What Does It Mean To Become A Master?
"In the 1960's and 70's, the advent of computers not only reinforced this notion of man as a rational animal, it also led many people to predict that we would soon have machines that could think and act just like human beings. In 1972, however, Hubert Dreyfus's seminal and controversial book What Computers Can't Do anticipated the failure of what came to be known as 'artificial intelligence'.
In the book, Dreyfus explains that human beings are not at all like computers. We do not apply abstract, context-free rules to compute how to act when we engage in skilled behavior. Instead, Dreyfus argued, the fundamental thing about humans is that we are embodied beings living in a shared world of social practices and equipment. In the end, it is our skillful mastery and our shared practices that not only distinguish us from machines but allow us to assume meaningful identities."
(Tao Ruspoli, 2010)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Design knowledge or design, communication and culture?
"The problem with any debate over design is that the intellectual resources with which the debate is typically engaged are themselves located within the field, and the competing definitions of design is the terrain over which struggles are fought and the resources used in those struggles. Each actor (or in this case, each designer) engages in these struggles and does so from a position within the field; each has a situated viewpoint and this viewpoint shapes the analysis of the field (Bourdieu, 1983). Thus, there is a need to be able to view the field afresh, from a perspective that is not associated with any specific position within the field but rather objectifies the field. This is not to argue for an 'ultimate-truth' perspective, but rather to suggest that, in order to be able to analyse the debates, one needs specific kinds of tools. Designers work with knowledge to 'do' design. When analysing the field of design the object of study has now shifted: it is not the design object but knowledge itself as an object that is being studied. For engineering a bridge, engineering knowledge is valuable; for designing a house, architectural knowledge is valuable. For analysing knowledge, a theory of knowledge itself is valuable."
(Lucila Carvalho, Andy Dong & Karl Maton, 2009, p.485)
Fig.1 Legitimation codes of specialisation Source: Maton (2007:97)
2). Carvalho, L., Dong, A. & Maton, K. (2009) 'Legitimating design: A sociology of knowledge account of the field', Design Studies 30(5): 483-502.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
High Tech High: building a high-tech work force
"High Tech High was originally conceived by a group of about 40 civic and high tech industry leaders in San Diego, assembled by the Economic Development Corporation and the Business Roundtable, who met regularly in 1996-98 to discuss the challenge of finding qualified individuals for the high-tech work force. In particular, members were concerned about the 'digital divide' that resulted in low numbers of women and ethnic minority groups entering the fields of maths, science, and engineering. Gary Jacobs, Director of Education Programs at Qualcomm, and Kay Davis, Director of the Business Roundtable, were key participants in these discussions.
In late 1998 the group voted to start a charter school and engaged Larry Rosenstock, then President of Price Charities in San Diego, as the founding principal. The founding group was clear about its intent: to create a school where students would be passionate about learning and would acquire the basic skills of work and citizenship. Rosenstock, a former carpentry teacher, lawyer, and high school principal who had recently directed the U.S. Department of Education's New Urban High School project, brought a vision and a sense of the design principles by which this mission might be accomplished (see Design Principles, below).
From January 1999 to the opening of the Gary & Jerri-Ann Jacobs High Tech High in September of 2000, Rosenstock and the founding group, led by Gary Jacobs, worked in tandem. Rosenstock located a site, prepared the charter application, hired staff, and oversaw the development of the program, while Jacobs and the business community took the lead in addressing issues of financing and facilities development."
(High Tech High Foundation)
Fig.1 Christopher Gerber/High Tech High
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Contexts, boundary objects and hybrid spaces: theorising learning in lifelong learning
"More recently, with the interest in social theories of learning, there is increased recognition of the complexity of transfer. If learning is situated/contextualised, there is a requirement for disembedding/decontextualisation and re-situating/re-contextualisation, some of which might require more explicit deliberation than others. As Eraut (2004: 256) suggests, the transfer of knowledge entails the interrelated stages of:
1. the extraction of potential relevant knowledge from the context(s) of its acquisition and its previous use
2. understanding the new situation – a process that depends on informal social learning
3. recognising what knowledge and skills are relevant
4. transforming them to fit the new situation
5. integrating them with other knowledge and skills in order to think/act/communicate in the new situation.
This involves building relationships between domains and extending the learning context beyond specific sites, which creates a pedagogic zone in its own right, a hybrid space of in-between contexts.
To move away from the cognitive concept of transfer, a discourse of boundary-crossing and border-crossing has also emerged (Tuomi-Grohn and Engestrom 2003 and 2003a), with associated notions of boundary objects. This is to make explicit the social practices and objects through which learning is mediated, but also to identify that objects may be part of many contexts. In addition, notions of mediation, mobilisation and transition have been deployed as alternative to that of transfer. These emphasise the relational and flow over context as a container.
Rather than focus on transfer of an existing skills set, the practices themselves, while identifiable as the same at some level, take on a different significance when networked into a different set of practices. Here it may be the pattern of participatory processes that are transferred rather than knowledge. This entails moving from a generalised notion of learning transfer to an understanding of the diverse specifics of a context that may be mobilised. To focus on learning per se may not be helpful therefore. Conventionally we might focus on what occurs in one context to the exclusion of others. What is suggested here is that this is only an effective pedagogic strategy if we assume context as a container. When we start to question that, the interesting pedagogic space is that in-between arena of boundary practices, where ‘elements from both sides are always present in the boundary zone’ (Tuomi-Grohn, et al. 2003: 5). These are not closed spaces but hybrid, networked and mediated domains, which give raise to alternative framings and metaphors.
Here the notion of a boundary object is crucial. The notion of boundary objects was developed in actor-network theory (ANT) (Star 1989), but has also been taken up by Wenger (1998) in his conceptualisation of communities of practice. In ANT, ‘like the blackboard, a boundary object "sits in the middle" of a group of actors with divergent viewpoints’ (Star 1989: 46). Boundary objects circulate through networks playing different roles in different situations. They are not merely material; boundary objects can be ‘stuff and things, tools, artefacts and techniques, and ideas, stories and memories’ (Bowker and Start 2000: 298). For Wenger (1998: 107) boundary objects work at the edges of communities of practice mediating their external relationships; ‘they enable co-ordination, but they can do so without actually creating a bridge between the perspectives and the meanings of various communities’."
(Richard Edwards, SCUTREA Conference 2005)
*Bowker, G. and Star, S. (2000) Sorting things out: classification and its consequences, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.
*Eraut, M. (2004) ‘Informal learning in the workplace’, Studies in Continuing Education, 26, 2, pp. 247-74.
*Star, S. L. (1989) ‘The structure of ill-structured solutions: boundary objects and heterogeneous distributed problem solving’, in L. Gasser and M. Huhns (eds) Distributed artificial intelligence, Vol. II, London, Pitman.
*Tuomi-Grohn, T. and Engestrom, Y. (eds) (2003) Between work and school: new perspectives on transfer and boundary-crossing, London, Pergamon.
*Tuomi-Grohn, T. and Engestrom, Y. (2003a) ‘Conceptualising transfer: from standard notions to developmental notions’, in T. Tuomi-Grohn and Y. Engestrom (eds) Between work and school: new perspectives on transfer and boundary-crossing, London, Pergamon.
*Tuomi-Grohn, T., Engestrom, Y. and Young, M. (2003) ‘From transfer to boundary-crossing between school and work as a tool for developing vocational education: an introduction’, in T. Tuomi-Grohn and Y. Engestrom (eds) Between work and school: new perspectives on transfer and boundary-crossing, London Pergamon.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
