ED 750 Notes 3-4-04 

Welcome!

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Next Week:  Cole and Bruner
	Bruner is a convert from cognitive perspective to sociocultural view.
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Gee/Lemke coursetools questions:

1. What does meaning making look like when done by an inanimate object?
2. How is meaning making different from simply responding to the environment
3. What is the control program within K12 education?
4. What is the relationship between old and new Discourses?
5. Different views of situativeness?
6. Do new technologies allow non-privileged perspectives more leverage?
7. How can we encourage the younger generation to be different from us and cast doubts on what we hold as truth?
8. How do we balance student exploration with not reinventing the wrong wheel?
9. How would Lave respond to LemkeÕs ideas about schooling?
10. What are the CoPÕs that help teachers teach more effectively?
11. How do you make the CoP of practitioners and the CoP of schools the same?
12. What are college entrance exams like in other countries?
13. What is the role of individual agency in self-organizing systems?
14. What are the ways that words and larger discourse structures different?
15. How are GeeÕs ideas of midlevel situated meanings applied?
16. Has our culture become more comfortable in general with technologies?
17. How does technology allow us to connect networks not usually connected?
18. How do people decide which texts are relevant and when, when interpreting another text?
19. What are strategies that help people overcome the restrictions of traditional discourse?
20. What determines the Òpreferential saliencesÓ that assist organisms in picking out a pattern in a larger system.
21. How is Òreflection-in-actionÓ different from Òreflection-on-actionÓ?
22. What is Gee trying to show in the ÒshoeÓ and ÒcoffeeÓ examples?
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Chapters from "Situated Cognition" bringing together several perspectives:
*Lave - Social Perspective
*Vygotsky - Semiotic - symbol systems ( all aspects ) - anything can be a symbol if it has meaning that goes beyond material affordances
*?? - Psychological perspective - ways that context influences the ways we do our thinking.
Carl Bereiter's chapter dealt with how to escape situated cognition. (Hutchins would say that it doesn't make sense to think of learning w/o context.)

Next week: Bruner and Cole: started with a more psychological (cognitive) standpoint.
Lemke's chapter tries to 'connect' semiotic perspective and sociocultural perspective.

- Semiotics - started out as a generalization of formal linguistics, (in which the symbol system is language, the units are words (sorta) which may refer to several concepts) Relationships between signs and symbols (not just words: gestures, movement, sound, etc.) what can the symbols mean, how can they be used?
 	 Linguistics:  can examine the sound structure, words, meanings (semantics, vs. pragmatics)
		semantics - possible meanings that words can have (?)  e.g. different meanings of 'up' and 'down' tend to share common oppositions.
		pragmatics - describes what you do with words besides just creating meanings (ie. they can perform an action).  How words are used, not just what they mean ==> social effects of the meanings you assign to words.

- Formal (structural) Semiotics: Chomsky.  Try to represent language as a complex mathematical model.  JF ?:  is this similar to symbolic logic, where phrases are assigned symbols and statements manipulated using rules?  I think that was the original plan.

The difference here is the difference between proscriptive rules for meaning making (formal) vs. descriptive rules for meaning making (functional)

- Functional (Social) Semiotics:   What something means depends on how people use symbols in the world. Compatible w/ Vygosky.  Words/symbols are resources for getting kinds of things done in society.
                                    ^^^^^^^ - so you need a theory of society

The link is through the cultural theories of society:  How people organize themselves in society depend on not just what's necessary to survive, but also depend on attitudes/beliefs, etc. which are created through symbolic systems.

-Eco-social system - society is part of the ecosystem, the same properties of ecosystems are found in societies.  However, there are additional properties of an ecosystem containing a society because the society alters the ecosystem like crazy.  [a.k.a. socionatural systems]  Human values are factored into traditional models (15 years old) as ecomonic forces.  Eco-social system models seek to add semiotics, resulting in more cultural dimensions being recognized as forces in ecosystems.

  ecological/social/semiotic  (a.k.a ecological sociological semiotic system) - how societies thrive and persist is based in part on their language systems.

-Heterogeneity: To describe a ecosocial system, you need to include all of the "participants" (Bateson's ideas...to understand the feedback circuit, you have to understand all of the items in the circuit -- see also Latour)
  + actants: people, artifacts, tools, symbols, landscapes
  + practices (specific to social world)/processes( more general, including larger part of natural world ) apparently there's not much distinction, but we've 'inherited' this distinction
  = form a system/ interdependence (an emergent property), cross-catalytic coupling affected by the values of the people in society.
  

Social Change (or changes in parts of the ecosocial system)
 - Hard to change the system on the large scale b/c of homeostasis w/in the system. (LaChatlier's Principle)  :) 

Comments based on CT posts:

Ecosocial systems maintain psuedo dynamic equilibrium

Individuals can make changes, but on the small scale.  Hard to make change happen (w/o pain and damage), but difficult to control and predict.  

Changes in systems that seem to be isolated are often met with resistance from outside forces.  Forces that resist change are known as homeostatic forces.

Abandon all hope of making change.  Everything is meaningless....(sigh)


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Questions about Ecosocial Systems:

Has there been any change in American schools in the last 100 years?
	depends on how you define change... some changes are bigger than others
		there is more group work in classes now (probably to prepare the future proletariat)
		many kids like school more

		other possibles:
			special ed, integration (duh), alternative schools, less empahsis on rote learning (except math facts), changes in work-related education paths, 

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'Chomsky pogram'  - strong influence on linguistic departments in US and Japan.  Other English speaking countries were able to survive.


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Break
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_________ brought up issue of cultural differences in how students participate/value school. (sherri? )

Jim Gee is interested in social justice and how issues related to social justice affect what we know about learning.

Real transfer = same concept applied across different contexts or situations.  ADAPTATIONs do not count.  Is this right?  Do 'adaptations' count as transfer?  Are metaphorical references examples of transfer?

Distributed cogniton view of far transfer - The working unit that you use to solve a problem is a combination of the general concept and specific information about the system.  So what does the work is the adapted element.

Near transfer is basically the same concepts and specific elements with only minor variations.

Gee:  Notion that one word - one concept is problematic.

Alternative to one word - one concept idea: situated meaning.  Gee is saying that we should teach more about the members of the family that is represented by a concept e.g.  learning more about different forms of coffee.  (?)

e.g. equilibrium; ==> many different concepts of equilibrium.  Mechanical equilibrium <> chemical equilibirum; scientists would draw connections between the different 'versions' of equilibrium.


Gee's views on thinking in practice influenced by Schon (architects, engineers, other geeks) and Latour (scientists)  ==> found that working concepts were not the high level ones, but the mid-level ones (?) 

JF:  I digress... URL for Schon summary:  http://www.nvgc.vt.edu/alhrd/Theorists/Schon.htm;  Short sketches of other theorists (not many in our course) http://www.nvgc.vt.edu/alhrd/Theorists/theo%7Ecom.htm.

Connectionism:  a shift in the typical model of the nature of thinking (1st generation - problem solving, good thinking is what experts do; match problems with general problem solving strategies, therefore need to know lots about the brain. 2nd generation -  pattern recognition, see the association (which things go together) which depends on seeing certain features as more important than others -- depends on the culture of the community (or CoP)

Cultural models are not just internalized...not just part of the structure of neural networks, but are also part of the world (social and cultural world)...this is where Bateson's circuit comes back

Pier: If you teach people to look at the world through different networks will people think about those things differently?

JL:  Yes.

Discourses vs. discourse  (and why I hate social scientists)
^^^^^^^^^^ midlevel specific ways of making meaning about the world through any symbolic systems (including action and activity.

are there are level of really believing?  I think that's the difference between religion and science, you 
can have levels in science, but religion it seems not so much...

I don't believe in Beatles...I only believe in me.