Working with a fellow student we can share each other's notes, but here I question their worth, that coming from your personal choices and sensibilities that should trigger in you the original reasons why you picked a thing out, they often appear disjointed and illogical to another. Perhaps when you sit down together like pushing a couple of combs together the mesh offers a third interpretation from which you can then work?
Expansive Learning
Engestrom (2006) The idea of internal contradictions of change, with a model of learning activity based in horizontal, not vertical learning and 'knotworking' whereby the nodes and collective ownership of learning changes.
Learning that is top down and stems from:
Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995)
Learning comes about from participation in culturally valued practices in which something useful is produced – though participation and acquisition alone cannot be enough to make major change. Engestrom (2006:61)
When it comes to learning on campus think about the 'hidden curriculum of what it means to be a student'. Bateston (1972)
REFERENCE
Bateston (1972) Steps to an ecology of mind: collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution and epistomelogy. New York. Ballantine Books.
Engestrom Y, (2006) Learning by expanding. An activity theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki. Orienta–Konsultit.
Lave and Wenger (1991) Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge.
Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) The Knowledge Creating Company: How Japanese companies create the dynamics for learning
I tried start a discussion on Engestrom in the General Forum.
To make the subject my own I drew up the activity system on MDF then laid out some chess pieces. Ideally I would do this outside, on a beach perhaps, with people and objects.
This is how I'd develop a concept board in three dimensions, with real instruments.
I've done this with a Youth Theatre before developing a script for a video, the entire process enabling me to get my head around the subject so that any audience who then view the product of my work get it too. (hopefully).
This is web 1.0 thinking, telling. Web 2.0 should engage your audience earlier in the creative process, so that it is a collaborative, shared, and these days a fluid, even an open outcome.
quote 16 May 11
Social networks tend to disproportionally favor connections between individuals with either similar or dissimilar characteristics. This propensity, referred to as assortative mixing or homophily, is expressed as the correlation between attribute values of nearest neighbour vertices in a graph.
Recent results indicate that beyond demographic features such as age, sex and race, even psychological states such as “loneliness” can be assortative in a social network.
In spite of the increasing societal importance of online social networks it is unknown whether assortative mixing of psychological states takes place in situations where social ties are mediated solely by online networking services in the absence of physical contact.
Here, we show that general happiness or Subjective Well-Being (SWB) of Twitter users, as measured from a 6 month record of their individual tweets, is indeed assortative across the Twitter social network. To our knowledge this is the first result that shows assortative mixing in online networks at the level of SWB.
Our results imply that online social networks may be equally subject to the social mechanisms that cause assortative mixing in real social networks and that such assortative mixing takes place at the level of SWB.
Given the increasing prevalence of online social networks, their propensity to connect users with similar levels of SWB may be an important instrument in better understanding how both positive and negative sentiments spread through online social ties.
Future research may focus on how event-specific mood states can propagate and influence user behavior in “real life”. — [1103.0784] Happiness is assortative in online social networks
We need everyone out there if everyone is going to be represented.
I've taken this, from Engestrom and considered this as the interplay between SIX people (or groups) - or a mix of the two. Six people who are bringing to the discussion their different backgrounds and ideas in order to address a topic. At arm's length, the objects, the ideas, views or knowledge that they have begins to take on an identity of its own.
'Expansive learning is based on Vygotsky, though three times removed; it implies that we learn within activity pockets as individuals and groups. The interplay between these groups are the consequential objects of learning that in turn transmogrify in the presence of other objects. Solving problems, dealing with contradictions, may come about as these learning systems slide or shift'.
Amyone care to comment?
This is my take on a topic that has taken me through the briar-bush and out the other side. Has the struggle been worth it. The challenge I feel I face when reading papers such is this is how to make the subject matter comprehensible to the non-academic, I challenge I throw down to every academic: it is possible to make yourselves understood by the majority, rather than a minority.
REFERENCE
Engeström (2001) article, Expansive learning at work: toward an activity theoretical reconceptualisation
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