This short paper will discuss the background to the special issue through a consideration of the basic knowledge representation issues in AI. We will briefly introduce the symbolic and sub-symbolic representations which are traditionally associated with AI, before noting the socially constructed views of knowledge with which they are at odds and the techniques for knowledge elicitation which they use. This forms the context against which this special issues sits, highlighting the broad view of knowledge elicitation and representation and the (...) issues that they raise which we feel are important to debate in the discipline. By gathering this set of papers together, we hope to encourage researchers to see the value in differing approaches and to encourage a more synthetic view of the discipline, where contributions and insights from different perspectives may be of use. (shrink)

A central goal of cognitive science is to develop a general theory of transfer to explain how people use and apply their prior knowledge to solve new problems. Previous work has identified multiple mechanisms of transfer including (but not limited to) analogy, knowledge compilation, and constraint violation. The central hypothesis investigated in the current work is that the particular profile of transfer processes activated for a given situation depends on both (a) the type of knowledge to be transferred and how (...) it is represented, and (b) the processing demands of the transfer task. This hypothesis was investigated in two laboratory training studies. The results from Experiment 1 show that each mechanism predicts specific behavioural patterns of performance across a common set of transfer tasks. The results from Experiment 2 show that people can adaptively shift between transfer mechanisms depending on their prior knowledge and the characteristics of the task environment. A framework for the development of a general theory of transfer based on multiple mechanisms is proposed and implications of the theory are discussed for measuring and understanding knowledge transfer. (shrink)

The interpretive processes required to understand the context and goals of an algorithmic task are illustrated in the use of an intelligent instructional system developed to train soldiers to monitor a computerized missile's system automatic identification of aircraft. The problems students had in understanding the identification task were addressed in INCOFT, a simulation-based intelligent instructional system that depends, in part, on human instructors to convey the task framework. Supported by recent advances in the cognitive science of instruction, the concept ofapprenticeship (...) provides a model for the student-machine as well as the student-instructor interactions observed in the use of INCOFT. The system's instantiation of apprenticeship illustrates an alternative to conventional tutorial-based design of intelligent instructional systems. (shrink)

This paper examines the nature of model-based reasoning in the interplay between theory and experiment in the context of biomedical engineering research laboratories, where problem solving involves using physical models. These "model systems" are sites of experimentation where in vitro models are used to screen, control, and simulate specific aspects of in vivo phenomena. As with all models, simulation devices are idealized representations, but they are also systems themselves, possessing engineering constraints. Drawing on research in contemporary cognitive science that construes (...) cognition as occurring in a complex distributed system comprising people and artifacts, I argue that reasoning with model systems is a constraint satisfaction process involving co-construction, manipulation, and revision of mental and physical models. (shrink)

Designing, building, and experimenting with physical simulation models are central problem‐solving practices in the engineering sciences. Model‐based simulation is an epistemic activity that includes exploration, generation and testing of hypotheses, explanation, and inference. This paper argues that to interpret and understand how these simulation models function in creating knowledge and technologies requires construing problem solving as accomplished by a researcher–artifact system. It draws on and further develops the framework of “distributed cognition” to interpret data collected in ethnographic and cognitive‐historical studies (...) of two biomedical engineering research laboratories, and articulates the notion of distributed model‐based cognition to answer the question posed in the title. (shrink)

The paper frames interdisciplinary research as creating complex, distributed cognitive-cultural systems. It introduces and elaborates on the method of cognitive ethnography as a primary means for investigating interdisciplinary cognitive and learning practices in situ. The analysis draws from findings of nearly 20 years of investigating such practices in research laboratories in pioneering bioengineering sciences. It examines goals and challenges of two quite different kinds of integrative problem-solving practices: biomedical engineering (hybridization) and integrative systems biology (collaborative interdependence). Practical lessons for facilitating (...) research and learning in these specific fields are discussed and a preliminary set of interdisciplinary epistemic virtues are proposed as candidates for cultivation in interdisciplinary practices of these kinds more widely. (shrink)

This article examines the main approaches to public understanding of science in light of recent developments in social and cultural theory. While traditional and critical perspectives on PUS differ in terms of their models of the public, science, and understanding, they nevertheless share a number of commonalities, which are humanism, incorporeality, and discrete sites. These are contrasted, respectively, to versions of the person as hybridic, to treatments of embodiment drawing especially on Whitehead’s notion of prehension, and to a rhizomic view (...) of science and public as interwoven. Throughout, it is stressed that the alternatives posed do not constitute an accusation of deficit on the part of traditional and critical PUS. Some research and political implications of interweaving these three perspectives are presented. (shrink)

In this article, I try to make sense conventional notions of ‘premodernism’, ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ as ways of relating to reality, and apply them to education. I argue for the additional notion of ‘neo-premodernism’ to make sense of recent attempts to engineer social reality. Each of these four approaches coexists and constitutes the four ages: the age of prayer, the age of reason, the age of social engineering and the age of responsibility. I try to trace these ages in modern (...) schooling and critically analyze their consequences and the power relations between teachers and students. (shrink)

This study was designed to find out what scientists and science students actually do when they are reading familiar and unfamiliar graphs. This study provides rich details of the subtle changes in the ontologies of scientists and science students as they engage in the reading tasks assigned to them. In the course of the readers’ interpretation work, initially unspecified marks on paper are turned into objects with particular topologies that are said to correspond to specific features in the world. We (...) theorize this interpretive work as a transition of graphs from things to signs that come to stand for natural objects. Especially among physicists and theoretical ecologists, graphs enter new relations and become natural objects in their own right. (shrink)

Research on interdisciplinary science has for the most part concentrated on the institutional obstacles that discourage or hamper interdisciplinary work, with the expectation that interdisciplinary interaction can be improved through institutional reform strategies such as through reform of peer review systems. However institutional obstacles are not the only ones that confront interdisciplinary work. The design of policy strategies would benefit from more detailed investigation into the particular cognitive constraints, including the methodological and conceptual barriers, which also confront attempts to work (...) across disciplinary boundaries. Lessons from cognitive science and anthropological studies of labs in sociology of science suggest that scientific practices may be very domain specific, where domain specificity is an essential aspect of science that enables researchers to solve complex problems in a cognitively manageable way. The limit or extent of domain specificity in scientific practice, and how it constrains interdisciplinary research, is not yet fully understood, which attests to an important role for philosophers of science in the study of interdisciplinary science. This paper draws upon two cases of interdisciplinary collaboration; those between ecologists and economists, and those between molecular biologists and systems biologists, to illustrate some of the cognitive barriers which have contributed to failures and difficulties of interactions between these fields. Each exemplify some aspect of domain specificity in scientific practice and show how such specificity may constrain interdisciplinary work. (shrink)

The discovery of social phenomena by a discipline whose roots are abidingly psychological has been a singular development in American educational research. Formulations of situatedness are emblematic of this rethinking, and depending on our understanding of it, we have in situatedness the possibility of a distinctive set of analytic commitments. This paper discusses these possibilities and their development in the educational research literature, in the particulars of the Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) publication Situated Cognition. In the end, situatedness is (...) understood as a unifying formulation. And while it opens a huge domain of topics for inquiry, it also proves, as its inclusiveness, of no use whatsoever as a parsing device. Situated cognition, for example, could not be, nor has ever been, otherwise. (shrink)

We still lack an operational theory for a complete analysis of early socialization processes. Bourdieu has stressed their bodily dimension but has done so at the expense of more symbolic aspects. This theoretical option corresponds to a very general goal of the Bourdieusian theory of practice: analysing sociality without suffering an intellectualist bias. However, symbolic activity and socializing language in particular can be approached as a practical phenomenon (i.e. habitual, informal, unconscious, etc.). From this viewpoint, the sociology of embodiment may (...) have much to learn from cultural psychology, which has focused on early language as it is naturally performed – when people speak to children, and when children speak. The work of cultural psychologists on the role of everyday words and narratives in the making of the self can be extended through a sociological ethnography of language. The features and interests of such an ethnography are discussed in the final section of the article, on the basis of fieldwork conducted in a nursery. This final development illustrates and analyses the concrete appropriation of caregiver injunctions by 2- to 3-year-old children. (shrink)

Following previous work that shows engineering students possess different levels of understanding of ethics—implicit and explicit—this study focuses on how students’ implicit understanding of engineering ethics influences their team discussion process, in cases where there is significant divergence between their explicit and implicit understanding. We observed student teams during group discussions of the ethical issues involved in their engineering design projects. Through the micro-scale discourse analysis based on cognitive ethnography, we found two possible ways in which implicit understanding influenced the (...) discussion. In one case, implicit understanding played the role of intuitive ethics—an intuitive judgment followed by reasoning. In the other case, implicit understanding played the role of ethical insight, emotionally guiding the direction of the discussion. In either case, however, implicit understanding did not have a strong influence, and the conclusion of the discussion reflected students’ explicit understanding. Because students’ implicit understanding represented broader social implication of engineering design in both cases, we suggest to take account of students’ relevant implicit understanding in engineering education, to help students become more socially responsible engineers. (shrink)

This study explores how peer advising affects student project teams’ discussions of engineering ethics. Peer ethics advisors from non-engineering disciplines are expected to provide diverse perspectives and to help engineering student teams engage and sustain ethics discussions. To investigate how peer advising helps engineering student teams’ ethics discussions, three student teams in different peer advising conditions were closely observed: without any advisor, with a single volunteer advisor, and with an advising team working on the ethics advising project. Micro-scale discourse analysis (...) based on cognitive ethnography was conducted to find each team’s cultural model of understanding of engineering ethics. Cultural-historical activity theory analysis was also conducted to see what influenced each team’s cultural model. In cultural model, the engineering team with an ethics advising team showed broader understanding in social implications of engineering. The results of CHAT analysis indicated that differences in rules, community, and division of labor among three teams influenced the teams’ cultural models. The CHAT analysis also indicated that the peer advisors working on the ethics advising project and the engineering team working on engineering design project created a collaborative environment. The findings indicated that collaborative environment supported peer ethics advising to facilitate team discussions of engineering ethics. (shrink)

This second companion volume on engineering studies considers engineering practice including contextual analyses of engineering identity, epistemologies and values. Key overlapping questions examine such issues as an engineering identity, engineering self-understandings enacted in the professional world, distinctive characters of engineering knowledge and how engineering science and engineering design interact in practice. -/- Authors bring with them perspectives from their institutional homes in Europe, North America, Australia\ and Asia. The volume includes 24 contributions by more than 30 authors from engineering, the (...) social sciences and the humanities. Additional issues the chapters scrutinize include prominent norms of engineering, how they interact with the values of efficiency or environmental sustainability. A concluding set of articles considers the meaning of context more generally by asking if engineers create their own contexts or are they created by contexts. -/- Taken as a whole, this collection of original scholarly work is unique in its broad, multidisciplinary consideration of the changing character of engineering practice. (shrink)

Niche construction theory (NCT) can be applied to examine the influence of culturally constructed learning environments on the acquisition and retention of beliefs, values, role expectations, and skills. Thus, NCT provides a quantitative framework to account for cultural-historical contingency affecting development and cultural evolution. Learning in a culturally constructed environment is of central concern to many sociologists, cognitive scientists, and sociocultural anthropologists, albeit often from different perspectives. This article summarizes four pertinent theories from these fields—situated learning, activity theory, practice theory, (...) and distributed cognition. As a basis for interdisciplinary investigation, the article considers how these theories may be addressed using a cultural niche-construction framework, including the utility of an embedded model that explicitly accounts for effects of the constructed learning environment on within-individual learning dynamics in an evolutionary framework. (shrink)

In a refrigerated warehouse, workers organize distribution and exchange of frozen seafood by the spatial and temporal arrangement of loads. Using videotapes of workers' activities and interviews, this paper investigates how workers organize space, time and artifacts in the activity of frozen seafood distribution and exchange, and how organized space, time and artifacts systematize workers' multiple courses of actions and give direction to them. Particular attention is paid to how the workers use artifacts such as various documents and computers as (...) part of their practices, because the activity of distribution and exchange in this workplace is regarded as the activity of organizing space and time with various artifacts in multiple contexts. Through the analysis of situated literacy of using artifacts, it was shown that the activity of using artifacts is always embedded in multiple contexts. At the same time, diverse artifacts organize multiple contexts of work. Thus, there is the reflexive interaction between the artifacts and the contexts. (shrink)

Cognition is predominantly seen as information processing in multidisciplinary landscape of cognition studies, despite having had a formidable opposition from embodied and embedded perspectives in the last few decades. This paper analyses cognitive processes involved in different task domains of Kashmiri carpet weaving practice from the theoretical frameworks of cognitivism and situated-distributed cognition. After introducing the practice and its task domains (Section −1), paradigmatic cognitive activities involved in them are discussed and how these are explained by the two theoretical paradigms (...) and why the latter framework explains these processes better (Section-2). During this discussion (Section – 3), a way via culture impacts the practice and resultant cognitive operations turns out to be workspace of the actors. (shrink)

The design process in Kashmiri carpet weaving is a distributed process encompassing a number of actors and artifacts. These include a designer called naqash who creates the design on graphs, and a coder called talim-guru who encodes that design in a specific notation called talim which is deciphered and interpreted by the weavers to weave the design. The technological interventions over the years have influenced these artifacts considerably and triggered major changes in the practice, from heralding profound cognitive accomplishments in (...) manually driven design process causing major alterations in the overall structure of the practice. The recent intervention is by the digital technology: on the one hand, it has brought precision and speedy processing in the design process, and on the other, it has eliminated some of the crucial actors from the practice. This paper, which forms part of a larger study on the situated and distributed cognitive process in Kashmiri carpet-weaving practice, describes the technological makeover of the design artifacts involved in this practice over the years and their resultant cognitive impact on the design process as well as on the practice. (shrink)

One of the central issues is how the computer can enter in the learning process. A considerable amount of research has examined how children’s interactions and learning with computational artifacts are situated. A different approach focuses on the learning through computational artifacts: what can and do children learn when making a computational artifact? This paper studies the experience of elementary-school students making computer games to teach fractions to younger students. The analysis addresses how the social interactions and the artifact constructions (...) situated students’ learning experience. The discussion examines the relationships between designing and learning from a situated learning perspective. (shrink)

This paper uses Actor Network Theory to examine two cases of device-mediated educational change, one involving a computer-assisted interactive video module that provided a half-hour of instruction for a university course, the other an assistive communication device that proved a supposedly retarded pre-school child to be intelligent. The paper explores how device construction instigated by middle-level organizational workers can ramify into organizational change, and extends Actor Network theory by augmenting some of its conceptual tools. I argue that the organizational change (...) processes initiated by work on the devices played out in non-linear ways across the decades-long careers of their makers, and that to understand them we not only have to look across such extended time frames, but must also consider how agency and identity positions emerge and shift over time through the mediation of devices. (shrink)

Different situations — like school and workplace — demand different forms of knowledge. Even more important, in particular for lifelong learning, are forms of knowledge we need for managing movements between those situations. To develop a better understanding of how to ‘navigate’ knowledge boundaries, this paper analyzes, firstly, interviews with scientists interpreting familiar and unfamiliar graphs. Our goal is to identify those forms of knowledge that should receive special attention in education. Secondly, the article elaborates — based on Peirce’s semiotics (...) — an epistemologically reflected semiotic model to describe the role and conditions of knowledge necessary for crossing knowledge boundaries. (shrink)

Wicked problems—that is, problems that can be framed in a number of different ways, depending on who is looking at them—pose ethical challenges for professionals that have scarcely been recognized as such. Even though wicked problems are all around us, they are rarely addressed in education. A reason for this failure might be that wicked problems pose almost insurmountable challenges in educational settings. This contribution shows how students can learn to cope with wicked problems in problem-based learning projects that are (...) structured by the Reflect! platform. (shrink)

This study addresses building an interactive system that effectively prompts customers to make their decision while shopping online. It is especially targeted at purchasing as concept articulation where customers initially have a vague concept of what they want and then gradually clarify it in the course of interaction, which has not been covered by traditional online shopping systems. This paper proposes information presentation methods to effectively facilitate customers in their concept articulation process, and the framework for interaction design to enable (...) the methods. Specifically, this study builds a system called S-Conart that facilitates purchasing as concept articulation through support for customer’s conception with spatial-arrangement style information presentation and for their conviction with scene information presentation, and then makes a set of evaluation experiments with the system to verify that the approach used in building the system is effective in facilitating the purchasing as concept articulation. (shrink)

This article compares two cultures of engineering design, one flexible and interactive, the other rigid and hierarchical. It examines the practices of design engineers who use a mixture of paper documents and computer graphics systems and contrasts these with the practices of workers reengineering their own work process and its technological support system, using predesigned software. Based on the idea from actor network theory that objects participate in the shaping of new technologies and the networks that build them, the study (...) reveals that design cultures are intrinsically tied to the way in which their representations are constructed because such representations—sketches, drawings, prototypes—are the heart of design work; such design tools can engage or restrict participation in the design process; politics in the form of management prerogatives can be built into a design tool, influencing the range of creativity allowed and innovation accomplished in a given sociotechnological setting. (shrink)

Engineering sketches and drawings are the building blocks of technological design and production. These visual representations act as the means for organizing the design to production process, hence serving as a "social glue" both between individuals and between groups. The author discusses two main capacities such visual representations serve in facilitating distributed cognition in team design work As conscription devices, they enlist and organize group participation. As boundary objects, they facilitate the reading of alternative meanings by various groups involved in (...) the design process. The introduction of computer-aided design into this visual culture of engineering restructures relationships between workers in ways that can hamper the flexibility necessary for these crucial capacities to take place. The data are drawn from a study of the daily practices of engineers engaged in redesigning a turbine engine package. The method is participant observation. (shrink)

This study explores building code negotiation between straw bale advocates’ ecology-oriented values and health and safety values that underlie building codes in general by focusing on how values and ethics are articulated and embodied in practice and discourse in the two states where straw bale building standards were first initiated. The local, contingent nature of interactions, grounded in particular practices, material culture, and written and visual texts in which values were embedded, coupled with organizational factors contributed to strategies for a (...) prescriptive code in Arizona and for a performance code in New Mexico. Examination of situated practice in standards development for unconventional materials that may not fit well with practices based on conventional technologies sheds light on how norms associated with the ethics of safe building are enmeshed in existing practice where they can be taken for granted as ethical absolutes and illustrates the kinds of insights available through paying attention to ethics in practice. (shrink)

The concept of lifelong education received wide criticism and rejection in many educational circles in the 1970s. Recent developments in educational research and the increasing influence of postmodernist thought, the paper argues, are major factors in the return to favour of lifelong education. While a postmodern society is one characterised more by conflict than by consensus, the paper suggests that consensus on the importance of lifelong education might be one precondition for such a society.

This paper maintains that post Lave and Wenger VET has overlooked the relation between vocational curricula and workplace practice. The paper attributes this oversight to Kant's legacy in the ‘situated’ tradition in VET and critics of that tradition. The paper argues that when Vygotsky's concept of mediation is allied to the recent work of Robert Brandom and John McDowell, it is possible to formulate a non‐dualisitic conception of the relation between mind and world that goes beyond the Kantian separation of (...) mind and allows us to grasp the interdependency of theory and practice. The paper concludes by outlining the implications of this philosophical and theoretical claim for vocational curriculum and vocational pedagogy. (shrink)

The relationship between 'subjective' and 'objective' features of social reality (and between 'subjectivist' and 'objectivist' sociological approaches) remains problematic within social thought. Phenomenology is often taken as a paradigmatic example of subjectivist sociology, since it supposedly places exclusive emphasis on actors' 'subjective' interpretations, thereby neglecting 'objective' social structures. In this article, we question whether phenomenology is usefully understood as falling on either side of the standard divides, arguing that phenomenology's conception of 'subjective' experience of social reality includes many features taken (...) to be 'objective' elements of it. We illustrate our argument by a critical examination of Jean Lave's attempt to differentiate social practice theory from phenomenology. We show that many theoretical positions that want to overcome the subjective—objective dualism retain an objectivist conception of the 'subjective' features of social reality. (shrink)

This paper explores the issue of democracy and the role of the democratic classroom in the development of society in general, and the way in which educators understand and deal with diversity in particular. The first part of the paper explores different meanings of democracy and how they can be manifested in the classroom. We argue that the idea of a ‘democratic classroom’ is far too broad a category; democracy is defined in action and can have realist or pragmatic characteristics, (...) elitist or pluralist roots. The realist form of social education was championed by political scientist Charles Merriam, while a social educative process more dependent on pragmatic problem solving was pursued by educational philosopher John Dewey and those who followed in his theoretical wake. The history of democracy in the United States, and the battles of how to import different meanings of democracy into the classroom over the course of the 20th century is explored, suggesting that the educational establishment has a tendency to adopt more realist/elitist forms of civic education. We present five ‘democratic’ classrooms with different characteristics to illustrate the different characteristics social education can exhibit. In the second part of the paper we discuss the relationship between different types of democratic classrooms and issues of race/ethnicity/culture. (shrink)

Resumen La racionalidad ecológica que propone el grupo de investigación ABC destaca en su proyecto normativo la relación entre las heurísticas rápidas y frugales y el ambiente; por ello, considera que se trata de una racionalidad situada. El primer objetivo de este trabajo es mostrar que, si bien la racionalidad ecológica puede entenderse como una forma de situar la racionalidad, ello no implica situar el razonamiento. En particular, se muestra que la manera de entender la ecología del razonamiento es estática, (...) como en los estudios estándar de la cognición. El segundo objetivo es mostrar que es deseable y viable caracterizar el razonamiento heurístico de manera que nos permita entender cómo las interacciones con el entorno son parte de las estructuras cognitivas que sustentan nuestras capacidades de razonamiento, es decir, formular una ecología interactiva del razonamiento.The relation between fast and frugal heuristics and the environment is central to the normative project of the ecological rationality proposed by the ABC research group. This is why ecological rationality has been considered as a situated rationality. This paper shows that even if ecological rationality can be seen as situated rationality, this does not imply a situated form of reasoning and, in particular, that the understanding of the ecology of reasoning in this proposal is as static as it is in the standard studies of cognition. Next, the article focuses on showing that characterizing heuristic reasoning in a way that allows us to understand how interactions with the social and material environment are components of the cognitive structure that ground our reasoning is a desirable and viable task, which would allow us to formulate an interactive ecology of reasoning. (shrink)

‘Eoliths’ were crude but purportedly humanly worked stones that exercised a great deal of scientific interest between about 1870 and 1930. They became a problem in the context of the debate surrounding the existence of pre-humans in Europe before the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch, and are now mostly reckoned to be of non-human origin. This paper addresses the way in which a network of geologists and prehistorians associated with Benjamin Harrison, the celebrated collector of the first English eoliths, attempted (...) to make sense of barely recognizable artefacts in the period immediately following the establishment of human antiquity in the face of orthodox creationist chronologies. Harrison and his associates did so by innovating a series of criteria, names, categories and crosscutting classifications drawn from their own cultural experience, and typologies available to them through the comparative ethnography of technology. Using concepts and insights developed in cognitive anthropology, we shall attempt to shed light on a controversy in the history of science that has implications for our understanding of the way in which scientists more generally employ ‘provisional classifications’, folk categories and vernacular terminology in order to make sense of domains of intractable data at the frontiers of knowledge. (shrink)

Ethnomathematics is a relatively new discipline that investigates mathematical knowl edge in small-scale, indigenous cultures. This essay locates ethnomathematics as one of five distinct subfields within a general anthropology of mathematics and describes interactions between cultural and epistemological features that have created these divisions. It reviews the political and pedagogical issues in which ethnomathematics research and practice is immersed and examines the possibilities for both conflict and collaboration with the goals, theories, and methods of social constructivism.

Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena in context. In particular, it points to the web of mutual dependence among the elements of a cognitive ecosystem. At least three fields were taking a deeply ecological approach to cognition 30 years ago: Gibson’s ecological psychology, Bateson’s ecology of mind, and Soviet cultural-historical activity theory. The ideas developed in those projects have now found a place in modern views of embodied, situated, distributed cognition. As cognitive theory continues to shift from units (...) of analysis defined by inherent properties of the elements to units defined in terms of dynamic patterns of correlation across elements, the study of cognitive ecosystems will become an increasingly important part of cognitive science. (shrink)

Starting from the assumption that the ability to see patterns and thus abstract from actual events and properties of specific objects is universal, the article reviews different conceptualizations of and attitudes toward the terms ‘theory’ and ‘model’, identifying two co-existing and opposing tendencies: the love for details and the attraction to generalizations that can cover a wide range of phenomena. Using as a backdrop seven theses here reproduced in the Appendix, the article also examines the implications of taking the notion (...) of interaction as primary in the analysis of language and culture. Such implications involve the need to identify useful units of analysis and evaluative measures for competing theories and models. (shrink)

Proceedings of PhiloWeb 2012, workshop at WWW 2012, on the philosophy of the Web.

In recent years, there have been many attempts at defining learning as a social phenomenon as opposed to an individual and primarily psychological matter. The move towards understanding learning as social processes has also altered the concept of knowledge as a well-defined element stored in books, brains, CD-Roms, disks, videos or on the Internet. Instead, knowledge has been perceived as a social and context related construction. The roots of the social angle within theories on learning and knowledge are much older (...) than the current literature suggests. This paper illustrates how these theories can be traced back to pragmatism as a philosophy and foundation for an educational approach introduced by the American, John Dewey, more than one hundred years ago. The paper also suggests that Dewey avoids some pitfalls that have come with the new theories, particularly the strong division between individual vs. social and school vs. everyday life learning. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to draw out the consequences of the communal character of learning approach promoted by a sociocultural framework. This approach has both descriptive-analytical and prescriptive-guiding power: it helps to analyze existing practices be they traditional, exclusive, or innovative but, what is, probably, even more important, it also helps to guide practitioners in the design of more inclusive educational practices. In the first part of the paper, we will provide a framework for analyzing the case of (...) a shift from a traditional institutionalized perspective that understands learning as an individual process located in the head of the learner to the institutionalization of learning as a communal process — a regime which helps avoid constructing children in terms of a deficit model, disability, and academic failure. In the second part of the paper, we will discuss how treating learning as a communal process can guide an educational practitioner to develop a new pedagogical regime of a learning community of social activists that leads to inclusive pedagogy and eliminate “zones of teacher-student disability. (shrink)

This article questions the concept of tacit knowledge as the basis for our conceptual understanding of practice. The first part of the article is a critical introduction to the concept of tacit knowledge. It is emphasized that this concept is situated in various academic practices and not defined and homogeneously but in accordance with issues and intentions significant for these practices. The second part of the article outlines some consequences of conceptualizing practice as basically a matter of tacit knowledge. It (...) is argued that tacit knowledge should be seen in relation to the growth of professions in modern society and to the need to legitimate them. It is further claimed that as a legitimating concept tacit knowledge may bring about various problems leading to a marginalization of specific experiences, to social uniformity, to the reappearance of individualism and to the maintenance of a dualistic view of knowledge. (shrink)

This article is in praise of the labor of reading profound and rich texts, in this case the essay on 'estranged labor' by Karl Marx. Comparing in detail what Marx wrote on estranged labor with current social practices of learning and education leads us to comprehensive ideas about learning - including the social practices of alienated learning. We then emphasize the importance of distribution in the institutionalized production of alienated learning. And we end this article with critical reflections on the (...) importance of alienation for the relationship between teaching and learning in the social practice of scholars. (shrink)

This paper analyzes what may have been a mistake by pianist Thelonious Monk playing a jazz solo in 1958. Even in a Monk composition designed for patterned mayhem, a note can sound out of pattern. We reframe the question of whether the note was a mistake and ask instead about how Monk handles the problem. Amazingly, he replays the note into a new pattern that resituates its jarring effect in retrospect. The mistake, or better, the mis-take , was “saved” by (...) subsequent notes. Our analysis, supported by reflections from jazz musicians and the philosopher John Dewey, encourages a reformulation of plans, takes, and mis-takes as categories for the interpretation of contingency, surprise, and repair in all human activities. A final section suggests that mistakes are essential to the practical plying and playing of knowledge into performances, particularly those that highlight learning. (shrink)