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Serina Croll Assignment 9 February 20,2002 Assignment 9 (1)What did you find interesting about the article? The entire article was very interesting and informative. I enjoyed reading about the different theories surronding the concept of distributed cognition. One of the more interesting points that was made in the article was that about culture and cognition. The following line sums up the correlation between culture and distributed cognition: "Where cognitive science traditionally views culture as a body of content on which the cognitive processes of individual persons operate, in the distributed cognintion prospective, culture shapes the cognitive processes of systems that transcend the boundries of individuals. (2) not interesting about the article? There was nothing that was not interesting about the ariticle. (3) What do you consider the main message of the article? I consider the main message of the article a discussion of the theory of distibuted cognition and how it differs from the study of cognition. There is also discussion of how cognitive ethnography compliments the theory of distributed cognition. (4) Are themes discussed in the article which you would like to know more about? Yes. I would like to learn more about the theory of distributed cognition. (5) Please describe briefly your understanding of distributed cognition? I understand distributed cognition to be the collaboration of multiple cognitive beings across time and space to make one complete system. As explained in the article: "Distributed cognition look for cognitive processes, whenever they may occur, on the basis of the functional relationships of elements that participlate together in a process....In distibuted cognition, one expects to find a system that can dynamically configure itself to bring sub-systems into coordination to accomplish various functions." (6) Please describe briefly your understanding ethnography. From the article: "Cognitive enthnography is not any single data collection or analysis technique. Rather it brings togehter many specific techniques to help understand cognition. Congnitive enthrography feeds distributed cognition theory by providing the corpus of observed phenomena that the theory must explain. (7) Please describe briefly your understanding active representations (which is the most important example you can think of?) Active respresentation is something like a word file because it is an active representation of the document being created. In future work environments people will pursue their goals in collaboraiton with elements of the social and material world The article talks about "new foundations" for HCI. (8) Please discuss a couple of "old foundations" for HCI how "new" according to your knowledge are these "new foundations"? The old foundations for HCI is that the computer is an external factor to human cognition. Thus the human must take in and process this external factor. A more integrated approach, the new foundations of HCI, suggest that suggests that HCI should begin in ehtnographic studies of the phenomena of interest and with natural histories of the respresentation employed by practitioners. (9) Do you have any ideas how this research could / should be extended based on your own knowledge and experience? Not really at the moment. Assignment 9 Summary
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