INFO 782 — Spring 2009 — Gerry Stahl

You Tube: “Information R/evolution”

Outline of this week’s class  YouTube: “A vision of students today”  Course overview (and Blackboard demo)  Form small groups  Introductions of students & instructor  Theories of information & human thinking  Information & education  YouTube: “Information R/evolution”  Information science  Information and users  YouTube: “The machine is us/ing us”

“Social theories of information systems relevant to computer support for collaborative information behavior”

information systems for group use  as computational artifacts  as informational resources how they are: designed, enacted, diffused, adopted, evolved within social settings

post-cognitivist theories  social constructivism,  activity theory,  situated cognition,  distributed cognition,  actor-network theory,  ethnomethodology,  group cognition

texts & con-texts  [RCA] Ackerman, M., Halverson, C., Erickson, T., & Kellogg, W. (2008). Resources, co-evolution and artifacts: Theory in CSCW. London, UK: Springer. [purchase]  [GC] Stahl, G. (2006). Group cognition: Computer support for building collaborative knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Series on Acting with Technology. Available from [purchase or download]  [SVMT] Stahl, G. (Ed.). (in press). Studying virtual math teams. New York, NY: Springer. Computer-supported collaborative learning book series, vol. 11. Available from [download]  Other readings [download in Blackboard]

Weekly readings  Before noon Saturday, post reviews ( words each) of 2 readings in Blackboard discussion  Before midnight Monday, post evaluations ( words each) of 3 reviews in Blackboard discussion  Before class, read other people’s reviews & evaluations  Bring questions to class: mysterious words, incomprehensible sentences, confusing arguments

Individual assignments  4. Midterm reflection paper  9. Final reflection paper

Group assignments  Each week, meet with your group online  in your group’s Blackboard virtual classroom  With chat  With whiteboard for outlining ideas  Prepare to present one of the readings

Group assignments  Group A:  Group B:  Group C:  Group D:  Group E:

Some info about the users of this course’s info  Take 5 minutes to interview your neighbor in the classroom  Then stand up with your neighbor and briefly introduce her/him to the class  Name; something about their interest in informatics; something about their career; what they hope to get out or this course

The Blackboard information system s/portal/frameset.jsp s/portal/frameset.jsp 

A brief history of thought: info, knowledge, truth & human cognition 

Plato’s philosophy  Starting point for Western thought, science & technology  Truth, knowledge, learning, wisdom  Education takes the student out of the common-sense world through stages and the student must struggle to make sense  A world of ideas, concepts, theory that sheds light on empirical sense perception

Western philosophy (500 bc– 2009 ad), then social theory  Greek: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle  Latinized Aristotelian Christian theology  Descartes (cogito ergo sum)  Empiricism vs rationalism  Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx  Behaviorism, cognitivism, post-cognitivism

 Plato distinguished the common-sense world of shadows from the realm of true knowledge, consisting of the general forms or concepts of things  The medieval Christian realms of heaven/earth  Descartes separation of mind and body  Empiricism (sense perception & induction) vs rationalism (logic, predictive science & deduction)  Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx (people constitute the world socially)

 Introspective psychology:  What do we experience about how we think? Bias, rationalization, no implicit processes  Behaviorism in the 1930’s-1950’s:  Pavlov dogs, Skinner rats & pidgeons learn by conditioned reflexes; drill & practice in education  Cognitivism in the 1960’s-1980’s:  The human mind interprets and constructs understanding of the world  Post-cognitivism in the 1990’s-2010’s:  Not a purely rational, individual process of mental representations & models; tacit knowledge, interpersonal interaction, cultural practices

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The readings Intro to domains of groups & information  Social informatics  CSCW  CSCL Current (post-cognitivist) theories of information artifacts & systems  Activity theory (Vygotsky, Engestrom)  Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel)  Situated & distributed cognition (Hutchins)  Actor-network theory (Latour)  Group cognition (Stahl)

Philosophies and scientific paradigms led to:  Multi-disciplinary approaches, like cognitive sciences, learning sciences, information sciences, social informatics, CSCW, CSCL, …  Different theories of learning, education, scientific method, software designs  There were also larger social changes: war, prosperity, ideologies, technologies, etc.  Can you follow the connections, overlaps, differences, application areas, holes?

Questions?  You should have lots of questions now.  Many of them will be addressed in the readings  … Then you will have even deeper questions … (I hope)