On the integration of digital technologies into mathematics classrooms

Trouche‘s (2003) presentation at the Third Computer Algebra in Mathematics Education Symposium focused on the notions of instrumental genesis and of orchestration: the former concerning the mutual transformation of learner and artefact in the course of constructing knowledge with technology; the latter concerning the problem of integrating technology into classroom practice. At the Symposium, there was considerable discussion of the idea of situated abstraction, which the current authors have been developing over the last decade. In this paper, we summarise the theory of instrumental genesis and attempt to link it with situated abstraction. We then seek to broaden Trouche‘s discussion of orchestration to elaborate the role of artefacts in the process, and describe how the notion of situated abstraction could be used to make sense of the evolving mathematical knowledge of a community as well as an individual. We conclude by elaborating the ways in which technological artefacts can provide shared means of mathematical expression, and discuss the need to recognise the diversity of student‘s emergent meanings for mathematics, and the legitimacy of mathematical expression that may be initially divergent from institutionalised mathematics

Toward an Aesthetics of New-Media Environments

In this paper I suggest that, over and above the need to explore and understand the technological newness of computer art works, there is a need to address the aesthetic significance of the changes and effects that such technological newness brings about, considering the whole environmental transaction pertaining to new media, including what they can or do offer and what users do or can do with such offerings, and how this whole package is integrated into our living spaces and activities. I argue that, given the primacy of computer-based interaction in the new-media, the notion of ‘ornamentality’ indicates the ground-floor aesthetics of new-media environments. I locate ornamentality not only in the logically constitutive principles of the new-media (hypertextuality and interactivity) but also in their multiform cultural embodiments (decoration as cultural interface). I utilize Kendall Walton’s theory of ornamentality in order to construe a puzzle pertaining to the ornamental erosion of information in new-media environments. I argue that insofar as we consider new-media to be conduits of ‘real-life’, the excessive density of ornamental devices prevalent in certain new-media environments forces us to conduct our inquiries under conditions of neustic uncertainty, that is, uncertainty concerning the kind of relationship that we, the users, have to the propositional content mediated. I conclude that this puzzle calls our attention to a peculiar interrogatory complexity inherent in any game of knowledge-seeking conducted across the infosphere, which is not restricted to the simplest form of data retrieval, especially in mixed-reality environments and when the knowledge sought is embodied mimetically

Possibilities for pedagogy in Further Education: Harnessing the abundance of literacy

In this report, it is argued that the most salient factor in the contemporary communicative landscape is the sheer abundance and diversity of possibilities for literacy, and that the extent and nature of students' communicative resources is a central issue in education. The text outlines the conceptual underpinnings of the Literacies for Learning in Further Education project in a social view of literacy, and the associated research design, methodology and analytical framework. It elaborates on the notion of the abundance of literacies in students' everyday lives, and on the potential for harnessing these as resources for the enhancement of learning. It provides case studies of changes in practice that have been undertaken by further education staff in order to draw upon students' everyday literacy practices on Travel and Tourism and Multimedia courses. It ends with some of the broad implications for conceptualising learning that arise from researching through the lens of literacy practices

Creativity and Culture in Copyright Theory

Creativity is universally agreed to be a good that copyright law should seek to promote, yet copyright scholarship and policymaking have proceeded largely on the basis of assumptions about what it actually is. When asked to discuss the source of their inspiration, individual artists describe a process that is intrinsically ineffable. Rights theorists of all varieties have generally subscribed to this understanding, describing creativity in terms of an individual liberty whose form remains largely unspecified. Economic theorists of copyright work from the opposite end of the creative process, seeking to divine the optimal rules for promoting creativity by measuring its marketable byproducts. But these theorists offer no particular reason to think that marketable byproducts are either an appropriate proxy or an effective stimulus for creativity (as opposed to production), and more typically refuse to engage the question. The upshot is that the more we talk about creativity, the more it disappears from view. At the same time, the mainstream of intellectual property scholarship has persistently overlooked a broad array of social science methodologies that provide both descriptive tools for constructing ethnographies of creative processes and theoretical tools for modeling them

Embodiment and embodied design

Picture this. A preverbal infant straddles the center of a seesaw. She gently tilts her weight back and forth from one side to the other, sensing as each side tips downward and then back up again. This child cannot articulate her observations in simple words, let alone in scientific jargon. Can she learn anything from this experience? If so, what is she learning, and what role might such learning play in her future interactions in the world? Of course, this is a nonverbal bodily experience, and any learning that occurs must be bodily, physical learning. But does this nonverbal bodily experience have anything to do with the sort of learning that takes place in schools - learning verbal and abstract concepts? In this chapter, we argue that the body has everything to do with learning, even learning of abstract concepts. Take mathematics, for example. Mathematical practice is thought to be about producing and manipulating arbitrary symbolic inscriptions that bear abstract, universal truisms untainted by human corporeality. Mathematics is thought to epitomize our species’ collective historical achievement of transcending and, perhaps, escaping the mundane, material condition of having a body governed by haphazard terrestrial circumstance. Surely mathematics is disembodied

Development of multiple media documents

Development of documents in multiple media involves activities in three different fields, the technical, the discoursive and the procedural. The major development problems of artifact complexity, cognitive processes, design basis and working context are located where these fields overlap. Pending the emergence of a unified approach to design, any method must allow for development at the three levels of discourse structure, media disposition and composition, and presentation. Related work concerned with generalised discourse structures, structured documents, production methods for existing multiple media artifacts, and hypertext design offer some partial forms of assistance at different levels. Desirable characteristics of a multimedia design method will include three phases of production, a variety of possible actions with media elements, an underlying discoursive structure, and explicit comparates for review

Outline of a multilevel approach of the network society

Social and media networks, the Internet in particular, increasingly link interpersonal, organizational and mass communication. It is argued that this gives a cause for an interdisciplinary and multilevel approach of the network society. This will have to link traditional micro- and meso-level research of social and communication ties (Rogers, Granovetter a.o.) to the macro-level research of the network society at large (Castells a.o.).\ud Systems theory linked to a theory of communicative action establishes a potential basis for a multilevel theory. The systems theory described uses elements of a biologically inspired analysis of networks as complex adaptive systems and the mathematically inspired theory of random and scale-free networks recently elaborated by Barabási, Strogatz and Watts. The outline of the multilevel theory is summarized in ten statements about changing relationships in the network society: an information society with structures and modes of organization primarily shaped by social and media networks. \ud In the last section an inventory is made of the theoretical and methodological changes communication science will have to make to develop a general theory of the information and the network society in the perspective of communication

Pattern languages in HCI: A critical review

This article presents a critical review of patterns and pattern languages in human-computer interaction (HCI). In recent years, patterns and pattern languages have received considerable attention in HCI for their potential as a means for developing and communicating information and knowledge to support good design. This review examines the background to patterns and pattern languages in HCI, and seeks to locate pattern languages in relation to other approaches to interaction design. The review explores four key issues: What is a pattern? What is a pattern language? How are patterns and pattern languages used? and How are values reflected in the pattern-based approach to design? Following on from the review, a future research agenda is proposed for patterns and pattern languages in HCI