framing the frames

I found S&Q's book extremely stimulating; their account of previous cultural/anthropological theory is an excellent foundational chapter - though some of the works they criticize I do not know well enough to fully comment on (I'm thinking of Jim's and Anthony's comments on Geertz here).

What I like about their approach is that they attempt to synthesize theories rather than reject them outright: this, I applaud. They move on from the situated theory that we discussed last week by introducing their schema and connectionism ideas. Very interesting overall, but their own application of the theories, is to my mind, illustrative at best. they admit as much in their final remarks, and what this provocative book offers is a template to build on rather than a ready-to-go theory.

Another aspect that I like about this book is that it has more than an anthropological audience in mind: it offers critiques of theories that we are all familiar with from different disciplines and it warns about the limits of their application.

Eventhough I am still formulating my ideas on the strength of S&Q's theory, I would without doubt recommend this as a pedagogical text. It is broad-ranging, inclusive of major critical movements, and it offers varied approaches to evaluating and applying theory. It is a book that I will certainly keep at hand.

I will be interested to see what everyone has to make of the vailidity of their schema theory tomorrow...

Schemas and Enthymemes

I enjoyed the introduction to Strauss and Quinn because it gave such a clear (though long) description of the situation out of which their book arose. I also enjoyed the section on connectionism, which seemed very familiar to me (especially the discussion of how the brain works) though I don’t know where I have encountered those ideas before. Their ideas do a good job tying together all the different theories of the books we have read so far, accounting not only for the societal influences that impact learning and learning’s public characteristics, but it also accounts for how the individual is able to learn in relation to those societal factors.

In addition, connectionism supplies an additional way to study context as it impacts the individual learner. Perhaps it was the fact that the book was only preventing a single viewpoint that made its impact more clear to me, but I felt Strauss and Quinn gave a better description of how to study context than I found in Understanding Practice. Perhaps this opinion is based on a misreading on my part, but at the very least the different views provide more than one way to look at context besides the container model.

Theoretically, I was fascinated by the idea of schemas. Strauss and Quinn point out that schemas are the knowledge or structures that we keep in mind (or, in a connectionist model, the various weights of neural pathways that connect to each other) that help us to compensate for situations with missing info. They give the example of the beer ad, described not seen, and point out the way in which we tend to fill in—or flesh out—missing details. This seems to me to be an enthymematic process. Like an enthymeme, it leaves out part of the argument that is assumed to be shared or uncontestable. This seems to indicate to me that confusion in communication comes from assuming that schemas are shared, when they are not. I’m not sure that Strauss and Quinn have a method for making sure that schemas are communicated more clearly, but the connection would certainly be helpful for rhetorical studies, since it would give a cognitive basis for good and bad communication.

practically understanding Understanding Practice

Understanding Practice is the first text on this course that I have managed to get my hands on and read. Since I am new to the class, I want to use this posting to formulate my initial ideas about the kind of theories that we will be exploring this semester by explaining my evolving relationship with this collection of essays.

I read the book in a roughly sequential manner, reading some chapters in depth, others with an overview of content and methodology in mind. Lave’s opening chapter on “The Practice of Learning” provoked responses that would frequently recurred as my reading deepened. I found the thesis that “theories of situated everyday practice insist that persons acting and the social world of activity cannot be separated” (4-5) generally stimulating. Yet, it was difficult to parse the different elements of the argument by the end of the chapter; the theories seemed to collapse into one another, and a trajectory of the field’s development remained unclear. Simply put, I felt that the same point was being made again and again. I felt that I either don’t grasp the subtleties of the arguments presented, or that I do not fully understand the applicability of this interdisciplinary movement.

My experience of the other chapters reflected my initial reaction. I found many of them stimulating (Hutchins and Keller & Keller in particular), but I also found them lacking. As descriptions of detailed social practice, they were well researched and presented with a high degree of nuance and sophistication. But the ultimate goal of some pieces remained unclear: are these researchers attempting to use theories to develop more integrated knowledge sharing and production, or are they merely applying theories to highly particularized situations? I was baffled by some conclusions. Engestrom’s use of interviews in a medical practice was interesting, and his placement of the situation within the historical context of changing medical practices enlightening. Yet, his conclusions about the corporatization of medicine and the breakdown of communication between practitioner and patient were simply, well, common sense. How the theories elucidated actually could work to either clarify the situation or change it remained opaque.

It was not until I reached Chaiklin’s conclusions that I could contextualize the preceding chapters. As Jim rightly pointed out in his posting, Chaiklin’s piece is an important piece because of it reflectiveness: he situates how these disparate pieces work toward a common theoretical goal; the development of this interdisciplinary movement and its growth out of previous theoretical traditions is clearly mapped; how it does (or does not) contribute to social change is honestly and provocatively presented.

It is one of the best theoretical pieces I have read in a long while and I am already beginning to “situate” these readings differently because of it. The relative infancy of the field (if you can call it such) makes sense of the provisional nature of some of the conclusions. To this novice reader, how important this theorizing may actually be is beginning to sink in: the synthesis of different disciplines that engage with an idea as complex and protean as shifting contexts is, I now realize, a massive undertaking.

Finally, I would like to applaud all the bloggers. All are stimulating in their own fashion; some made me feel comfortable in my own confusion (!) while others made me rethink what I was reading. I apologize for the length and lateness of this posting, but I would just like to say that I look forward to working with you all this semester.

Open Technology and the Writing Center

I enjoyed the connection between Chaiklin and Lave’s book and the previous two we’ve read. The anthropological examples, especially, gave me not only a sense of the theories the authors were trying to examine, but also of the methodologies for research in a field I’m not very familiar with. The chapters that interested me most were Hutchins’s on Navy quartermasters, Mehan and McDermott’s looks at the ways in which learning disabilities are diagnosed, and Minick’s study of the ways children learn to think in representational language.

Because of my interest in the way technology aids thought, Hutchins’s study of the quartermasters intrigued me, especially his comment on the openness of the technology used by the sailors allowed for mistakes, but allowed for them in a framework that corrected them and thus allowed the mistake-maker to learn on the job. I was particularly interested in how his view of open technology can be applied to composition studies. It is odd, I think, that most people who write on the computer, edit on paper. Where I work at the Undergraduate Writing Center, we require the students to bring in a print copy of their papers for us to go over with them. This practice has the benefit, seen by Hutchins, of making the document accessible to us both, but I wonder why computer files could not serve the same purpose and eliminate the paper. Besides, it seems a retrograde activity in light of the fact that all the papers are created on the computer. Perhaps we work on hard copies to eliminate concerns that are beyond the scope of the UWC but vital on the computer, like setting margins and picking font sizes and styles. Or perhaps it is that our current software (Word) does not quite allow us the easy of notation that is available with pen or pencil, but tablet computers could change this fact. Would peer editing on a computer change the way the students write, or think about writing?

I was drawn as well to the role that language plays in the final three chapters I mentioned. I found McDermott’s description of the disability acquiring a child to be extremely plausible, and it connected nicely to the surrounding chapters, all of which focused on the role social settings play in creating learning disabilities. Whether existing just as a convenient label or as a way of responding to a person that hinders their intellectual growth, all of the views of learning disability are created by the community, not just in the heads of the children in question. The lessons learned by Minick in studying how school children learn their tasks through abstract and representational language could apply to these studies, helping teachers to respond to students in a way that would not be detrimental to their development.

Fleck and 'Situated Learning'

I read Lave and Wenger almost immediately after I read Fleck, and the juxtaposition of the two was interesting. First, as the class pointed out last Thursday, the sense that Fleck was far ahead of his time is only reinforced by ‘Situated Learning’. The ideas about cognition and what “learning” is in the two books are remarkably identical for works separated so far apart in time.

The chief difference between the two, I think, is that Lave and Wenger place more of their theoretical focus on the individual as a part of a community and the way in which learning takes place as part of the individual psyche. For them, knowledge is created in Fleck’s thought communities (someone could probably help me out here; I’m almost certain L&W did not use Fleck’s terminology, but I do not remember what term they did use for this concept). Learning, however, occurs in the individual; it is legitimate peripheral participation that explains how learning occurs.

The focus on the individual is an important addition to the concepts of Fleck. Not only does it begin to explain one possible process by which learning and progress can occur (Fleck merely indicates how a particular advancement occurs; the closest thing to an idea of reproducing that kind of success is his suggestion that the early mistakes of scientists are not purely accidental, but the process of directed thought aimed at a particular problem), it also, as Lave and Wenger indicate, can serve as a checkup for learning situations, whereby the achievement/accomplishment of individual participants can be monitored. I do not see how a similar focus on individual progress can be possible in Fleck’s theory, mainly because he places almost all of his emphasis on the social/historical aspects of knowledge making. By closing this gap in the theory, Lave and Wenger make a major step forward in allowing the ideas of social cognition to be put to practical uses.

I’ve always thought of myself as kind of a theory-head, that I am interested in ideas and their relationships to each other more than their execution, but in reading these books, I’ve noticed that the more abstract the theory, the more I am both excited by it and interested in practical applications. In regard to the latter, Lave and Wenger are a little maddening. Though they provide the examples of five apprentice-like situations and give a fairly complete explanation of what they think constitutes legitimate peripheral participation in each, they leave a lot of ground uncovered. I will be interested to read everyone else’s comments to see how L&W’s ideas are worked out in relation to the many different fields represented in our class.

Response to 'Genesis': Online Thought Collectives

While reading his book, I can't help feeling like the thought collective “apprentice” Fleck describes in section three of the fourth chapter. Thought collectives and linkages, passive and active connections: all of these terms are new to me (though I find myself accepting the underlying concepts). No doubt Fleck would say that this is because I already am a member of a thought collective that is open to thinking in this style (20th century rhetorical studies). Nevertheless, I still feel a little overwhelmed by the information, especially his terminology, which I found that he spent little time explaining. (I’m not talking about the medical jargon here; I assume he was writing to other physicians and researchers and felt that those terms did not need explaining, and what I missed there did not seem vital.)

I think the history of the book is also interesting in relation to the ideas it contains. Could it be said that the book was not generally accepted or noted in its time for reasons having to do with the accepted notions of scientific theories that were prevalent at the time of its publication? The editors mention the book being much discussed at the time of its release, but in the foreword, Thomas S. Kuhn seems to indicate that the book was either forgotten or ignored, at least in the U.S. Obviously, it had some impact, but I would think the argument could be made that Fleck was ahead of his time.

My personal concerns with technology seem to dovetail with Fleck’s ideas about thought collectives. While reading, I became particularly interested in how his ideas apply to online, self-consciously anonymous thought collectives. Two well-known examples are the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) and Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). Both of these databases were assembled through volunteer information (though in each case this information is controlled by editors and subject to strict rules as to what will and will not be included). More recently www.scipionus.com assembles information about the damage done by Hurricane Katrina (see the story in Wired News http://www.wired.com/news/hurricane/0,2904,68743,00.html?tw=rss.TEK). In each of these three instances, the thought collective decides which information is relevant and which is not to the style of the collective. In the case of scipionus, the information is limited to current damage and flood levels, explicitly excluding mere descriptions and pre-flood place markers.

In the Wired article, the creator of scipionus mentions that his site might be a model for how federal and state governments might respond to similar disasters in the future. An interesting research project might be preparing a set of guidelines or rules for posts to a disaster management site like scipionus that is similar to the monitored posts at Wikipedia and the iMDb. The theories of Fleck might be useful for generating such a set of guidelines, though I’m sure some of the books we will read later in the semester will provide a more structured framework for such a study.

(Sorry the links are so clumsy; I'm new at this.)