methodologies of social robotics and interaction studies with interpretations of the words, conversations, and stories in and about human–robot relations.