Week 4: Making Connections

So, It would appear that perhaps Dewey and Norman have had the largest influence on my thinking, although I did enjoy all of the other readings. The table below has 2 main sections: Major Claims and Informative for Design. The blue text is my thoughts on connections amongst readings. This is not thorough, but it does highlight the things that stand-out to me the most. 

	Dewey (1938) Experience and Education	Gee (2004) Situated Language and Schooling	Pea (1993) Distributed Intelligence	Bransford & Schwartz (1999) Rethinking Transfer
Major Claims	It’s not either or between “traditionalism” and “progressivism”. Organization is still important but what it looks like should be rethought. Experiences are always happening and involve explicit (purposeful) and implicit (by-product) learning—Experiences can be educative or miseducative.	Learning is a cultural process, and ignoring the resources that traditionally low achieving kids bring into the classroom is what has been causing the gap between poor (mostly minority) students and their more privileged (mostly white) peers	The mind rarely works alone; intelligence is distributed "across minds, persons, and they symbolic and physical environments, both natural and artificial" (P. 1/ 47) RESEMBLES GEE’S NOTIONS OF TOOL USE AND PARTICIPATION IN A COMMUNITY.	“... people's perception of the givens of a situation depends on what they have at their disposal to know with. Thus, the individual's knowledge actively constitutes the perceivable situation (p. 23 / 82) RESEMBLES DEWEY’S CONTINTUITY OF EXPERIENCE The ability to use resources to problem solve (“knowing with,” p. 11, 70) is a better predictor of future success than a snapshot of a person’s knowledge at any given point in time (p. 10 / 69) MAKES ME THINK ABOUT PEA’S POINT THAT AFFORDANCES ARE ONLY THERE IF THEY ARE TAKEN UP, AND DEWEY’S NOTION OF CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE ALONG WITH NORMAN’S CLAIMS ABOUT THE VALUE OF STANDARDIZATION “They can modify their environments by changing them physically, by seeking resources (including other people), by marshaling support for new ideas, and so forth. Rather than simply viewing transfer as the mapping of old understandings and practices onto a given situation, the PFL perspective emphasizes that people can actively change the given situation into something that is more compatible with their current state and goals.” (p. 23 /82) RESEMBLES DEWEY’S PRINCIPLE OF INTERACTION
Informative for Design	The tension between theory and practice resembles the link between untested design and use, and use in novel situations. (RESEMBLES NORMANS EXPLANATION OF WHY PROTOTYPING AND TESTING IS IMPORTANT)	Have learners collaborate with experts on tasks they couldn’t do on their own. Have learners work in a "smart" environment filled with tools and technologies, and artifacts store knowledge and skills they can draw on when they do not personally have such knowledge and skills. (RESEMBLES PEA’S DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE) Information is given "just in time" when it can be put to use (and thus better understood) and "on demand" when learners feel they need it and can   follow it. Extended information given out of a context of application (thus not "just in time”) is offered after, not before, learners have had experiences relevant to what that information is about. (RESEMBLES DEWEY’S IDEAS ON BUILDING ON EXPERIENCE) Learners see learning as not just "getting a grade" or "doing school," but as part and parcel of taking on the emerging identity of being a physicist.	“... the environments in which humans live are thick with invented artifacts that are in constant use for structuring activity..." (p. 2/ 28) RESEMBLES DEWEY’S NOTIONS OF INTERACTION BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL, SOCIAL, AND MATERIAL SETTINGS, AND NORMANS NOTIONS OF BAD DESIGN VS. HUMAN ERROR “... intelligence is accomplished rather than possessed... While it is people who are in activity, artifacts commonly provide resources for guidance and argumentation. The design of artifacts, both historically by others and opportunistically in the midst of one's activity, can advance that activity by shaping what are possible and what are necessary elements of that activity" (p. 3/ 50) RESEMBLES NORMAN’S NOTIONS OF DESIGNING FOR HUMANS ENGAGED IN ACTIVITY AND THE LEGACY PROBLEM “Resources of the world offer potential relationships, constrained by their affordances, that may not at all be mentally represented prior to a situational perception of their meaning... Intelligence is contributed in each moment by the ways in which people interpret the things they are experiencing" (p. 5 / 55) RESEMBLES ALL OF NORMAN AND DEWEY’S PRINCIPLES OF CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE AND INTERACTION Affordances aren’t always obvious for novices (p. 62, 64). There are trade-offs between privileging “meaning for” and “meaning of” "Intelligence is contributed in each moment by the ways in which people interpret the things they are experiencing" (p. 5 / 55) REMINDS ME OF DEWEY’S CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE	We can see people’s learning trajectories by looking at the questions they ask because their questions shape/reveal their learning goals. (p. 10 / 69) If students don’t create good representations of problems they might assimilate unrelated problems and make negative transfer. This means that we want students to have differentiated knowledge, which can be facilitated by encouraging metacognitive strategies such as monitoring and reflecting on one’s own learning with the goal of improvement (p. 5/65) “... people need help thinking about their experiences and organizing them into some coherent view of the world.” (p. 26 /85) “... the dynamic assessment environments should help students learn about themselves as learners” (p. 32 /91)
Definitions	Principle/Condition of Continuity of Experience: past experiences effect current and future experiences, experiences can prepare us for future learning or close us off to future learning... learning should always have a purpose experienced in-the-moment Principle/Condition of interaction: “Every genuine experience has an active side which changes in some degree the objective conditions (environment / material and social setting) under which experiences are had... [The principle of interaction] assigns equal rights to both factors in experience-objective and internal conditions” (p. 15, 16)... in Rogers’ words, or my summary of Rogers’ words: "human inquiry always restructures a situation as people appropriate materials for new purposes"