Michael, I enjoyed the paper I read (Cognition & Instruction); I agree that it shows the distributed nature of knowledge in the classroom; also, the tracers you identified showed very nicely the difft temporalities of diffusion of different kinds of resources, and the differences between formal instruction & problem-based learning. I can see how difficult it must be to juggle synoptic and dynamic accounts to capture what is going on around those tracers. One issue I had w/ the study concerns the student population; I assume the demands on educators are different when classroom discourse is more (sociolinguistically) heterogeneous. I also assume that, by viewing students as 'in control of their learning' when learning by doing, you lose some contextual information -- that is, whether listening to the teacher or learning by doing, issues of agency are more problematic than you imply. I look forward to other comments, Judy At 10:06 AM 12/31/00 -0800, you wrote: >>>> Re: for discussion Hi Bill, with reference to your comments about the complexities of a simultaneous transformation study, I would like to point you and anyone else interested to two different studies, one among grade 8 students [1], one in a class of grade 4-5 students [2], where we have done such work, and also written about the complexities of doing such work. For example, tracing the emergence of knowledge and how it becomes shared. [1] Roth, W.-M., & Bowen, G. M. (1995). Knowing and interacting: A study of culture, practices, and resources in a grade 8 open-inquiry science classroom guided by a cognitive apprenticeship metaphor. Cognition and Instruction, 13, 73-128.Times [2] Roth, W.-M. (1998). Designing communities. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishing. Two partial studies from [2] were reported as: Roth, W.-M. (1996). Knowledge diffusion* in a grade 4-5 classroom during a unit on civil engineering: An analysis of a classroom community in terms of its changing resources and practices. Cognition and Instruction, 14, 179-220. Roth, W.-M. (1995). Inventors, copycats, and everyone else: The emergence of shared (arti)facts and concepts as defining aspects of classroom communities. Science Education, 79, 475-502. which should be read as companion studies. Cheers, Michael At 1:18 PM -0800 12/29/00, Mike Cole quoted Michelle Minnis and Vera John-Steiner: >Considered alone, activity theory is masterful in the social domain. It is most convincing when it is focused on activity systems in teams and organizations. But it does >not resolve well at the level of the individual person. We miss in this collected work the documentation of simultaneous transformations in activity systems and in >individual actors in these systems. There is only one instance of that in Perspectives, the longitudinal study by Bujarski, Hildebrand-Nilshon, and Kordt. After some growing frustration trying to locate the book, not upon the bookshelf, not under the bed, and so on, it appeared in a private place, located next to "steps to an ecology...", and "the self in social interaction" -- in good company. I see (and am living) the complexities of a simultaneous transformations study. These are: 1) Orientational Vacuum. The activity systems framework puts a highly useful perspective on social/technological interactions, as Vera points out, yet it seems the coordination with models of individual transformations remains to be completed. Semiotic ecology my provide a manageable step in this direction. Alfred's diagrammatic approach bridges to other people and things and functionally lends itself to revealing punctuations in ecological interactions. 2) Historical dearth of Field Interest/Problematic Focus. The literature does not seem to indicate a great amount of intellectual interest in co-development, and there are exceptions of course -- Bronfenbrenner's, and separately Clotilde Pontecorvo's, studies of families are two that jump to mind. My own interest I can date to about 1994 when an aera symposium proposal with Denis Newman and John Clement was well received, in contradiction to the interest apparent in the literature. There are near misses almost everywhere however, and the following examples are not condemnations, but simply examples of some things coming close. Luria's study of the mnemonist started in the 20's and in a 1935 account (perhaps a decade later) the subject states "I know that i have to be on guard if I'm not to miss something. What I do now is to make my images larger..." --- Is this the influence of Luria's study of memory on the eidetic development of the subject?? Perhaps during the 10 years of tests on the subjects synethesia and memory, the subject began adapting more advanced techniques, trying to do better -- and surely Luria's tests responded in turn? Is also the subject's eventual life trajectory to the occupation as mnemonist the influence of Luria's study that drew a long-term attention to his memory? Would the subject have instead stayed a reporter, or perhaps moved to being an editor? A second example, Joe Polman's book, a case study of a teacher attempting project based science, does not fully describe the simultaneous transformations in the author, in the school (if any), and in the perhaps highly influential CoVis project -- but this would have added many years and volumes to his dissertation. I see in L*'s paper on boundary objects the co-development of a natural history museum and its principal scientist (and also the benefactor perhaps), yet the one focus of the paper, as research papers are compelled to be focused, is on the presentation of the concept of boundary object. It is not as if the data w for example, around fifth dimension studies, together with the research reports, the web sites, and so on, forming auto-bio-ethnographies with the completeness one endeavors to reach when attempting to document the co-development of individual(s) and system(s). 3) Expanse of Field work. Possibly the root cause of (2) is the the difficulty of the study: pulling together a multifaceted, multiply-focussed (not one unit of analysis but many) study that spans co-development, longitudinally across people, things, and social structures and processes, balancing comprehensiveness with depth. This is no low-hanging fruit. Many professional and personal pressures and barriers militate against engaging in this kind of work. Barker et al. were almost there, but were missing (1) a theoretical framework of the dynamics. Consequently, their data is too much a static re-presentation, revealing the complexities and interdependencies of person-and-milieu in behavior, but not well capturing their changes over time. Who's to blame? -- Bill Barowy, Associate Professor Lesley University 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790 Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169 http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html _______________________ "One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful." [Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."] -- ---------------------------------------------------- Wolff-Michael Roth Lansdowne Professor Applied Cognitive Science MacLaurin Building A548 Tel: (250) 721-7885 University of Victoria FAX: (250) 472-4616 Victoria, BC, V8W 3N4 Email: mroth@uvic.ca http://www.educ.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/ ---------------------------------------------------- Times