> Dear David,
> In your message of October 20, you cited an article in Cognitive Science
> by Okada and Simon on collaborative discovery in a scientific domain and
> noted that some CHAT ideas were in it (but no CHAT citations). I know the
> first author and have some background on this paper. Takeshi Okada was a
> PhD student at CMU and he was very interested in the social context of
> scientific discovery. This interest made him something of an outlier at
> CMU but he did find other people, like me and Kevin Crowley, in Pittsburgh
> to talk to about his interest. He eventually did his dissertation under
> Herb Simon and I would guess this is the publication from it. He then did
> a postdoc at LRCD and audited a class I taught on Situated Cognition in
> which some readings from CHAT were assigned and actively discussed.
> Unfortunately we did not read Yrjo Engestrom's work--which would have been
> appropriate. Needless to say, Takeshi would not have been at liberty to
> include anything from CHAT if he had wanted to do so in this paper with
> Herb. Takeshi now has a faculty position in his native country, Japan,
> but continues to collaborate with Kevin Crowley in the U.S. and others and
> he continues to be interested in collaborative problem solving.
>
This is fascinating. I don't understand why he could not have
including anything from CHAT. Has academic freedom sunk that low (this is
a real question, not rhetorical--being from a small college I'm somewhat
removed from it all)? Curious, at one of the very first APS conventions I
heard Herbert Simon talk about situatedness as the "latest thing" (or
something close to that; I could dig out my notes if I were home) in
cognition. I only met him a few times -- the first was almost 30 years ago
when he encouraged me to send my paper on most efficient chunk sizes to
the new journal they were forming, called *Cognitive Psychology*.
> In my own work, I've been interested in how children's peer collaborations
> support (and constrain) their discovery of scientific ideas and their
> verification. A recent publication of mine (with Jorge
> Larreamendy-Joerns--another friend of Takeshi's) appeared in the Dec 1995
> issue of Cognition and Instruction. That issue (co-edited by me and Celia
> Hoyles) is devoted to research on collaborative problem solving in math
> and science.
>
I'll get a copy of it.
Thanks, Ellice for the fascinating update. I'll end with a modern
offering in the genre of "Old Irish Blessing":
May you ever continue to convince cognitivists that they need to
understand culture.
David