This is the transcript from the discussion the PIG group had on ActivityTheory on Friday 14/3/03. A more compact ( some would say degraded ) version is at ActivityTheoryDebrief
TimCedermanHaysom – why do people always make frameworks and stuff? For something as simple as ‘someone learning something’.
JesperPedersen – First impression is that it was tough to figure out if you apply this framework for analysis what new things it evokes by looking at what is happening through that framework? This paper is about using activity theory to understand the contradictions in this course, but I don’t think they really discussed a lot about the usefulness of AT compared to other things, and they don’t mention other things. So it’s a proof of ‘you can apply this’ but not about how well it works
BenMcGarry – Yeah I thought they did this study then the observations kind of got squished into their respective parts of the framework. I thought the results they got were ‘very nice’ ( sarcastic ) – triangles nesting within triangles and ‘now this becomes a tool for the next learning segment’
JesperPedersen – And I thought the conclusions about what was good about this shift – were they as a result of the Activity Theory approach? When Margot used her approach on how to learn with hardware, in that same situation what would happen with that ( AT )? What kinds of results would you get from that? So my feeling when I saw that was that it kind of replicates complexity, it doesn’t really deal with it. Because this was just based on eight sentences and I just wondered ‘Oh my god, we have five hours of video somewhere’
BenMcGarry – One thing I noticed in the triangle was that some of the parts were just token things like ‘oh, we have to think about communities, we have to think about rules’ but it seemed like they weren’t as important in the model as … couldn’t you make instruments just part of ‘culture’? I mean you have a subject and an object interacting within a culture rather than
TimCedermanHaysom – you look at the example and they sandwich stuff in there and some of the stuff is completely irrelevant. Like ‘classroom microcultures’
BenMatthews – One of the things I found confusing was there were a couple of shifts in the way they use terms that they never make clear, for example, ‘something that may have been an object of a previous activity system can become a mediator of a new one’ I think it’s fine to make that point, but they make it that the purpose determines the bounds of the activity system, but what they don’t make the point of is whether the purpose is for the actor or for the researcher. The researcher never has a role within the activity system, they just describe what ‘is’ and there were times when it seems to shift from being the purpose of the agent acting upon the object or the purpose of what the researcher sees in the agent acting upon the object.
BenMcGarry – So there’s one view from the subjects eyes and one view from the researchers’ eyes?
BenMatthews – Right, so 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.
BenMcGarry – I thought it seemed almost arbitrary the way things were named – I noticed in these triangles in figure 3 that ‘Todd’s understanding of line of nodes’ turns from an object to a mediator here, and I thought 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. Like, they seem such different things. They talk about your experience as being a mediator, and I don’t see that you should separate that from… Like, doesn’t that become ‘part of Todd’, not a ‘mediating tool’. Like, do you say ‘Todd has changed’ or do you say ‘Todd now has a new mediator at his disposal, which is his understanding’? Like this line shouldn’t go into ‘mediator’ in the new activity triangle but should go into ‘Todd’, since he changes as a result of his understanding of the line of nodes.
BenMatthews – There seems to be a very bizzare distinction between cognitive things and non-cognitive things, like he talked about objects being ‘acted upon’, they talked about understanding being ‘an object’, they talked about problem space as an object, and there’s no conventional use of the word object, so if you’re talking about my understanding of this meeting being the object, which is then mediated by the interactions here or the social norms or whatever, I’m acting upon my own understanding, and that understanding is changing? And that understanding is a tool to do something else? And it’s externalising a lot of stuff that…
BenMcGarry – I realised that ‘object’ is also used to mean ‘objective’….
BenMatthews – And again, that’s where ‘activity is doing something in order to transform something’ is their definition, it’s purposeful doing, and so presumably an actor who has a ‘purpose’ is directing their thoughts at changing that object, whether the object is a purpose or a thing or a…
JesperPedersen – There’s this focus on purpose or action that you criticise, or?
BenMatthews – No I’m… well, again we come to this perspective point. What I’m trying to say is that it’s presuming the actor has a purpose for acting, in their definition of activity they’re ‘doing in order to transform something’. Now, 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
JesperPedersen – I also thought in these transcripts with Todd they weren’t concerned about what they were actually doing, it was about a discussion. The doing part, the model, was not really part of it, you look at my model, you look at my representation, then you use that in your own understanding, but …
BenMcGarry – I noticed they had included in brackets that ‘Todd points’ etc, like I thought if you were studying activity, you would go into more depth, like, 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, the activity.
JesperPedersen – This thing about ‘purposeful actions’ I just thought if you react to something that’s happening, could you still say you react in a purposeful way? Normally you say that have to do this and that, but if something happens and you react…? I think it’s in line with what you were saying Ben?
BenMatthews – Are these retrospective purposes… or?
JesperPedersen – like he doesn’t have any time to think, so…is that purposeful?
BenMcGarry – What about… I didn’t see it much in the paper but the breakdown of activities into action into operations, and… the ame with motives, goals and conditions. Does that sit well with you? Like to me, you can do that if you deconstruct an activity post-hoc, their main activity was cooking dinner so they did this and this, I guess it’s the same thing of perspective, like when you’re doing an activity you don’t plan it down into actions and operations. This seems to be a perspective from the outside looking in, and yes, you can apply this abstraction, but it doesn’t seems right… I can’t articulate it
JesperPedersen – There’s this thing that somehow we miss that we as researchers are part of this activity. That’s one thing – I think it created confusion, trying to analyse activity but you are somehow part of that activity as well, or weren’t you? It was hard to tell?
BenMcGarry – When I first wrote this and there was this quote by Kaptelinin about being able to predict peoples behaviour I originally wrote that it smacks to me of cognitive engineering and that really cognitivist approach to interface design where you decompose the task into discrete elements and optimise based on time to target and stuff like that.
JesperPedersen – you mean this thing like it’s necessary to know what to do next and set a new goal and stuff like that? I just had this feeling that it’s OK to make a framework like this to prove it creates something beneficial, but its up to you to say is it to understand new things or the nature of phenomena, or do you understand to use it in design?
TimCedermanHaysom – Why did they use an AT approach to study this anyway? Are there other methods they could have used? Why break it up the way they did?
BenMcGarry – They wanted to publish a paper I guess
BenMatthews – I guess most models of learning are cognitivist, like, 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 role 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, instead of ‘this representation is now in his head’
BenMcGarry – In the background section it talks about the ‘acquisition vs participation metaphor’ which is I guess saying … moving away from a representational theory of mind towards an activity-based theory…
( adjourn to lunch room )
BenMcGarry – We’ll use the foosball table as a metaphor for design
BrettCampbell – Weren’t we going to use Lego as a metaphor for something?
BenMcGarry – What were your impressions JaredDonovan?
JaredDonovan – I’ve read a little bit about AT before, but just on web pages. The only thing I could really think were the two aspects I’m uncomfortable with, oh, except for the fact they’re all commie and everything ( everyone laughs and laughs and laughs ) but it’s just like, the descriptions didn’t really tell me any extra from… what I read in them, like, do you know what I mean?
BenMcGarry – Yeah, that’s kind of what we’ve been saying, like, it can be used to describe whats going on, but it doesn’t really ‘add value’
JesperPedersen – I tried to search for bits in the paper where you could link it to activity theory, but it was very hard to say by doing this, what do I get?
BenMatthews – What insights does AT give us that we wouldn’t be able to get without it?
JesperPedersen – Because the transcripts I could easily identify myself in those situations, so yeah, I could agree to the conclusions, but it was hard to say that that was because of what you used in your analysis, so I think it’s the same
BenMcGarry – Ben you were going to say something in the office about affordances in AT?
BenMatthews – Reading through it, I get the impression that they seem to borrow from a lot of different areas, and the people they cite are pretty funny – I really got the impression in the pdf paper that a lot of meanings were flexible, that were shifting like they say ‘it’s the subjects goals and intentions that bound which affordances of the object will be transformed’ and I thought objects were being transformed, but now we have affordances? And I thought transformation was about ‘instead of acting on this object, I now use the object acting on something else’
BrettCampbell – Run that by me again
BenMatthews – [diagrams] I had objects that could be material objects or conceptual understandings or problem spaces, but some of these things can be pulled in here, like objects can be transformed into tools, and used as mediating factors to act on an object, which can be a physical object or an understanding or an objective. I’m getting the impresssion that – at the beginning I thought there was a distinction between object and intentions, like they talk about intentionality…
BenMcGarry – Do they say that? It seemed to have smatterings of …
BenMatthews – Subjects, goals and intentions provide boundary conditions for
BenMcGarry – I was going to ask you, isn’t intentionaliy a specific concept in philosophy? By d…?
BenMatthews – Dennet? Intentionality has an AI meaning
BenMcGarry – Don’t know that one, but I thought there was another… one of the concepts made me think of… it was one of the phenomenologists, oh it was Brentano who had this idea of ‘your thoughts are always directed at or about something’ – that’s what I understood intentionality to be about
BenMatthews – me too. Maybe in that sense they’re talking about an intended outcome, not an objective focus…
JesperPedersen – I got the feeling it was intended actions, because in the conclusions summary I first saw that they use the word ‘intentions’ otherwise in the model it was ‘motives, goals and conditions’ but when I suddenly read intention I underlined it, but I’m not sure it was talking about intentions, but I just thought they were thinking of the intention of an action
BenMatthews – One of the other things I found annoying was that they found these tensions, and they talk about these contradictions as tensions, and then all of a sudden we get down here to talking about tensions and we’re talking about ‘tensions of the students trying to learn’ – there’s no place in the model for any of these tensions, like ‘teacher centred’ – those were the tensions they were talking about
BenMcGarry – One other crazy thing was this weird thing about socially defined properties of objects being 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?
BenMatthews – And they treat them the same!
BenMcGarry – Yeah
JaredDonovan – 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
BenMcGarry – And this is tied to … it talks about the links between semiotics and Vygotsky’s psychology
BenMatthews – I didn’t really understand when they started talking about a learning course being object-directed
BenMcGarry – When I read that it made me think ‘what the hell do they mean by objects’? Do they meaning learning outcomes or do they mean using external tools to help you understand something – oriented around the use of physical objects. It annoyed me by the end that ‘wow’ all those secondary tensions in figure 10 relate to objects, therefore our primary contradiction of teacher-driver vs student-emergent should be actually be about object-oriented learning, which bugged me because that was just too neat.
JesperPedersen – I wondered to what extents did they ask the students about these contradictions? Did they ask the students at all?
JaredDonovan – I read a similar thing in the very start – it seemed taken as a given that the students did gain deep understandings, like 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’
BenMatthews – it was just after the bit that we read, but in order to prove that Tood learned something, there’s this miraculous interviewer that appears, and there’s a ‘before’ answer and ‘after’, so they justify their perfectly self-contained theory of activity be interviews? It seems they’re gathering whatever evidence they can, regardless of whether it fits within their theory, to prove that the theory works, and I thought that was kind of funny
BenMcGarry - so they look for this external validations
BenMatthews – One thing TimCedermanHaysom asked before was about why use AT, and 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, like Ben said before 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 either as actions or as thoughts, unless you interalise culture in the head. And most phenomenology stuff that emphasises culture doesn’t make it explicit like this – there’s no phenomenological theory that says ‘context is important for these reasons and in these ways’
BenMcGarry – One thing that was interesting that you reminded me of was that 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.
BenMatthews – 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
BenMcGarry – theres always ‘a tool’. That’s part of the same problem I have with Todd’s understanding becoming a tool is that there doesn’t seem to be a strong – 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. So I guess that’s Engestrom’s model, because sure, it’s nice that it’s a triangle, because ooh we like triangles but it just seemed arbitrary that…
BenMatthews – 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?
Ben Mc – so 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…
BenMatthews – None of those things does appear embedded… everything acts on everything else and it’s all dynamic, but you still have this agent-object and everything else is tool, is some resource…
BenMcGarry – Playing the devils advocate, maybe they could justify it by saying they’re modelling an activity system, and not a person?
BenMatthews – So you’re saying a person might be bits of here, bits of here, might be spread over…
JaredDonovan – Didn’t they say the subject could be a community as well?
BenMatthews – Yeah because they did talk about collaborative learning as well
BenMcGarry – I’m just thinking that from their perspective they may be able to think about it as activity being a disembodied agent and they don’t have to say that’s what a person is?
BenMatthews – I don’t know, and this is where we get in the trouble of trying to compare these things, because the words are… like, ‘seeing as’ could be applied here for a number of things, in terms of the ‘doing something in order to transform something’ and ‘changing of understandings’
BenMcGarry – I thought it was intereseting how Kaptelinin explicity said it’s different from Gibson’s ecological psychology which says that the properties of the world aren’t independent of being perceived, but there’s this whole paper by Albrechtsen and Bodker that is called ‘Activity Theory and Affordances in Cognitive Systems Engineering’ that draws a link, so I haven’t read it, but it’ll be interesting to see how they tie them together – two fields that appear to be based on different philosophical foundations, or appear to be anyway.
BenMatthews – That’s interesting because there’s a guy named Thomas, who is a cognitive psychologist, who has developed a cognitive theory of situated action. So when you act, you’re constantly changing structures in your head, like, he’s got it all as all in the
head, but the actions are situated because he’s got them all represented in the head and your actions change your schema, so it’s very ‘grand unified theory’!
BenMcGarry – It’s alright! We can put action in the head as well!
JaredDonovan – One easy thing you could criticise is the heirarchy – kind of a cheap shot – too easy really! It says that conditions are subsumed by goals, subsumed by motives.
JesperPedersen – my better representation is all the words just in a circle.
JaredDonovan – a hexagon might be nice
BenMcGarry – Triangles are good
JaredDonovan – XML is object-oriented, isn’t it?
BrettCampbell – What was the original point?
JaredDonovan – Heirarchies – weren’t we…
BenMcGarry – My problem is that you can deconstruct activity that way, but for the person that’s doing it it doesn’t feel like there’s this heirarchy. That’s the whole AI view of…
BenMatthews – That view of activities and actions – 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.
BenMcGarry – Here activity is... it can be… 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’. I just made that up…
JaredDonovan – OK so activities – that seems strange then if they’re using activities and actions in the same way that you described? Because it would seem that activities are subsumed by actions
BenMatthews – Yeah in ethnomethodology you would assume that but here it’s the opposite, so…
BenMcGarry – It seemed like a lot of the attitudes are sympathetic, or some of the things we do are similar to what they do, but I did get the feeling that… maybe I’m biased because I’ve always read that it’s based on Russian psychology, but I get this clunky, unwieldy feeling – I can’t think of an example which doesn’t really strengthen my argument!
JaredDonovan – There was something about ‘tools can be physical and psychological, and they can be corrected’ or something, and I just thought ‘GULAG’ ( and then we laughed and laughed )
BenMcGarry – I got that feeling about Kaptelinin’s stuff about understanding and predicting peoples behaviour in different situations, which is where I got a bit worried.
JaredDonovan – 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.
BenMcGarry – Yeah, if context is unpredictable and the model includes context, than the model shouldn’t be able to used to predict…
BenMatthews – On the design list on the last few days – maybe we should try and make out distinctions between methods, theories, framework, paradigms, models, conceptualisations, cause that seems like it would be helpful – it seems like, ethnomethodology is not a theory, but it has implications for theory, like what you can or can’t theorise about, so I wouldn’t mind trying to put something like that together.
BenMcGarry – ‘As always, I have more questions than answers’ Where to from here?
JaredDonovan – What was that list of different things we need to distinguish between?
BenMcGarry – I think it would help to have a list of things, and see how they fit into those categories, because when I was reviewing those comments, it helped to think of an example of the theory and see what it could be used for. So we could each come up with 10 things that has a name that fits into those categories, so the theory of relativity, or the model of… the computational theory of mind
BenMatthews – and I think that something that I’m trying to do for my thesis is whatever framework I come up with, I’m trying to find good examples that don’t fit into that framework, because it makes it more valid, somehow, so he had this nice theory which he then deconstructed… It’s that storytelling and development of discourse in design – peter lloyd.
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