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Assignment 9: Review of the articile "Distributed Cognition: Toward a New Foundation for the HCI Research" 1. What did you find interesting about the article? The concept of Cognitive Ethnography is very interesting. Here the author emphasize on recording and analyzing the interaction among human, computer, culture and social enviornment. 2.What did you find not interesting in the article? Author mentioned the embodied cognition as one of the tenets of the distributed cognition approach. I found myself couldn't grasp the real meaning of the idea. I think both traditional and distributed cognition views the congnition as result of the reflection of external world by the internal mental activity of human being. 3.What do you consider the main message of the article? The main idea is to introduce distributed congnition as a new approach to study human-computer interaction. The new think extends beyond the traditional cognition by focusing on the interaction between human and all the possible exteranl resources in his environment. 4. Are themes discussed in the article which you would like to know about? I'd like to know more about History-Enriched Digital Objects. I think current technology have provided much better chance to capture more detail of the interaction between human, and his various surroundings. EDC is a good example to create the digital objects for HCI research. 5.Please describe briefly your understanding of: Distributed Cognition: Under this concept, the researchers not only study of cognition mechanism taking place inside human being but also study how human being interacts with various object in his working enviornment to generate cognitive activities. Ethnography: This is the record and study of human activity and his interaction with various enviornment under different social and culture background. Active representations: In comparison with traditionl view of congition, the distributed cognistion expand to boundary of cognition activity to search more active representation of internal cognition in the interactive social and culture environment. In future people will pursue their goals in collaboration with the elements of the social and material world: I think this assumption is happening right now, and will become more and more obvious. I found two reason to support this assumption. First, current technology makes interaction much earies by providing multimedia support and internet connection. Second, the problem people deal with will become more complex, which require to expand the boundary of collaboration of human with various objects. 5. The article talks about "new foundations" for HCI. Please discuss some old foundations for HCI. How "new" according to your knowledge are these "new" foundations? Old foundations for HCI pays more attention to pure one to one interaction just between human and computer, and the boundary of the cognition is restricted to the individuals. In new foundation, the boudary of cognition is no longer limited but to expand into the interaction between human and various objects in its social and cultural surroundings. Maybe, in Old foundation, the emphasis on the interaction between "internal" and "external" world is not strong enough, which make "distributed cognition" feel new( but might not be brand new, in my view) 6. Do you have any ideas how this research could/should be extended based on your knowledge and experience? Because the cognition ethnography is one of the major means to study distributed cognitive system, I think they should pay more attention to study how to implement current multimedia technology to enrich research on cognitive enthography Assignment 9 Summary
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