Source
Automatically imported from: http://commons.somewhere.com:80/rre/1996/syllabus.Computers.Cultu.html
Content
This web service brought to you by Somewhere.Com, LLC.
syllabus: "Computers, Culture, and Distributed Cognition"
``` Cognitive Science 200
Fall 1996
Friday 12:00 - 1:50 in CSB 003
Phil Agre
email: pagre@ucsd.edu home: http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/ office: MCC 106 hours: M 10-12 phone: 534-6328
This term, Cognitive Science 200 is a graduate reading course on "Computers, Culture, and Distributed Cognition". Rather than try to cover the entire intellectual territory suggested by the course title, I have assembled the reading list below after consulting with the students who showed up for the first day of class. I hope it will be helpful.
This is a pass-fail course -- technically, for graduate students, it is S-U. Anyone may attend individual class meetings. Required work for those attending any given week's class are as follows:
(1) subscribe to the class mailing list for that week (instructions below),
(2) read the week's assigned readings carefully,
(3) contribute a couple of paragraphs of thoughtful commentary on the readings to the class mailing list before Thursday morning at 11AM,
(4) read everybody else's contributions to the mailing list before class,
(5) contribute to the discussion in class.
To subscribe to the class mailing list, send a message that looks like this:
To: listserv@cogsci.ucsd.edu Subject: anything
add cs200students
You will get an automatically generated message in response that explains, among other things, how to end your subscription later on. You might want to consider saving that message.
A reading packet for the course will be available at Cal Copy. It will contain Pfaffenberger's Annual Review article, plus all of the articles listed here from Mike Cole's forward. Those articles will also be made available for copying in the CSB kitchen and MCC mailroom. Additional articles will be assigned for the visits of Andrew Feenberg and Ellen Seiter as their respective dates approach; these will be made available for copying as well.
Here are the readings for each week.
October 4th. Visitor: David Kirsh.
David Kirsh, Adapting the world instead of ourselves, to appear in Adaptive Behavior.
October 11th. Theoretical background.
Bonnie Nardi, Studying context: A comparison of activity theory, situated action models, and distributed cognition, Proceedings of the East-West HCI Conference, St. Petersburg, August 1997.
Friedrich Hayek, The uses of knowledge in society, in The Essence of Hayek, edited by Chiaki Nishiyama, Kurt R. Leube, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1984.
Emile Durkheim, selections on the modes of solidarity, in Selected Writings, Edited and translated by Anthony Giddens, Cambridge University Press, 1972.
Bryan Pfaffenberger, Fetishised objects and humanised natures: Towards an anthropology of technology, Man 23(2), 1988, pages 236-252.
Supplementary reading.
Bryan Pfaffenberger, Social anthropology of technology, Annual Review of Anthropology 21, 1992, pages 491-516.
October 18th. Visitor: Ed Hutchins.
Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, MIT Press, 1995. Chapters 3 and 9.
Supplementary reading.
Reviews of "Cognition in the Wild" by Charles Bazerman and Bruno Latour, with Hutchins' response, Mind, Culture, and Activity 3(1), 1996, pages 51-68.
Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, MIT Press, 1996, pages 1-22.
Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind, MIT Press, 1985. Chapters 1 to 4.
October 25th. Visitor: Mike Cole.
Michael Cole and Yrjo Engestrom, A cultural-historical approach to distributed cognition, in Gavriel Salomon, ed, Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Michael Cole, Cultural-historical psychology: A meso-genetic approach, in Laura M. W. Martin, Katherine Nelson, and Ethel Tobach, eds, Sociocultural Psychology: Theory and Practice of Doing and Knowing, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
November 1st. Cyborgs.
William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, MIT Press, 1995. Pages 46-77, 86-107.
Sandy Stone, Split subjects, not atoms, or, How I fell in love with my prosthesis, in Chris Hables Gray, ed, The Cyborg Handbook, Routledge, 1995.
Donna Haraway, A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Routledge, 1991.
N. Katherine Hayles, Designs on the body: Norbert Wiener, cybernetics, and the play of metaphor, History of the Human Sciences 3(2), 1990, pages 211--228.
Supplemental reading.
Mark Poster, Databases as discourse, or Electronic interpellations, in David Lyon and Elia Zureik, eds, Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Will the real body please stand up? Boundary stories about virtual cultures, in Michael Benedikt, ed, Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, 1991.
Randi Markussen, Subjects of technology: Cyborg identities, experience and politics of intervention, paper presented at the workshop on "Subject(s) of Technology", London, June 1995.
Geoffrey Bowker, Information mythology: The world of/as information, in Lisa Bud-Frierman, ed, Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business, London: Routledge, 1994.
November 8th. Education.
Charles Crook, Computers and the Collaborative Experience of Learning, London: Routledge, 1994. Chapter 7.
Janet Ward Schofield, Computers and Classroom Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Chapter 5.
Timothy Koschmann, introduction to Computer Supported Cooperative Learning.
O. K. Tikhomirov, The psychological consequences of computerization, in James V. Wertsch, ed, The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology, Sharpe, 1979.
Supplementary reading.
Monty Neill, Computers, thinking, and schools in "the new world economic order", in James Brook and Iain A. Boal, eds, Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information, San Francisco: City Lights, 1995.
Michael G. Dolence and Donald M. Norris, Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century, Ann Arbor: Society for College and University Planning, 1995. Chapters 1 and 5.
Mark Warschauer, Computer-mediated collaborative learning: Theory and practice, Research Note #17, Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center, Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1995.
November 15th. Visitor: Andrew Feenberg.
George Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968. Pages 83-100.
Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Chapter 8.
other reading TBA
Supplemental reading.
Andrew Feenberg, Lukacs, Marx, and the Sources of Critical Theory, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Chapter 3.
Susan Leigh Star, The politics of formal representations: Wizards, gurus, and organizational complexity, in Susan Leigh Star, ed, Ecologies of Knowledge, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
November 22nd. Networking.
Barry Wellman, An electronic group is virtually a social network, to appear in Sara Kiesler, ed, Research Milestones on the Information Highway, Erlbaum.
Liam Bannon and Kjeld Schmidt, CSCW: Four characters in search of a context, in John M. Bowers and Steven D. Benford, Computer Supported Cooperative Work: Theory, Practice and Design, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1991.
Rob Kling and Suzanne Iacono, The mobilization of support for computerization: The role of computerization movements, Social Problems 35(3), 1988, pages 226-243.
Eevi E. Beck, Changing documents/documenting changes: Using computers for collaborative writing over distance, in Susan Leigh Star, ed, Cultures of Computing, Blackwell, 1995.
Supplemental reading.
David M. Levy and Catherine C. Marshall, Going digital: A look at assumptions underlying digital libraries, Communications of the ACM 38(4), 1995, pages 77-83.
Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia, Net surfers don't ride alone: Virtual communities as communities, paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, 1995.
Steven G. Jones, Understanding community in the information age, in Steven G. Jones, ed, CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995.
Craig Calhoun, The infrastructure of modernity: Indirect social relationships, information technology, and social integration, in Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser, eds, Social Change and Modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
December 6th. Visitor: Ellen Seiter.
Readings TBA.
Supplemental reading.
Christina Allen, What's wrong with the "golden rule"? Conundrums of conducting ethical research in cyberspace, The Information Society 12(2), 1996, pages 175-187. ```
This web service brought to you by Somewhere.Com, LLC.