Reed Stevens

Disrupting Representational Infrastructure in Conversations Across Disciplines

In this article, we analyze conversations in consulting meetings where people work across disciplines to design things. We focus on interactional processes through which people disrupt and attempt to change representational technologies for scientific and technical classification. Our case material is drawn from ethnographic and cognitive studies of work in field entomology and architectural design. In both cases, we find common structures of interaction when people work across disciplines. These include selective use of talk, embodied action, and inscription to animate representational states that make up design alternatives. Participants from different disciplines animate situations in strikingly different ways, but these differences can either go unremarked or be put into coordinated use without explicit, shared understandings. Differences become remarkable either when a design proposal runs counter to deeply held disciplinary objectives or threatens to destabilize a wider network of representational technologies. These kinds of disruptions, and their consequences for representational infrastructure, are a central problem for research on distributed cognition.

Comparative Understanding of School Subjects: Past, Present, and Future:

Research has elevated the proposition of knowledge’s domain specificity from a working hypothesis to a de facto truth. The assumption of domain specificity structures handbooks, organizes branches of funding agencies, and provides headings for conference proceedings. Leading researchers often focus on a single slice of the school day despite the possibility that such segments swirl into a blur for children. The authors examine the domain-specific landscape, beginning with the recent past, when domain generality, not domain specificity, reigned supreme. They then examine the transition to domain-specific approaches. Next, they offer an alternative to both positions, a stance they call the comparative understanding of school subjects. A comparative understanding trains attention on how the same children understand multiple subjects in the curriculum. The authors argue that this approach represents a promising path for conceptualizing research on children, schooling, and thinking by raising new questions about children’s understandings.

Divisions of Labor in School and in the Workplace: Comparing Computer and Paper-Supported Activities Across Settings

This study uses the concept of division of labor to investigate the comparative uses of media in 2 organizational settings (a middle school classroom and a professional architecture firm). In both settings, participants used both computer and paper-based media in architectural project work. This study found that, in both settings, collaborative labor was divided between designers who worked on paper and draftspersons who worked with computers. The analysis compares the origins of these divisions of labor and finds important similarities in the reasons for the divisions of labor and important differences in the implications of the divisions of labor for participants. The analysis links the similarities to the comparative affordances of different media for supporting collaboration and links the differences to how the 2 environments differently evaluated its participants as individuals and as members of a group.

The Missing Bodies of Mathematical Thinking and Learning Have Been Found

For a long time, the body has had a bad rap among some big names in the Western philosophical tradition. Plato and Descartes come quickly to mind as particularly bad rappers (cue Monty Python-esque skit). But it appears that the body is making a comeback in the cognitive and learning sciences. Long banished from the main stage by an idealized, inside-the-head information-processing worldview, the body is steadily being rediscovered in the work of thinking and learning. I say rediscovered because there have been substantive anticipations of this movement in 20th-century philosophical traditions like phenomenology and later Wittgenstein, and then in recent empirical extensions of these philosophical ideas in ethnomethodology and conversation/interaction analysis. In the current cognitive and learning sciences that are rediscovering the body, these anticipations are not always acknowledged. A reasonably active mind has been with us since the beginning of the so-called cognitive revolution. That active mind is now being reintroduced to a sensing, feeling, thinking body in action. Mathematics has commonly been construed as among the forms of human activity most distant from the body’s experiences and its understandings (Rotman, 1993). As early as high school geometry, we are taught that our intuitions about line segments drawn on paper, with their minimal thickness and finite lengths, mislead us from the real phenomena of geometry, “lines” that go on infinitely across imagined infinite planes, lines without thickness. We are told that if we wish to understand“abstractions”—whatmanyregardas the realphenomenaofdisciplinary mathematics—we must do it through tangible but misleading objects, marks, and movements. These teachings have a long history. “Plato [said] that numbers and

Playing with Representations: How Do Kids Make Use of Quantitative Representations in Video Games?

This paper describes the use of quantities in video games by young people as part of a broader effort to understand thinking and learning across naturally occurring contexts of activity. Our approach to investigating the use of quantities in game play is ethnographic; we have followed eight children over a six-month period as they play their own games at home. The data set is composed of video recordings and artifact-based interviews. The concept of disciplined perception is used to understand how quantities are coordinated during game play. The current study shows young people using quantities in games to make predictions and organize their actions based on those predictions. Some ideas based on the study’s findings for using video games in school are discussed.

What Resources Do CS1 Students Use and How Do They Use Them

In this paper, we explore how students used two resources, the in-class lecture and the online newsgroup, to write computer programs. By focusing on the questions students asked in each setting, we compare these two learning environments. Questions students asked during lecture typically related to the material the instructor was presenting. In contrast, questions posted to the newsgroup focused on the problems students encountered while programming. The responses posted to the newsgroup varied from providing syntax and resources to offering emotional support. We provide data that demonstrates that the newsgroup was an invaluable resource in this course as it supplied personalized, just-in-time help that allowed students to make progress on their programming assignments.

VideoTraces: rich media annotations for learning and teaching

This paper describes a computer-based video annotation environment with a variety of uses for learning and teaching. The VideoTraces system allows users to capture and annotate digital video, thus representing their ideas in a unique way. The system is based on research about the embodied nature of human knowledge and collaborative learning. In this paper, we report on two pilot uses of the system in very different settings (a science museum and a university dance course). We describe a range of ways in which people represent their ideas with VideoTraces, and argue that the system may be a general tool to support collaborative learning.

What Counts Too Much and Too Little as Math

Gerry was a Vietnam veteran who had bounced around VA hospitals for a few years before he found his way to the school for adults where I was working. My job was essentially a kind of educational triage. My role at the school was to get students into educational and training programs and to help them establish themselves in these programs, since most had been out of school for a long time.

Special session - linking research findings on engineering student learning and engineering teaching: Implications for engineering education

The goal of this special interactive session is to engage attendees in (1) knitting the results of two linked studies (of engineering undergraduates and engineering faculty) into the larger body of engineering education scholarship and (2) developing ways of thinking about these findings that can be used to inform engineering education program planning and classroom practice. The findings are from an extensive set of data collected over multiple years by the Academic Pathways Study (APS) and Studies of Engineering Educator Decisions (SEED), both of which are part of the NSF-funded Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE). These data sets present a unique opportunity to examine the intersections between research on engineering learning from the student perspective and research on engineering teaching from the faculty perspective.

Tools of play: coordinating games, characters, and actions while learning to play video games

This paper describes an individuals role in coordinating a distributed system for learning. The analysis deals with a core issue for CSCL; the mismatch between common measures for learning, which are based on individual traits and outcomes, and learning processes that are distributed across people and artifacts. Rather than bridge this mismatch through an assessment of group performance, we suggest that learning scientists consider assessing an individuals adaptive reorganization in a socio-technical system. We selected video game play as a context for looking at collaborative learning because it represents an emergent social activity young people commonly engage in. Additionally, recent claims that game play involves deep learning have not been thoroughly investigated with ethnographic research; this project begins to address that gap.