A Vygotsky Centennial:
Issues and Applications of Semiotic and Socio-cultural
Ideas
Symposium Organizer, Chair, and Contact Person:
Gary Shank
EPCSE Dept
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL 60115
gshank who-is-at niu.edu
815.753.8466
This year, 1996, marks the centennial of the birth of Lev
Vygotsky. Vygotsky has grown in importance in recent
years, both as a developmental psychologist and as a
semiotician. This symposium is a celebration of
Vygotsky the psychologist and Vygotsky the semiotician.
It brings together some of the variety of work found
today in this important area of intersection. It also
brings together the work of famous and established
scholars with that of newer scholars, in a celebration of
the collective and collaborative inquiry that was at the
heart of Vygotsky's own career.
A 2 hour Symposium consisting of the following papers:
1) The Sign in Activity
Charles Bazerman
English Dept.
UC Santa Barbara
2) Learning on the World Wide Web: A Test of a Model of
Abductive
Reasoning
Donald J. Cunningham, Indiana University
Gary Shank, Northern Illinois University
3) The Semiogenesis of Human Tribality
Rolfe Windward, UCLA
Gary Shank, Northern Illinois University
4) Forgotten Words
Michael Cole
Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition
University of California, San Diego
The Sign in Activity
Charles Bazerman
English Dept.
UC Santa Barbara
Although modern semiotics was founded on the
systematic possibilities created by Saussure's
langue/parole and synchronic/diachronic distinctions,
numerous critics have pointed out that we can not
understand the meaning, social use, rise, and fate of
signs apart from their force within occasions of use,
tracked in multiple scales of time: local event, personal
biography, and cultural history. This critique,
highlighting the individual utterance and the history of
utterances, has at times been taken to dissolve the
meaning of the sign into the social dynamics of the
evolving moment. In contrast, Vygotsky's approach to
the sign allows us to develop a situated theory of
meaning in utterance. Vygotsky treats the sign as an
attractor or personal and communal impulses, bringing
those impulses into a publicly intelligible shape as a
means of participation in social activities. I will
expand on these ideas using examples from my
forthcoming book THE LANGUAGES OF EDISON'S LIGHT
(MIT, 1997).
Learning on the World Wide Web: A Test of a Model of
Abductive Reasoning
Donald J. Cunningham
Indiana University
Gary Shank
Northern Illinois University
There is an embarrassing lack of research on learning
from the World Wide Web (WWW). We argue that this
state of affairs is due largely to a lack of fit between
conventional models of learning and cognition and open-
ended resources like the WWW. Traditional models of
inductive and deductive inference are simply inadequate
in conceptualizing the skills necessary to utilize the
WWW. The work proposed here will test a model of
abductive inference derived from the writings of Peirce
and mediated tool use proposed by Vygotsky. University
students will be given problem scenarios to be
investigated with the WWW. Using a combination of
video, think aloud protocols, debriefing interviews, and
abductive analysis, we will test whether the model of
abductive inference provides a useful account of student
reasoning and tool use while using the WWW.
The Semiogenesis of Human Tribality
Rolfe Windward
UCLA
Gary Shank
Northern Illinois University
This paper builds on the idea that human society is
inherently tribal, and that many of the ails of the
modern world are based on attempts, both implicit and
explicit, to eliminate tribal aspects from human
society. In this work, we detail the evidence that human
tribality is neither natural or cultural, but is properly
semiotic in both its origins and development. Finally,
this notion of tribal semiogenetic development will be
linked to Vygotsky's important notion of the zone of
proximal development.
Forgotten Words
Michael Cole
Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition
University of California, San Diego
In his monograph of thought and speech, LS Vygotsky
began the chapter on word and image with the phrase
from a fragment of a poem by Osip Mandelshtam" I
forgot the word I wanted to say, and thought,
unembodied, returned to the hall of shadows." In this
talk I want to examine this metaphor for its
implications about theories of mind and communication,
and particular the unusual circumstance when words are
remembered, "automatically" and culture becomes
transparent.