What did you find interesting or not? Trying to get a grasp on the material in this paper was a challenge for me but the topics are largely fascinating. How do groups of people think and understand together? How is meaning created? Where do digital tools take their place in these systems? These are individually emmense subjects that I'm somewhat interested in. For me though, much of this was entirely new. While I was interested in most of the paper, I really had to read, reread and reflect and each passage to get any sort of grasp on the material. At the rate I was moving, I struggled to keep my focus and understand where a particular passage fit in to the paper and theory as a whole. I don't know if this qualifies as 'not interesting' but it certaintly wasn't thrilling.
what do you consider the main message of the article? I'm not really sure, but the article seemed to attempt to discuss several ways of viewing distributed cognition and introduce the reader to ethnography. All of this laid the groundwork though for the central question, "How can make software facilitate users learning from one another?"
Please describe briefly your understanding of:
Distributed cognition: Flow of information and ideas through a group to form some sort of shared meaning, knowledge or understanding.
Ethnography: Studing how the meaning of events or non-events is viewed by individuals within a group or community.
Active Representations Representations of domain objects which take on certain characteristics as a result of use. I'm on very shaky ground here.
The article talks about "new foundations" for HCI what's old what's new? This distinction was a bit blurred for me, but as I understand it, the 'old' model relies on direct manipulation. Things in the domain are manipulated and the system indicates that one way or another. Newer systems would attempt to understand what things are benig used for and make their uses (or at least most useful features) more apparent.