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Design, Learning, and Collaboration Assignment 9 Analysis and Summary Jonathan Marbach General notes on responses: Two major points that need to be clarified or discussed more in class are: What are active representations? Some students knew, others had vague ideas or indicated they weren't comfortable with the concept. I think discussion of some examples would be called for. Maybe those who know could explain as it seems they have some a priori familiarity (e.g. one student cited Ken Anderson's research). Some discussion of ethnography and the paper's "Cognitive Ethnography" should take place. Personally, I wasn't familiar with the term before reading the paper but the paper expected the reader to know it. This may have been the case for several students because there was no real consensus on the "What is your understanding of ethnography" question. I resorted to Dictionary.com which says that ethnography is (basically) the study of culture, so to me that would suggest that cognitive ethnography is the study of the cultures that surround thinking and learning activities. As a side note, I was glad to see that one person mentioned the difficulty/density of the reading. I thought it was rather tough reading as well and I'm surprised at how well most of the class did with the questions! My hunch is that the target audience of the paper has more background in HCI than the average class member. 1. Interesting People seemed to indicate the following were interesting: Not interesting. Few comments were made here, but some highlights are: 2. Main message There was consensus here that the main message was that under the Theory of Distributed Cognition, HCI research and development of computational systems must take into account the social factors involved in how a system will be used. I feel like I didn't say that very well, so here's a quote from Payal: "The main message of the article is that people form tight bonds with their environments. Human-computer interaction has to be viewed within the sociotechnical context of the environment and only in doing so can the design of systems be greatly enhanced." hw9-prabhu 3. Themes you would like to know more about. I've already summarized many of these comments in the general notes but here are some other points: 4. Understanding of Distributed Cognition - There was general agreement here that it is cognitive activities that transcend the individual in being carried out among groups of people and artifacts. Again, I think Payal said it best: "Distributed cognition implies that cognitive powers extend beyond the individual to cover interactions between humans and their environment (tools, resources, materials, etc). It is a broad concept that includes phenomena that emerge in social interactions as well as interactions between people and artifacts in the environment." hw9-prabhu Ethnography and Active Representations - I've already summarized that these answers varied greatly. For ethnography, most answers said something like "the study of human interaction with the environment". For active representations, people said "data objects with context-dependent visualizations". Some people mentioned History-Enriched objects. (Note that I'm not actually quoting anyone, the quotes are hypothetical.) "In future work environments, people will pursue their goals in collaboration with elements of the social and material world." Most answers agreed with and supported the statement, saying that this will become necessary due to the every increasing complexity of the problems we must solve; we will have to depend on the resources in others and the resources that our artifacts provide, therefore study in support of distributed cognition is necessary. 5. New and Old foundations for HCI. There was another large consensus here that the "Old" focus was on the interaction of a single user with a single system in the process of achieving an isolated work task. Of course then by contrast, the "New" direction focuses on how to support and exploit the social aspects of how large systems will be used in complex problem domains. 6. Extensions The main comment made here is that the EDC can make use of recording "History". Jing commented that study should be done in how to implement software that supports collection of data for Cognitive Ethnography.
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