This summary takes quotes from the meeting ( read the transcript at ActivityTheoryTranscript ), decontextualises them and randomly shuffles them back together again to create an incoherent babble of unrelated phrases. The paper referred to can be found at ActivityTheory.
Enjoy...
The paper was somewhat circular, and the contribution of Activity Theory was unclear.
Does AT add anything in the paper? They didn’t seem to discuss its usefulness compared to other things – it proves you can apply it but not how well it works. How much of the results can you attribute to the use of AT? Does AT ‘add value’? I could agree to the conclusions, but it was hard to say that that was because of what you used in your analysis. In the abstract they talk about how good their course is – that’s their starting point, but it would have been better to ask the students what their outcomes were. If you had something like ‘students had terrible learning outcomes’ then maybe AT could be used to point to improvements but it seems that in this one it’s a little bit circular like ‘here’s activity theory and we study our really good course and activity theory shows that our course is really good’. It seems to be describing and 'replicating' complexity without making a contribution?
The role and interpretative licence of the researcher is unclear
They’ve said that the purpose of the activity determines the bounds of the activity system, but the purpose for whom? Some activities have purposes that are clearly defined by the researcher, while other activities have purposes defined by the subject – for example the person doesn’t see the computer as a tool for learning, because the person doesn’t know they’re learning something, yet. The researcher is bracketing all of that as the activity system, so the purpose has been defined by the researcher, even though the subject doesn’t know yet what the object is.
Is the ‘subject’ a person with experiences? Or do all experiences become part of the ‘instruments/mediators’ category?
It was problematic that you could change something from a goal of an activity to then that achieved goal being the mediator of the next thing. They seem such different things. They talk about your experience becoming a ‘mediator’, but I don’t see that you should separate that experience from the subject. Doesn’t that prior experience become ‘part of Todd’, not a ‘mediating tool’. Do you say ‘Todd has changed’ or do you say ‘Todd now has a new mediator at his disposal, which is his understanding’?
It seems to be really concerned with situating human thought and activity in the world, yet there’s this strong divide between the subject and what they’re acting on. And it seemed to be that the boundaries between the person, the tool and the world were quite different from the stuff that you read from phenomenology, which says it’s all the same thing - this unitary kind of monism where you’re not separated from the world you’re acting in. There’s no place here for the hammer to lose its properties, like Heidegger says, for the hammer to become an extension of ourselves, there’s always ‘a tool’. That’s part of the same problem I have with Todd’s understanding becoming a tool is that they dissociate ‘subject’ and ‘instrument’ as these two parts of the triangle, then they say ‘mental tools are instruments’ so heuristics or algebra become mental instruments, and you then have to deal with the issue of this separation between the subject and their mind. It’s like the subject is distilled to ‘the ability to act’, distilled to just this ‘agency’ and everything else is a tool to be used by something that can select among alternatives and make choices? it doesn’t really seem to be about embodied knowledge, its more like like ‘an agency’ which has everything to draw on, including community, rules, knowledge…
The definition of activity seems to presuppose an actors awareness of their goal
It’s presuming the actor has a purpose for acting, in their definition of activity they’re ‘doing in order to transform something’. How aware they are of why they’re doing what they’re doing when they’re doing it is debatable. It seems presumptious to define activity as purposeful activity, it’s one thing to say there was a point of all this at the end, it’s another thing to say he was doing this to transform this into something preferable.
The emphasis seems to be on talking and thinking rather than doing
I thought if you were studying activity, you would go into more depth - I was imagining it was a theory of physical activity, as well as thinking and talking, and they didn’t seem to go into much depth of what they were actually doing ie the activity.
Activity Theory explicitly recognises context in the model
I guess most models of learning are cognitivist - they don’t look at learning in the world, and there are some models, like AT or situated cognition that notice explicitly that action and interaction with something have for learning, and I think if you look at a cognitive model you would just look at how his conceptual model was changing, instead of how he actually had to engage with the software, and in that process, that’s where the understanding occurred. I guess not many theories try and relate context and activity, and this one tries really hard. I’m not sure its successful, but it has a role for everything, like as a tool as a role or an agent, in this community you have all of this culture, you can claim culture is a tool but at least its accounted for, whereas in a scientific model you have to define everything as mental or physical – it’s either action in the world or it’s a thought, and its hard then to represent culture because you have to represent culture as actions or you interalise culture in the head
Activity Theory makes seemingly dubious claims about the meaning of objects
Can socially defined properties of objects really be studied scientifically, or objectively at least? There seems to be a big chasm between being able to study the properties of something and to study the categories that a human gives to that? I think that’s a problem with semiotics, too. It tries to be a ‘science of signs’ and it’s kind of the same thing
Does Activity Theory still need external validation?
They justify their perfectly self-contained theory of activity with interviews! It seems they’re gathering whatever evidence they can, regardless of whether it fits within their theory, to prove that the theory works.
Breakdown of activity into actions and operations is a very ‘cognitive engineering’ approach and the terminology is not consistent with other research areas.
Criticisms of ethnomethodology are that they are about activity and not action. Action is purposeful and directed, whereas activity is unthinking engagement, or ‘happenings’, and ethnomethodology never gets at why people are doing things, it just gets at sections of activity, which is almost exactly the opposite of that framework there, in that activity is this whole thing you’re involved in, and actions are individual parts of an activity, is that right? It’s just a use of words that’s not consistent with other research themes an activity as I understand it can be taken at a few levels, depending on how you want to approach it. Like, the same thing can be seen as an individual activity or an action within a larger community activity. Like, there are no rules for boundaries between these categories, or no ‘scaling rules’.
Some inconsitencies arise when looking at the motives and power of Activity Theory
If you’re trying to say that your model is keeping hold on the context, then you’re saying you can predict, than there’s some contradiction there. if context is unpredictable and the model includes context, than the model shouldn’t be able to used to predict human behaviour
I agree!
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