This is a draft of an article by danah boyd. It gets at the intersection of identity, technology and community. It is a new take on an old story, but fits well within the theme of our course. It is also a good reading for our first synthesis week as it addresses many of the overlapping issues that you will have to consider.
Reading
Team 4 Week 3
Pea (1993) “Practices of distributed intelligence and designs for education”
McLuhan & Fiore, The Medium is the Massage
This is quite an interesting and (for its time) graphically innovative book. It is an attempt to capture the core of McLuhan’s ideas and, I believe also to push the envelope on what it means to publish serious academic writing as an artform in and of itself. Try to think of it in terms of the way it reflect current sentiments about identity, community, design and our relationship to technology even though at the time of its publishing there was (essentially) no such thing as a personal computer.
Update: You can find the reading here.
Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity PDF
Learning is becoming an urgent topic. Nations worry about the learning of their citizens, companies about the learning of their workers, schools about the learning of their students. But it is not always easy to think about how to foster learning in innovative ways. This book presents a framework for doing that, with a social theory of learning that is ground-breaking yet accessible, with profound implications not only for research, but also for all those who have to foster learning as part of their responsibilites at work, at home, at school.
Find the reading here.
Gee (1999), An introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method (Ch.2 & 3)
Gee, J. P. (1999). An introduction to discourse analysis theory and method (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
While this is a book about discourse analysis it is really about social interactions (both spoken and written) and how they shape our world. Read this in light of identity and its relationship to community. Gee frames his thinking in terms of Discourses. For your purposes think about not only the discourse as the content of the communication, but like Marshall McLuhan, think about the medium as message. What does discourse when using a different tool do to the identity of the communicators? How does the tool shape the discourse and vice versa?
Find the readings here.
Lankshear & Knobel (2007), “Sampling ‘the New’ in New Literacies”
Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2007). Sampling “the New” in New Literacies. In M. Knobel & C. Lankshear (Eds.), A New Literacies Sampler (Vol. 29, pp. 1-24). New York: Peter Lang.
Pea (1993), “Practices of distributed intelligences and design for education”
We’d like you to read a piece by Roy Pea about Distributed Cognition / Intelligence. This is a seminal piece that has clear implications for what it means to increasingly off-load our cognition into our environment, either onto other people, artifacts or technology.
The readings can be found here.
Pea, R. D. (1993). Practices of distributed intelligences and design for education. In G. Solomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations (pp. 47-87). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
One questions that you should consider, and likely post some thoughts about: Are the implications of distributed intelligence different with Web 2.0 technologies? If so, why? If not, why not?
Reading Assignment for 04.10.08
The rest of the Wenger book has been posted to ANGEL. Please read 173 – 221 for next week. That rounds out Part II on Identity. That also means that we should take up identity next week in a pretty serious way and also that you should focus your blog posts on that same concept. The last section is on Design. Feel free to dig into it if you have reading time, but you will need to finish up the rest of the book in the next couple weeks either way. Have a good weekend and I will see you on Thursday.
For Class Thursday
Hi all … Bart Pursel from the College of Information Sciences and Technology will be in class on Thursday to talk to you a bit about virtual worlds and how they play out in a learning landscape. Bart maintains a blog that you might want to take a look at it. He also passed a link along to a PDF he’d like you to skim over. It should be a fun and interesting discussion, so please try to come ready to participate.