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Note: This blog post is most likely to be of interest to those working or planning to work with activity theory.

At the last ISCAR 2011 conference held in Rome last week someone asked about the difference between action and activity.

This is a crucial difference in activity theory. Actions are "goal-directed processes" (Leontiev 1978: 63) driven by specific goals in pursuit of a more general motive. That motive is closely connected to the individual's needs, which account for the orientation to the activity. Activity, on the other hand, is "the purposeful interaction of the subject with the world" (Kaptelinin and Nardi 2006: 31) mediated by cultural artefacts. An activity can be realised by performing different actions (ie, in different ways) (Leontiev 1978).

References

Kaptelinin, V. and Nardi, B. A. (2006) Acting with technology: Activity Theory and interaction design. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Leontiev, A. N. (1978) Activity, consciousness, and personality. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

I'm currently involved in my lit review.

I've got tons to read. I'm working on a seminal book by Vygotsky at the moment. I find his ideas fascinating.

The idea of looking at human development as something that occurs in a socio-cultural environment, and within activity patterns, makes a lot of sense to me.

OK, that's that for now.

Back to Vygotsky.