Annotations | Nardi, 1996: Studying Context

[ NB: “Annotations” are occasional posts that explore selections from my research reading—articles or books—in rhetoric, technical and professional communication, and related fields. ]

Nardi, B. (1996). Studying context: A comparison of activity theory, situated action models, and distributed cognition. In B. Nardi (Ed.), Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction (69–102). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

In my last post, I considered how and why human beings become attached to particular artifacts and technologies. Trauman offered a compelling response in the comments area, and I thought I’d respond to at least part of his query here: how to get started with activity theory…

This semester, I’m teaching a special topics graduate seminar exploring activity theory and writing technologies. I’ve posted the syllabus for the course on Scribd, but the actual reading list is hardly innovative—it’s all the usual stuff to get one primed on the basics of AT and its application in rhetoric and writing studies. For deeper reading, have a look at Clay Spinuzzi’s list of activity theory sources on Mendeley.

But I thought I’d address some of the basics of activity theory by considering one of its primary applications: studying particularized contexts and situatedness by deploying a methodological framework (activity theory) that moves a given researcher beyond an overdetermined particularity. This is actually one of Nardi’s (1996) goals in her excellent chapter comparing activity theory to situated action models and distributed cognition.

I thought I’d kill two birds here by exploring some AT basics through an annotation of Nardi’s chapter.

This chapter of Context and Consciousness is, like the one before and the one that follows, essential reading for the budding activity theorist. Nardi explores the notion of context in a given research site by considering perspectives from three similar methodological/theoretical approaches: activity theory, situated action models, and distributed cognition. In this chapter, she asks:

• What exactly is context?
• What is the correct unit of analysis if the individual is no longer the primary locus?
• What are the relations between artifacts, individuals, and social groups?

Nardi begins by making the argument (drawing on several other studies) that it is simply not possible to understand how people learn or work when the unit of analysis is “the unaided individual with no access to other people or to artifacts” (p. 69). In other words, artificial lab settings are no longer sufficient for truly approximating the complexity of human beings acting with technology. She also asks, crucially, how we might study complex, situated contexts while still producing research findings that are generalizable (p. 70).

Essentially, Nardi’s goal is to explore the three approaches noted above to see how each deals with the problem of research contexts, considering the benefits and drawbacks of each for studying HCI in particular.[1]

A situated action model, Nardi argues, “deemphasizes study of more durable, stable phenomena that persist across situations” (p. 72). Situated action models, therefore, are highly particularistic: “These analyses offer intricately detailed observations of the temporal sequencing of a particular train of events rather than being descriptive of enduring patterns of behavior across situations” (p. 72). She adds that situated action models suggests that the structuring of activity emanates from the immediacy of a given situation. This is extremely problematic, of course, because it essentially elides cultural-historical factors that surely impinge upon how a human being uses a particular artifact, for example.

Nardi moves next to a discussion of activity theory, where activity systems are the unit of analysis, comprised of “subject, object, actions, and operations,” and where the object held by any one subject “motivates activity” and gives it shape and direction (p. 73).[2] “Actions are goal-directed processes that must be undertaken to fulfill the object,” she states. Actions are conscious, and different actions may be linked in the service of the same goal. Chains of actions work in support of the more complex activity.

Objects, Nardi notes, are not immutable structures, but they also don’t change on a moment-by-moment basis, thus offering some stability (p. 74). Actions also have operational aspects—routinized, unconscious operations (such as accelerating and breaking while driving a car). Nardi points out that “Activity theory holds that the constituents of activity are not fixed but can dynamically change as conditions change. All levels can move both up and down” (p. 75).

Nardi then describes mediation as a key notion in activity theory approaches. “Artifacts carry with them a particular culture and history,” she argues, drawing on Kuutti (1991), and they are “persistent structures that stretch across activities through time and space” (p. 75). Activity theory, she argues, has a very strong notion of context: “the activity itself is the context. What takes place in an activity system composed of object, actions, and operation, is the context” (p. 76, emphasis in original). Moreover, “People consciously and deliberately generate contexts (activities) in part through their own objects; hence context is not just ‘out there’” (p. 76).

Nardi takes us next through the particulars of the distributed cognition approach, where the representation of knowledge is both in the head and in the world, that is, in and between individuals and artifacts (p. 76–77). For distributed cognition, “we cannot understand how a system achieves its goal by understanding ‘the properties of individual agents alone’” (p. 77). Distributed cognition “moves the unit of analysis to the system and finds its center of gravity in the functioning of the system” (p. 77).

In this chapter, we can see that Nardi establishes a continuum, with the constrained particularity of situated action models at one end, and the systems level approach of distributed cognition at the other. Activity theory, with its recognition of both individual particularity and collective sociocultural histories within a given context, sits somewhere in the middle of this continuum.

Nardi moves next to exploring the key differences between these frameworks, starting with how each structures or models human activity. In an activity theory approach, “activity is shaped first and foremost by an object held by the subject” (p. 79). Activity theory, therefore, emphasizes motivation and intentionality of the human or collective. This differs markedly from the situated action approach, where plans, and presumably intentions, are “retrospective reconstructions” (p. 79) that somehow justify an individual’s response to a given situation.

Nardi’s chapter is as much about research methods as it is exploring the three frameworks noted above. For example, she notes that interviewing is a way of bringing operations to a research participant’s “conscious awareness,” and that doing so can empirically demonstrate “the dynamism of the levels of activity as posited by activity theory” (p. 82). In a situated action model, Nardi argues, “what constitutes a situation is defined by the researcher; there is no definitive concept such as object that marks a situation” (p. 82). This is extremely important, methodologically: in activity theory, “the structuring of activity is determined in part, and in important ways, by human intentionality before the unfolding in a particular situation” (p. 82). So, for a researcher to identify an activity system, she can simply start with the object defined by a given research participant rather than imposing her own view (p. 82–83).

Nardi’s next section explores the important role of persistent structures. She notes that understanding the role played by persistent structures—“artifacts, institutions, and cultural values” (p. 83)—in the structuring and shaping of activity is crucial. Drawing on Leont’ev (1974), she illustrates how activity theory is “concerned with the historical development of activity and the mediating role of artifacts” (p. 83). Nardi then explores the ways in which each approach considers the mediating role of artifacts, suggesting that distributed cognition “has taken most seriously the study of persistent structures” (p. 85). In activity theory approaches, things like artifacts or the work practices in a given community are important “precisely because they span particular situations” (p. 86). In other words, the activity theorist looks for patterns that stretch across individual situations, since those patterns are indicative of larger contexts comprised of genres and norms (Engeström’s “rules”), collaborations and interactions (Engeström’s “division of labor”).

Despite the focus on artifacts, for activity theory, unlike actor network theory, “people and things are unambiguously asymmetrical” (p. 86). Nardi argues that, compared to distributed cognition’s tendency to overdetermine the cognitive properties of artifacts, “The activity theory notion of artifacts as mediators of cognition seems a more reasonable way to discuss relations between artifacts and people” (p. 87). “Activity theory says, in essence, that we are what we do,” she argues (p. 88).

One of the most important contributions of this chapter is Nardi’s argument that activity theory gives researchers a shared vocabulary and outlook on a given research site, and that this shared vocabulary and approach allows us to generalize qualitative research. She gives a compelling example of the three different walkers in a forest near the end of this chapter, and in so doing she provides an application of an activity theoretical lens—one that helps researchers see how situatedness constrains human beings, but doesn’t determine their agency.

Of activity theory, Nardi argues:

Aiming for a broader, deeper account of what people are up to as activity unfolds over time and reaching for a way to incorporate subjective accounts of why people do what they do and how prior knowledge shapes the experience of a given situation is the more satisfying path in the long run. (p. 94)

Activity theory, therefore, comes with the following methodological implications:

1. It requires “A research time frame long enough to understand users’ objects”
2. It requires “Attention to broad patterns of activity rather than narrow episodic fragments”
3. It suggests “The use of a varied set of data collection techniques, including interviews, observations, video, and historical materials” (without an over-reliance on any one method)
4. It suggests “A commitment to understanding things from users’ points of view” (p. 95)

Nardi concludes with the argument that “Activity theory seems the richest framework for studies of context in its comprehensiveness and engagement with difficult issues of consciousness, intentionality, and history” (p. 96). I would add, following Kaptelinin (1996) and Engeström (1999), the centrality of mediation (which is especially important for writing researchers), and following Tolman (1999), I would further stress the “societal nature of the human individual” (p. 71).

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1. I’m making the tacit assumption that we have much to apply from this approach to studying writing, especially as it largely occurs today, as technologically mediated human-computer interaction…  ↩

2. If you are new to activity theory, the nomenclature can be a bit disorienting at first. “Object,” for example, refers not to an artifact, but is more akin to objective. The object is the thing motivating activity…  ↩

Technologies and Attachment

I love my 2009 MacBook Pro. This is a very silly thing to say, and an even sillier thing to publicly acknowledge. But in this post I want to explore how and why users may become attached to specific technologies (but not in an obsessive My Strange Addictions kind of way).

In my graduate class on activity theory this semester, I’m teaching a book that I first encountered as a graduate student myself, Nardi’s wonderful 1996 collection Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction. One of the benefits of teaching, I’ve learned, is revisiting previous work with fresh eyes. In this case, Christiansen’s chapter helps shed new light on why I’ve become so attached to my MBP. She notes:

It is the relationship between artifact and user that creates a feeling inside the user, which in turn is projected to the artifact. The tool relationship becomes a kind of filter through which the user experiences the artifact. (p. 176)

Tools

To really unpack what Christiansen is saying here, we need to back up and explore her definition of the word tool, which is much richer than the typical understanding of “simple implement.” Christiansen’s use of the term tool designates “a computer artifact that has tamed someone so that she has come to care” (p. 175).[1]

This is very interesting, on several levels, especially since activity theory explicitly assumes an agentive asymmetry between people and things. In activity theory, human beings use artifacts in meaningful, intentional, and sociohistorically situated ways. Artifacts and people are not granted equal agency. So can an artifact tame a human being, or do human beings tame artifacts?

Christiansen is extending a metaphor here, one that originates in The Little Prince. The fox tells the little prince that “It is the time you have wasted on your rose that makes it so precious,” and Christiansen extends this line by noting that the prince’s effort and attention to the rose has “caused him to fall in love” with said rose (p. 175).

Intentional and sustained interactions with the rose, or with a computing technology, lead to feelings of attachment. But that’s still well short of the whole story. For example, my key ring is a technology, it’s with me constantly everyday, and I have almost no feelings of attachment to it; indeed, there’s another layer of interaction here…

Mediation

Christiansen extends the little prince metaphor to illustrate the much bigger issue of mediation. It is not the tool in and of itself—not the roseness of the rose or Appleness of my MBP— but the ways in which the artifact acts as a significant mediator in meaningful human activity that leads to the definition of tool noted above. Mediation, of course, necessitates a relationship of some kind.

But more importantly, mediation assumes motives and goals—mediated actions are enacted within and directed toward meaningful activities. Some mediation is fleeting or even invisible, therefore,[2] but other forms are deeply enmeshed in lived experience. And the tools mediating lived experience often involve lots of cultivation and nursing (to use Christiansen’s terms).

Mediation and Activity

The main reason that I love my MBP is its central role in mediating a variety of tremendously important (to me, anyway) activities.

Christiansen takes “activity as the term for the process through which a person creates meaning in her practice, a process we can neither see or fully recall but a process that is ongoing as part of the participation in a community of practice” (p. 177). Activities are complex, longer-term formations made up of chains of actions (Kuutti, 1996).

An example might be the longer-term project of ideating, researching, writing, submitting, and publishing an article. In this lengthy process, there are hundreds or thousands of culturally and historically situated actions that lead to the eventual outcome—publication. In my workflow, the vast majority of those actions are mediated by my relationship with my MBP…

And here’s another way of looking at this relationship. Earlier today, Courtney Danforth tweeted:

People, please stop asking what I do for fun. Don’t make me say that I don’t do anything for fun. You’re implying that what I do isn’t fun.

For me, going to work is fun. I get to read and write things that interest me and teach about what I read and write. Holy shit is my job fun! I love going to work, I love learning new things, I love working with research participants, I love publishing stuff, and I love seeing the consistently amazing things my students produce. And a ton of this love is mediated by the 2009 MacBook Pro (through which this very post is being written).

This is another way of saying that pretty much everything I do professionally—all of the many goal-directed activities relevant to my everyday lived experience—is filtered through this tool.

And as Kaptelinin (1996) points out:

Tool mediation is a way of transmitting cultural knowledge. Tools and culturally developed ways of using tools shape the external activity of individuals and through the process of internalization influence the nature of mental processes (internal activity). (p. 53)

It’s no wonder users become attached to technologies and practices that help mediate the most important activities of their lived experience.

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1. I should note here that Christiansen’s definition is focused on computing devices because the chapter itself explores “Computers as Tools in Human Activity.”  ↩

2. My key ring agains serves as an apt illustration. The key ring becomes visible and consequential in the case of a breakdown or disruption—when I lose my keys, for example.  ↩

Dirty Secret: I Don't Hate Blackboard

It begins a few days before the start of each semester. Tweets of frustration. Tweets of anger. Tweets of stupefied ambivalence. Tweets of unfettered rage. Many of the educators that I follow on Twitter have serious problems with Blackboard or similar “learning management systems.”

I’m no fan either, and I never have been. My first peer-reviewed publication attempted to describe why learning management systems are especially stifling for instruction in writing and rhetoric. I’m also sure that I too have tweeted something to the effect of “Blackboard/WebCT is horridly horrible” in the past. But I feel as though I’ve been harboring a dirty secret, especially when I read those tweets tweets of frustration.

I don’t hate Blackboard.

Over that last couple of years I’ve really backed away from a militant anti-LMS perspective in everyday practice, in large part because it’s simply not conducive to getting things done with what we have.[1]

A rhetorician, after all, makes do with what’s available.[2]

Because of any number of limitations, many instructors simply find ways to play their hands with the cards that they’ve been dealt. For me, this means working within the constraints of the LMS in the most effective way possible, and with the least amount of time, energy, and headache. I wonder if much of the frustration that instructors feel is borne of simply trying to make the LMS do more than it is actually capable of accomplishing on a day-to-day basis.

In point of fact, Blackboard does few things well. Its constraints are massive. Once acknowledged, this perspective actually frees the instructor (and students) to make a deliberate move toward metis.

So, let me begin with some basic premises: first, a locked-down LMS is simply not designed to facilitate public or semi-public discourse; second, the usability of Blackboard and WebCT (the two learning management systems with which I have first-hand experience) is notoriously poor for all users—instructors and students alike; and third, with its profound ontological and epistemic limitations and soul-sucking user experience, it makes sense to spend as little time in the LMS as possible.

Given these premises, then, of what use is Blackboard? Well, there are a couple of areas where the university-sanctioned LMS actually excels: first, it’s great at storing stuff; and second, it’s intentionally designed to facilitate assessment.[3]

I don’t hate Blackboard because I recognize and accept that its limitations are enormous, and as such, I don’t try to make it do anything beyond its extremely limited capabilities. Blackboard, therefore, doesn’t frustrate me in the least.

Here’s a quick rundown of how I use Blackboard:

• To store my syllabus (which includes lots of hyperlinks and can be viewed in-browser)
• To store supplemental reading material (PDFs of articles and such)
• To store assignment descriptions and rubrics
  • To store student deliverables in a knowledge work model, so that everyone in the class can see what everyone else did for a given deliverable
• To privately message my students with feedback and assessments

That’s it. I use Blackboard to do basically the two things (only things?) that it does reasonably well: store stuff and provide private, individual feedback.

And because this is all I do with the LMS, usability improves by simple subtraction.[4] The homepage basically has nothing (I use none of Blackboard’s faux-clever mix and match modules for “assignments,” “announcements,” or anything else; I delete them all). I have a simple left-hand menu which lists:

• Home
• Syllabus
• Supplemental Readings
• Discussions
• Messages

The Discussions area contains one forum, called “Deliverables.” Within this forum there are several threads, each of which corresponds to a given assignment (e.g., “Practicum 1”). The first post in a given thread is my assignment description and any attendant documents; when students have completed a deliverable, they simply reply to a message in the thread and upload their document (or hyperlink).

I use Messages to give my students feedback; they have a running tally of exactly where they stand at any point in the semester by simply consulting their private messages.

To reiterate: my Blackboard experience begins with deleting almost everything the LMS suggests I use; then I add only the things that the LMS can handle with reasonable efficiency. I store stuff there so it can be easily retrieved by students, and I provide feedback that can likewise be easily retrieved and maintained throughout a given semester.

This scenario leverages Blackboard’s few strengths. It means students can upload huge files (like PDFs with video and audio files related to their qualitative studies), that they can safely retrieve copyrighted work (such as articles provided as part of the course readings), and that they can safely maintain a record of their achievement in the course.

For everything else, there’s our face-to-face discussions and the interwebs, where they can have meaningful public and semi-public interactions with authentic audiences.[5]

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1. This is certainly not meant to shame anyone who tweets about the ontological frailties of Blackboard. I rather enjoy them, actually. Instead, I’ve chosen to take a more Stoic approach: some things are up to us, some things aren’t, and we would do well to focus on the things we can control, and those things alone. I don’t have the energy or influence to overturn my university’s LMS policy; I can offer my students interesting workarounds to the limitations of the LMS, however.  ↩

2. I believe it was either Aristotle or Morrissey who argued that “Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”  ↩

3. I can hear you screaming at you screen: “It’s terrible at assessment!!1!” Stay with me here; I don’t use it for assessment in the ways that the designer intended…  ↩

4. Figuring out Blackboard’s Messaging UI, however, remains a serious problem for first-time users. I’m not sure how one could design a poorer messaging workflow. Honestly.  ↩

5. A final note. I have a colleague who grew up in Berkeley; I grew up in the East Bay as well. When I found out he was from Berkeley, I asked him if he hated Piedmont, an affluent enclave in the Berkeley hills that I resented when I was an angsty youngster. He replied, “No, I don’t hate Piedmont.” He understood why some folks did, but he didn’t see the point of hating something like an entire city. “What good could that possibly bring me?,” he wondered. Any residual disgust I harbored towards Piedmont disappeared on the spot.  ↩

Idle Speculation

A few months ago, I think my mom must have googled me and spent some time going through my blog and website. She was reading up on my research and such, and then she sent along a couple of lengthy emails asking all sorts of questions about the future of communication technologies—questions I’m not qualified to answer, necessarily.

I told her I’d try and answer some of her questions, even though my responses would amount to little more than idle speculation. Then I thought it might be neat to simply publish her questions and my answers on the blog, and she was thrilled by the idea. So here goes…

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Subject: “What do you think?”

Hi Son,

Hope that you and your family are doing well and all back at school with all the scheduling that involves. Enjoy your web/blog site and check frequently to see all the wonderful things you are doing. You know that I am so proud of you and all the hard work you have done has certainly paid off. I have a few theoretical questions for you…

Considering the almost universal usage of cell phone technology to tweet, “like” instantly send msg, pix and ideas as we have seen in the countries that have overthrown dictators, would you say that this will be the methodology for future history making/changing events? Do you think that the centuries old idea of “war” as we know it will change?

So, my mom starts off with a huge question, one that I feel woefully unprepared to answer. This is the kind of question that Clay Shirky routinely answers, and I’d consult some of his stuff for viable insights.

But just thinking through the question, I wouldn’t say that mobile technologies necessarily will be central to future “history-making/changing events.” Certainly, it seems inevitable from our current perspective, but who could have predicted 5 years ago the role that something like Twitter would play on a global scale?

So while all signs point to SMS and our current iterations of mobile communications playing a significant role in the coordination of human activity, there’s no telling what might be available to us in 5 or 10 years.

As for the notion of “war,” well, yes. I think our understanding of this construct is always in flux. Look at the role of drones in contemporary warfare, for example…

Now we have the ability to take a blood test from a sick child in Congo and send samples to laboratories in the USA or any where else. The samples are tested, the results emailed/tweeted back, best practice treatment is administered and the child is well. What do you see as the future of medical technology to help alleviate suffering utilizing this means of communication?

Again, I’m so unqualified to address this question that I hesitate to respond. One of my graduate school colleagues, Lucia Dura, is doing interesting and important work in areas like this, and one of my Ball State colleagues, Kerry Anne McGeary, is leading our new Global Health Institute in an effort to explore similar problems.

I also know that this question is related to the previous question in that SMS is increasingly used to facilitate health care decision-making in places where computing technologies are scarce, but mobile technologies are ubiquitous.

As for the political arena, now that everyone has access to modifying, altering and sending images, how will that effect the truth of what we see and believe?

There’s nothing new under the sun as far as this goes. Just differences of scale…

What do you think is the solution to cyber bullying and those who hide behind their keyboard/ texting to decimate the life of others?

This is an area where I haven’t done much thinking, but I know that folks like danah boyd are actively researching in this area, and the work that she and her colleagues are doing is helping to shape public policy…

Subject: “One more…”

Do you think that since tweeting has created a sort of new language to fit in 140 letters/symbols we will eventually evolve to a phonetic only language?

thx 4 yr insite, luv u, ma

Here’s one I can answer! I needn’t just provide my thoughts, since we know that the constraints of SMS—and by extension, Twitter—have resulted in many neologisms that have been adopted in more traditional communication genres.

The word “tweet” itself is a prime example. It’s now a verb that basically means “to broadcast a short, public message using the microblogging service Twitter.”

As for a “phonetic only language,” well, our language is already phonetic, but I think I see where she was going with that question… I think she was asking if written forms of our language will contract in some way, in order to better meet the constraints of SMS.

I’d say the answer is probably yes and no. In the short term, neologisms for shortening written forms of language will prosper. But again, we don’t know what our communications media will look like in 5 years. Even now, for example, Apple’s iMessages is pushing back against the constraints of SMS, affording text expansion within a given mobile message.

Who know’s what we’ll see in 5 years? A renaissance of epistolary communication is not out of the realm of possibility!

Subject: “Re: One more…”

Just thinking of the possibilities with these new methods of communications – visitors from another planet describing earthlings “2 feet, 2 legs, a torso topped by a head and 1 arm and an angular appendage on the other side of the torso that connects to the ear on the head. “ (cell phone user) Or –” 2 feet, 2 legs, torso, 2 arms, 1 head and talks to the air” (blue tooth user)

Medical issues – already seeing “text thumbitis” –(Will the thumb evolve to twice its present size and the other fingers shrink?), greater number of young people with major hearing issues (ear bud use with volume too high), neck cervical issues (always bent over keyboard of cell phone checking or sending text msg), major increase in stress levels and blood pressure due to the 24/7 involvement in constant communication, major increase in eye problems due to small print on text msg and/or computer social network connections, or the really tragic one “accident involving multiple cars due to driver texting while behind the wheel.” New law in CA has already been placed into effect – “no texting while driving – fine at least $350.00.”

Psychological changes – future generations unable to form deep friendships or other personal relationships. Every individual continually on blue tooth or texting while attempting to have conversations with companion, neighbor, friend, spouse etc, greater population of patients with major insecurities/depression and feeling disconnected from life due to loss of cell phone, spending time in “dead zones” etc.

Two really interesting popular audience articles come to mind when reading about changes to personal relationships. This first is Clive Thompson’s excellent, almost magisterial piece on “ambient awareness”.

The second is more recent, and explores the “Joy of Quiet”.

Both articles make compelling arguments, and both are substantially “right.” It’s not either/or, but both/and.

Future of communication? – cell phone type implants in the brain (sort of like a cochlear implant now in use for the deaf) so no actual cell phone or accessory needed? Also no battery needed as communication device powered by neuron synapses of the brain. The possibilities for future communication methods and effects on many areas of our lives are mindboggling ! Fun to speculate.

Definitely fun to speculate! Thanks for your contribution to the blog, mom, and thanks for making me think!

Blogging: Links in Chains of Literate Action

The 2011 Computers and Writing Conference has been widely lauded in recent days as one of the best iterations in the conference's history. I echo those sentiments: the venue was spectacular, the people—as always—were wonderful and supportive, and Ann Arbor is a lovely city.

I participated on a roundtable exploring the following: Is Blogging Dead? Yes, No, Other. With eight participants, we limited our talks to three minutes, leaving lots of time for audience interaction. The panel was organized by Steve Krause, and one of my fellow presenters, Bradley Dilger has done a fine job of corralling some of the discussion before, during, and after the roundtable.

The general feeling was that our session engaged the backchannel in a way that few others did at this year's conference, and part of that is attributable to: 1. the nature of our topic, and 2. the format, which explicitly took emphasis away from individual presenters and attempted to foster what Scott (1967) calls "collaborative critical inquiry."

Put another way: it was a lot of fun to deliver a 3 minute talk, and then sit back and listen to the thoughts of my fellow panelists and audience participants (those co-located and distributed). Basically, I spoke for 3 minutes, then didn't say anything until the last 10 minutes or so of the session. And I learned a lot more that way.

My talk is below. I encourage you to have a look at Bradley's post—he's updating periodically to capture some of the post-roundtable reaction, including a Storify perspective on the session.

CMD, RFID, QR, and Touch at iDMAa 2009

I spent some time over at the Center for Media Design during a break in the International Digital Media and Arts Association conference yesterday, and I had an opportunity to play around with the excellent integration of cross-platform media and information flow here at the conference. (If you have any interest, we've been blogging many of the conference sessions over at the iDMAa 2009 site).

Below are a couple of videos showing how iDMAa and the Center for Media Design have thoroughly integrated conference data (presenters, locations, abstracts) into the places, spaces, and ubiquitous devices that mediate our conference experience...

Backchannel Persistence and Collaborative Meaning-Making

Last week I had the pleasure of delivering a paper relatively close to home, at the 27th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC), at Indiana University in Bloomington. I was especially excited to be on a panel with Shaun Slattery of DePaul University, and Jason Swarts of North Carolina State University--two scholars that I hold in high esteem.

Our panel explored the traces of literate activity that are surfaced and archived in new media writing environments, and which lead to the construction of "fact" on Wikipedia, and the development of provisional knowledge in microblogging platforms. All three papers called on Actor Network Theory and/or Cultural Historical Activity Theory as a way to frame and trace computer supported collaborative work.

I added some theoretical frameworks that are likely too much for a 6,000 word manuscript. I like what I have here, but it's meant to be the start of something much more substantial. In short, my paper amounts to a longish position piece which aims to establish a theoretical framework for tracing meaning-making in persistent backchannel platforms (such as Twitter).

The official published version, should you be able to navigate behind the paywall, is available through the ACM portal. The full proceedings--which include excellent papers from Shaun, Jason, and a number of other fantastic researchers--can also be accessed through ACM. I've uploaded a pre-publication version of the paper to Scribd, and it's available below:

Finally, I've embedded the slides for my presentation as well. If you've seen me present in the past, you'll know that I take a minimalist approach to slidedecks, favoring images over alphabetic text. So, if you'd like the script that accompanies the slides, let me know!

Twitter and Commonplace Books

Since 2006, I have been thinking through various iterations of a digital commonplace book. First, a little background on the traditional practice of commonplacing...

As early as the 14th Century in the west, literate populations began to cobble together bits of information--quotes, measures, thoughts, arguments, summaries, responses--on paper, an increasingly ubiquitous resource. These "note books" eventually came to be known as commonplace books, and they were a predicated upon tenets of classical rhetoric. George Eliot kept a commonplace book; so did Thoreau, Thomas Jefferson, and E.M Forster, among many, many others.

The Digital Commonplace

While people continue to keep journals--both offline and on--the online sourcing and collection of information and contemporary digital reading practices have provided different affordances for the same kinds of work accomplished in the traditional commonplace book. Delicious, Digg, Reader, FriendFeed--all of these tools enable knowledge curation practices which remediate the work of commonplacing to a certain extent. And the affordances are strikingly different: greater access to massive amounts of information, far flung, and harder to filter. If these affordances can be managed effectively, new communications tools can revive commonplacing in a significant way (in fact, if you're reading this, you are very likely already engaged in the kinds of digital commonplacing I am suggesting...).

As I mention above, I have been trying to develop the idea of digital commonplacing in concert with research on recursion in writing studies (and more recently, ambient research). For example, in 2006 my first-year writing students used a modified version of the WebCT discussions area to produce a (quasi) stream of short reading responses and thought pieces that eventually built from and played off of one another. Today, platforms like FriendFeed and Twitter afford commonplacing activities in ways that are persistent, searchable, copyable, and easily shareable.

A key, of course, is positioning the platform so that it can be effective for this kind of work.

I'm still thinking through these ideas, and I'll be discussing Twitter as digital commonplace book at the upcoming International Digital Media and Arts Association annual conference (iDMAa), held this year on my home campus of Ball State University. The abstract for that talk elaborates a bit on these ideas, and is embedded below. As always, I welcome feedback!

4 Reasons Why Twitter Resonates with Generation X

Have you noticed the recent spate of articles about Twitter user demographics? For example, one of my Twitter contacts, @dreig, pointed me to a Reuters piece which suggests that "you could be forgiven for thinking that Twitter was the latest example of youth culture," noting its increasing popularity with those in more, well, advanced demographic brackets ("Twitter Older than it Looks"). Then there's a similar CNET post which points out that "the majority of Twitter users are 35 or older" ("Why Facebook and Twitter are aging gracefully").

Assuming the accuracy of the ComScore numbers that both articles cite, what are some of the factors influencing Twitter adoption among the 35+ demographic? I'll discuss here four of the key features that I feel have contributed to Twitter's popularity with Generation X (full disclosure: I'm 35).

1. It's Dead Simple

Twitter is flexible. Twitter is agile. Twitter is mobile. Usability, thy name is Twitter. These properties could easily have been listed as adoption attributes in their own right for those 35+, but I've chosen to gather them under the rubric of "Dead Simple" here, because collectively they contribute to the fact that Twitter just works (occasional sightings of Fail Whales notwithstanding).

For a generation in college at the dawn of the web, finding unfettered, dead simple, web-based applications is particularly noteworthy, since that same generation has seen so much that didn't work over the years. And as David Weinberger notes, "twitter is an app that scales as a platform." Twitter's flexibility and agility have enabled user-generated innovation and robust third-party development; mired for so long in virtual walled gardens, users 35+ can uniquely appreciate the relative freedom of information circulation that Twitter enables (remember, one can grab an RSS feed of any public Twitter user without ever signing up!). Which leads us to point number two. . .

2. It's Distributed

Since it scales as a platform, Twitter realizes some of the potential of distributed knowledge work. I want to make a distinction here that this isn't necessarily the same type of distributed communication found on social networks like Facebook, where symmetry is enforced and past relationships--now distrubuted--are reinforced.

There is some sense of distributed communication with far-flung social ties on Twitter, to be sure, but the affordances for distributed knowledge work are also more easily leveraged (meaning that I can find and follow someone like Valdis Krebs, for example, without having an algorithm tell me that someone else I know is following him too). And since many of those 35+ are especially inclined to make use of such affordances--say, for professional reasons--Twitter easily enables distributed connections based upon self-identified shared interests, rather than a shared past or location.

Adina Levin argues that Twitter's dynamic asymmetry enables "discovery [of other, distributed users] with low social expense" ("How Asymmetry Scales"). It's easy to find and follow on Twitter, regardless of preexisting knowledge, relationship, or spatial proximity. As a distributed platform, then, the 35+ crowd can selectively receive information from others all over the world more easily than even an RSS feed.

3. It's Public

In a recent Microsoft Research talk, danah boyd argues that "social media continues to be age-graded. Right now, Twitter is all the rage, but are kids using it? For the most part, no" ("Social Media is Here to Stay ... Now What?"). She then explores why this is the case, and hits upon something that has been largely ignored: "the culture of Twitter is all about participation in a large public square ... many are leveraging Twitter to be a part of a broad dialogue. Teens are much more motivated to talk only with their friends..."

In my field, we approach this "participation in a large public square" from the perspective of civic rhetorics, of discursively contributing to culture at large. Those who are 35 and over are well-positioned and uniquely inclined to participate in civic rhetorics for personal, professional, and social reasons.

On a personal level, the 35+ user is likely to feel that age and experience lend a certain viability to their public voice. In professional terms, the 35+ user can leverage the distributed, public knowledge work noted above, while also deploying Twitter as a space to shape professional image. Finally, in social terms, a recognition of shared interests and a desire to shape shared futures allows the 35+ user to contribute publically to political discourse.

4. It's about Communication

In a certain sense, Twitter is really not a social network. The barriers to participation are tremendously low, and the primary--really the only--unit of social connection is discourse (isn't it nearly always so?). Twitter is about talk, and it's dead simple platform makes such talk travel and scale in ways that those 35+ are especially positioned to appreciate.

Generation X came of age with email, and likewise saw email's transition from novelty to nuisance. This morning when I checked my inbox, I found 40 things I didn't want; when I similarly checked my incoming tweets (on my mobie), I found 50 more things that I had explicitly asked for. And those tweets are incredible pivots for social interaction, for simple, agile, distributed, public connections with others that foster ineraction in ways that walled social networks and email simply cannot broach.

Game Theories

I am by no means any kind of expert in game theory. There are many brilliant people in my field that study gaming and game theory, and I've been very lucky to have met a few of them, and to have discussed digital gaming with folks from other disciplines, such as Steven Conway from the New Media Research Group.

These conversations have essentially changed my perspective on digital gaming and its role in childhood educational development. I played video games as a kid (hello Atari 2600!), but I also spent an inordinate amount of time outside, breaking things, making things, and pretending to be a sports superstar. Like many parents, I have at times suggested that my kids don't do enough of this kind of play, and too much of the gaming that is now ubiquitous and digital.

But there's a preponderance of evidence which suggests that gaming in digital environments is actually good for the kids, and combined with my own research interests in digital media, I have relented on how much time my kids spend gaming. In fact, I'm even promoting it, within reason.

There have been some interesting recent developments in applied game theory and primary education. The Institute of Play, for example, promotes "gaming literacies" and seeks to "build new domains of knowledge connected to gaming, digital media, and learning." In fact, a new(ish) public school in NYC called Quest to Learn admitted its first 6th grade class in the fall, which "uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences for students." And a recent NY Daily News article looks at the transition from pencils to joysticks.

All of which leads me to share a short video of my five year-old's first attempt at playing FIFA (my all-time favorite game) on the Xbox 360:

Informal HCI and Media Consumption Study

Okay, not really. You may remember that my daughter's birthday was on Saturday, and we were very excited to give her an iPod Touch.


She's had a little over two full days of use by now, and I thought I'd talk a bit about how she's actually using the device so far. I must say that I'm not surprised, as I've always seen the Touch as more analogous to a laptop than to the Nano, for example. So, this is all very informal, very anecdotal, and by no means rigorously tracked. First, some details on what she actually received:

• iPod Touch 2nd Generation, 8GB
• Preloaded with: Twilight movie (a gift from my son), third Twilight book via the Kindle app, 2 free games and one paid game (Labyrinth), new Hannah Montana album (thanks to @amazonmp3), another full album and one other song that she likes, several tv shows that were already on her Nano, and the free Pandora app
  
• Wifi via WEP encrypted home connection, which I set up before unwrapping

That's pretty much it. So much for actual content loaded on the iPod (a device that originated as a way to conveniently store and disseminate lots of content). When she powered up and began to explore the device, she spent some time looking at the basic apps (weather, time), the games that were loaded, and the gifts she received (album, movie, book).

Then she hopped on YouTube. Then she closed out and headed to her email. Then she set up her contacts. Then she went to her feed reader. Then she streamed music from Pandora. Then she played games, and on her brother's advice, downloaded a couple more free games (Papi Jump is now a family favorite). See a pattern here?

What's most interesting (to me anyway) is what she didn't do: she didn't head over to the desktop and transfer music from iTunes. She didn't really even listen to music (other than through Pandora).

In the afternoon, she had a few friends over for a birthday party. They played outside, and generally did the things that normal 11 year olds do. Then my daughter connected her Touch to the main television, and they watched a little YouTube and then Twilight while eating pizza. Still no music playing. . .

Yesterday, I set up the TextFree Unlimited app from Pinger. She spent much of the afternoon and evening periodically texting her friends, cousins, grama, and mom (who was at Starbucks grading papers) from her iPod. She spent more time playing games and checking out viral videos on YouTube.

I'll not bore you with more details; my point should be abundantly clear by now. The overwhelming majority of the time my daughter spent on her Touch was in activities that we traditionally associate with "computing." Even most of the media consumed (everything other than watching Twilight, it seems) was obtained via the cloud. To me, this pattern of activity is not surprising in the least, yet completely fascinating.