Bøger i Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives serien

In this important theoretical treatist, Jean Lave, anthropologist, and Etienne Wenger, computer scientist, push forward the notion of situated learning - that learning is fundamentally a social process. The authors maintain that learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process they call legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). Learners participate in communities of practitioners, moving toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community. LPP provides a way to speak about crucial relations between newcomers and old-timers and about their activities, identities, artefacts, knowledge and practice. The communities discussed in the book are midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, and recovering alcoholics, however, the process by which participants in those communities learn can be generalised to other social groups.

This book details how the Math Forum uses the internet and digital media to support learning interactions of teachers and students. It is a case study for university students, pre-service teachers, and faculty members interested in how learning and professional development can be supported by digital media and online spaces.

Using video recordings of interaction of children at play, of archaeologists in the field, and in the home of a man with severe aphasia, this book reveals how language, embodiment, objects, and settings within historically shaped communities combine to form human action, sociality, skill, and knowledge.

Self-Making Man reveals socially shared and personal practices, as well as improvisational actions by which a person inhabits and makes sense of the world with others. After decades of discussion on embodiment, this study is the first to investigate one body in its full range of communicative activities.

In this book, Heath explores how the sale of art and antiques worth many billions of pounds each year is accomplished through social interaction. He demonstrates how an economic institution of some global importance, the auction, rests upon the fine details of talk, gesture and material action.

PowerPoint has become an integral part of academic and professional life across the globe. In this book, Hubert Knoblauch offers a complete analysis of PowerPoint presentations as a means of communication, exploring the dynamic relationships between the aural, visual, physical and social dimensions of this communicative genre.

Through an ethnographic study of a Papua New Guinea cultural group, Geoffrey Saxe traces the emergence of numerical representations and ideas as people participate in collective practices of daily life. His findings will be useful for understanding shifting representational forms and emerging cognitive functions in any human community.

Situated Cognition focuses on recent changes in the design of intelligent machines. This 1997 book differs from other purely philosophical treatises in that Clancey - an insider who has built expert systems for twenty years - explores the limitations of existing computer programs and compares them to human memory and learning capabilities.

This book looks to change our thinking about thinking by looking at communication and cognition (commognition). The explanatory power of the commognitive framework and the manner in which it contributes to our understanding of human development is illustrated through commognitive analysis of mathematical discourse accompanied by vignettes from mathematics classrooms.

This book shines important light on processes of personal change and learning in practice, launching a new theoretical approach to personhood. Drier offers an understanding of the workings of therapy and a rich set of findings for research invaluable for graduates and practitioners in psychology, education, counseling and sociology.

This 2007 book provides a way of understanding how human actions and technological artifacts are intertwined. The author shows how leading edge technologies can rest on very old-fashioned assumptions, while more modest initiatives suggest innovative approaches to technology design and use.

How do schools influence the kind of person a child becomes? Changing Classes tells the story of a small, poor, ethnically-mixed school district in Michigan's rust-belt, a community in turmoil over the announced closing of a nearby auto assembly plant.

Vygotsky's unique vision of education, from a social constructivist point of view is presented here, with illustrative examples from classroom studies between teacher and child. This unique volume will be of tremendous benefit to the field of education, as well as sociolinguistics, psychology and researchers.

This book explores the way complex systems affect everyday work and interaction through video-based field studies looking at the introduction of basic information systems in general medical practice, news production, the control room of London Underground and computer aided design in architectural practice.

This book offers a critical reconstruction of the fundamental ideas and methods of artificial intelligence research. Through close attention to the metaphors of AI and their consequences for the field's patterns of success and failure, it argues for a reorientation of the field away from thought in the head and towards activity in the world.

Drawing on research conducted mostly in Catalonia (Spain), Moises Esteban-Guitart outlines a distinct vision of education enhanced by students' identities, which leads to a discussion of the sociocultural factors that shape the processes of learning. He brings these ideas to life by examining traits of a mobile-centric society, the present-day ecology of learning, and his three metaphors of learning (connecting knowledge, connecting minds, and connecting communities). He then suggests a number of basic principles regarding learning for the twenty-first century based on prior literature in the learning sciences. He presents the terms 'funds of identity' and 'meaningful learning experiences', and reviews the funds of knowledge approach and the Vygotskian basis for understanding identity. In the second part of the book, he illustrates a number of strategies for detecting students' funds of identity and their meaningful learning experiences, and describes some practical experiences based on the theoretical framework he adopted.

This book explores alternative ways to consider the relationship between mathematics and the material world. Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Chatelet and the post-humanist materialism of Karen Barad, the authors present an 'inclusive materialist' approach to studying mathematics education. This approach offers a fresh perspective on human and nonhuman bodies, challenging current assumptions about the role of the senses, language, and ability in teaching and learning mathematics. Each chapter provides empirical examples from the classroom that demonstrate how inclusive materialism can be applied to a wide range of concerns in the field. The authors analyze recent studies on students' gestures, expressions, and drawings in order to establish a link between mathematical activity and mathematical concepts. Mathematics and the Body expands the landscape of research in mathematics education and will be an essential resource for teachers, students, and researchers alike.

How Humans Learn to Think Mathematically describes the development of mathematical thinking from the young child to the sophisticated adult. Professor David Tall reveals the reasons why mathematical concepts that make sense in one context may become problematic in another. For example, a child's experience of whole number arithmetic successively affects subsequent understanding of fractions, negative numbers, algebra, and the introduction of definitions and proof. Tall's explanations for these developments are accessible to a general audience while encouraging specialists to relate their areas of expertise to the full range of mathematical thinking. The book offers a comprehensive framework for understanding mathematical growth, from practical beginnings through theoretical developments, to the continuing evolution of mathematical thinking at the highest level.

In its description of several years of painstaking classroom observations and carefully crafted experimental interventions, the 'construction zone' makes clear the cleavage lines between the everyday requirements of classroom teaching and the practice of experimental psychologists. The best intentions of researchers to improve education are often undermined by such differences. The 'construction zone' is the shared psychological space within which teachers construct environments for their students' intellectual development and students construct deeper understandings of the cultural heritage embodied in the curriculum. The core of the book is a set of analyses of children's developmental changes during classroom lessons and individual tutorials designed to teach basic concepts in such diverse areas as natural science, social studies, and arithmetic. Fusing techniques currently in wide use in microsociology, experimental psychology, and ethnographic studies of the classroom, the authors offer a compelling vision of intellectual development as a process of joint constructive interaction mediated by cultural artifacts. Their approach makes it possible to retain the strength of a developmental perspective which treats intellectual change as a constructive process in the spirit of Piaget, while making it clear that developmental change is simultaneously a social process of cultural transformation as emphasized by Vygotsky and his students.

This book presents a theory of learning that starts with the assumption that engagement in social practice is the fundamental process by which we get to know what we know and by which we become who we are. The primary unit of analysis of this process is neither the individual nor social institutions, but the informal 'communities of practice' that people form as they pursue shared enterprises over time. To give a social account of learning, the theory explores in a systematic way the intersection of issues of community, social practice, meaning, and identity. The result is a broad framework for thinking about learning as a process of social participation. This ambitious but thoroughly accessible framework has relevance for the practitioner as well as the theoretician, presented with all the breadth, depth, and rigor necessary to address such a complex and yet profoundly human topic.

Drawing on the field of cultural historical psychology and the sociologies of skill and labour process, Contested Learning in Welfare Work offers a detailed account of the learning lives of state welfare workers in Canada as they cope, accommodate, resist and flounder in times of heightened austerity. Documented through in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis, Peter Sawchuk shows how the labour process changes workers, and how workers change the labour process, under the pressures of intensified economic conditions, new technologies, changing relations of space and time, and a high-tech version of Taylorism. Sawchuk traces these experiences over a seven-year period that includes major work reorganisation and the recent economic downturn. His analysis examines the dynamics between notions of de-skilling, re-skilling and up-skilling, as workers negotiate occupational learning and changing identities.

Studies of learning are too frequently conceptualized only in terms of knowledge development. Yet it is vital to pay close attention to the social and emotional aspects of learning in order to understand why and how it occurs. How Students Come to Be, Know, and Do builds a theoretical argument for and a methodological approach to studying learning in a holistic way. The authors provide examples of urban fourth graders from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds studying science as a way to illustrate how this model contributes to a more complete and complex understanding of learning in school settings. What makes this book unique is its insistence that to fully understand human learning we have to consider the affective-volitional processes of learning along with the more familiar emphasis on knowledge and skills.

The field of educational research lacks a methodology for the study of learning that does not begin with humans, their aims, and their interests. The Materiality of Learning seeks to overcome this human-centered mentality by developing a novel spatial approach to the materiality of learning. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), Estrid Sorensen compares an Internet-based 3D virtual environment project in a fourth-grade class with the class's work with traditional learning materials, including blackboards, textbooks, notebooks, pencils, and rulers. Taking into account pupils' and teachers' physical bodies, Professor Sorensen analyzes the multiple forms of technology, knowledge, and presence that are enacted with the materials. Featuring detailed ethnographic descriptions and useful end-of-chapter summaries, this book is an important reference for professionals and graduate or postgraduate students interested in a variety of fields, including educational studies, educational psychology, social anthropology, and STS.

In recent years, evidence-based medicine (EBM), clinical governance and professional accountability have become increasingly significant in shaping the organisation and delivery of healthcare. However, these notions all build upon and exemplify the idea of human-centred, individual action. In this book, Dawn Goodwin suggests that such models of practice exaggerate the extent to which practitioners are able to predict and control the circumstances and contingencies of healthcare. Drawing on ethnographic material, Goodwin explores the way that 'action' unfolds in a series of empirical cases of anaesthetic and intensive care practice. Anaesthesia configures a relationship between humans, machines and devices that transforms and redistributes capacities for action and thereby challenges the figure of a rational, intentional, acting individual. This book elucidates the ways in which various entities (machines, tools, devices and unconscious patients as well as healthcare practitioners) participate, and how actions become legitimate and accountable.

Teams are commonly celebrated as efficient and humane ways of organizing work and learning. By means of a series of in-depth case studies of teams in the United States and Finland over a time span of more than 10 years, this book shows that teams are not a universal and ahistorical form of collaboration. Teams are best understood in their specific activity contexts and embedded in historical development of work. Today, static teams are increasingly replaced by forms of fluid knotworking around runaway objects that require and generate new forms of expansive learning and distributed agency. This book develops a set of conceptual tools for analysis and design of transformations in collaborative work and learning.

Forms a diverse and fascinating look at situated learning. A distinctive feature of the book is the wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches to the problem of understanding cognition in everyday settings.

This study illustrates how groups learn through collaboration, mathematical discourse, and problem solving in a guided sequence of online topics.

It has become popular in recent years to talk about 'identity' as an aspect of engagement with technology. Constructing the Self in a Digital World interrogates the various definitions of identity while examining the role of technology in the learning and lives of young people.

How do we coordinate linguistic structures with bodily resources such as gaze and gesture to bring about intelligible courses of action? This volume brings together leading international scholars to provide a coherent framework for analyzing the production of meaning and the organization of social interaction.

How can students learn to extend mathematical language to real problems - to 'talk mathematics'? What can they learn from doing it? The studies in this volume address the processes of formulating problems, interpreting contexts in which problems arise, and arguing about the reasonableness of proposed solutions.