Many teaching practices implicitly assume that conceptual knowledge can be abstracted from the situations in which it is learned and used. This article argues that this assumption inevitably limits the effectiveness of such practices. Drawing on recent research into cognition as it is manifest in everyday activity, the authors argue that knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used. They discuss how this view of knowledge affects our understanding of learning, and they note that conventional schooling too often ignores the influence of school culture on what is learned in school. As an alternative to conventional practices, they propose cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, in press), which honors the situated nature of knowledge. They examine two examples of mathematics instruction that exhibit certain key features of this approach to teaching.

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Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning

Recent ethnographic studies of workplace practices indicate that the ways people actually work usually differ fundamentally from the ways organizations describe that work in manuals, training programs, organizational charts, and job descriptions. Nevertheless, organizations tend to rely on the latter in their attempts to understand and improve work practice. We examine one such study. We then relate its conclusions to compatible investigations of learning and of innovation to argue that conventional descriptions of jobs mask not only the ways people work, but also significant learning and innovation generated in the informal communities-of-practice in which they work. By reassessing work, learning, and innovation in the context of actual communities and actual practices, we suggest that the connections between these three become apparent. With a unified view of working, learning, and innovating, it should be possible to reconceive of and redesign organizations to improve all three.

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Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation

1. Introduction 2. The emergence of learning activity as a historical form of human learning 3. The zone of proximal development as the basic category of expansive research 4. The instruments of expansion 5. Toward an expansive methodology 6. Epilogue.

Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research

This article discusses the conduct and evaluatoin of interpretive research in information systems. While the conventions for evaluating information systems case studies conducted according to the natural science model of social science are now widely accepted, this is not the case for interpretive field studies. A set of principles for the conduct and evaluation of interpretive field research in information systems is proposed, along with their philosophical rationale. The usefulness of the principles is illustrated by evaluating three published interpretive field studies drawn from the IS research literature. The intention of the paper is to further reflect and debate on the important subject of grounding interpretive research methodology.

A set of principles for conducting and evaluating interpretive field studies in information systems

From the Publisher: 
A Question of Identity 
Life on the Screen is a fascinating and wide-ranging investigation of the impact of computers and networking on society, peoples' perceptions of themselves, and the individual's relationship to machines. Sherry Turkle, a Professor of the Sociology of Science at MIT and a licensed psychologist, uses Internet MUDs (multi-user domains, or in older gaming parlance multi-user dungeons) as a launching pad for explorations of software design, user interfaces, simulation, artificial intelligence, artificial life, agents, "bots," virtual reality, and "the on-line way of life." 
Turkle's discussion of postmodernism is particularly enlightening. She shows how postmodern concepts in art, architecture, and ethics are related to concrete topics much closer to home, for example AI research (Minsky's "Society of Mind") and even MUDs (exemplified by students with X-window terminals who are doing homework in one window and simultaneously playing out several different roles in the same MUD in other windows). Those of you who have (like me) been turned off by the shallow, pretentious, meaningless paintings and sculptures that litter our museums of modern art may have a different perspective after hearing what Turkle has to say. 
This is a psychoanalytical book, not a technical one. However, software developers and engineers will find it highly accessible because of the depth of the author's technical understanding and credibility. Unlike most other authors in this genre, Turkle does not constantly jar the technically-literate reader with blatant errors or bogus assertions about how things work. Although I personally don't have time or patience for MUDs,view most of AI as snake-oil, and abhor postmodern architecture, I thought the time spent reading this book was an extremely good investment.

스크린 위의 삶 = Life on the screen : identity in the age of the internet

This chapter represents an adopt a view of representations of work whether created from within the work practices represented or in the context of externally based design initiatives as interpretations in the service of particular interests and purposes, created by actors specifically positioned with respect to the work. It argues the importance of deepening the resources for conceptualizing the intimate relations between work, representations and the politics of organizations. It then aims to a design practice in which representations of work are taken not as proxies for some independently existent organizational processes, but as part of the fabric of meanings within and out of which all working practices the own and others' are made. The sense in which it rings true is particularly remarkable, the large and growing body of literature dedicated to work-flow modeling, business process re-engineering and other methods aimed at representing work in the service of transforming it.

Making work visible

This book considers how agencies are currently figured at the human– machine interface and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Contrary to the apparent enlivening of objects promised by the sciences of the artificial, the author proposes that the rhetorics and practices of those sciences work to obscure the performative nature of both persons and things. The question then shifts from debates over the status of humanlike machines to that of how humans and machines are enacted as similar or different in practice and with what theoretical, practical, and political consequences. Drawing on recent scholarship across the social sciences, humanities, and computing, the author argues for research aimed at tracing the differences within specific sociomaterial arrangements without resorting to essentialist divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while recognizing the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are constituted.

Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and situated actions (2nd edition).

This paper explores the relevance of recent feminist reconstructions of objectivity for the development of alternative practices of technology production and use. I take as my starting place the working relations that make up the design and use of technical systems. Working relations are understood as sociomaterial connections that sustain the visible and invisible work required to construct coherent technologies and put them into use. I outline the boundaries that characterize current relations of development and use, and the boundary crossings required to transform them. Three contrasting positions for design - the view from nowhere, detached intimacy, and located accountability - are discussed as alternative bases for a politics of professional design practice. From the position of located accountability, I close by sketching aspects of what a feminist politics and associated practices of technology production could be.

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Located accountabilities in technology production

(1990). Interactional Troubles in Face-to-Face Survey Interviews. Journal of the American Statistical Association: Vol. 85, No. 409, pp. 232-241.

Interactional Troubles in Face-to-Face Survey Interviews

This paper explores the relevance of recent feminist reconstructions of objectivity for the development of alternative visions of technology production and use. I take as my starting place the working relations that make up the design and use of technical systems. Working relations are understood as networks or webs of connections that sustain the visible and invisible work required to construct coherent technologies and put them into use. I outline the boundaries that characterize current relations of development and use, and the boundary crossings required to transform them. Three contrasting premises for design-the view from nowhere, detached engagement, and located accountability — are taken to represent incommensurate alternatives for a politics of professional design. From the position of located accountability, I close by sketching aspects of what a feminist politics and associated practices of system development could be.

Lucy Suchman

Papers

Making work visible

Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and situated actions (2nd edition).

Located accountabilities in technology production

Interactional Troubles in Face-to-Face Survey Interviews

Working relations of technology production and use