Re: [Air-l] Informal programming learning?
Jeremy, Not a reference to specifically learning programming, but the "Social Life of Information" by John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid is about the phenomenon of the "practice of learning." IB
jhuns@vt.edu 01/27/2003 7:38:30 PM >>> there is, as i recall, at least one such work at opensource.mit.edu, i'd be interested in hearing of others. <lurk mode= on> ! error mode not present On Monday, January 27, 2003, at 06:23 PM, David Wiley wrote:
<lurk mode=off>
Everyone,
I'm looking for references to the informal (trans. extracurricular) learning of programming. We all know (or may be) geeks of great prowess who never took a CS course. These people frequently relied on
the Internet to receive help, get feedback, etc. Anyone know of any research pieces that detail (or at least reference) this phenomenon? jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu on the ibook www.cddc.vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy/blog
() ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments _______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l@aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l Irene Berkowitz Program Director, Curricular Publications and Systems Office of the Vice Provost Temple University tel. 215-204-7596 fax. 215-204 3175 berkowitz@mail.temple.edu
yes, i have Brown and Duguid and have read some of it. i find it goes well with much of the work on tacit knowing in technological fields such as found in Michael Polanyi's work amongst others. learning tacit knowledge is also somewhat exemplified in leviathan and the air pump by shapin and shaffer, seeley brown also has some interesting work on the web like http://www.creatingthe21stcentury.org/JSB4-motorbike.html but all of this ties in with that huge set of literatures on organizational learning, org. theory, knowledge management, etc. which then takes us back to looking for in open source. Now, I'm sort of approaching these open source questions through the rubric of 'epistemic communities' which i sort of take from *Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge by Knorr-Cetina, but you can find it elsewhere. If you google on some of these terms with open source, interesting papers arise here and there. A while ago, '2000', when myself and a few others were running a side-program called cyberassistants, which was a program oriented toward using undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities and social sciences to 'span the gap' in higher education computing support in various disciplines, I set about developing a set of knowledge trees* which led from basic skills toward complex skills, such as starting in web design and ending up in scripting, databases, etc. or from basic maintenance to advanced trouble-shooting, etc, I ended with having people learn by doing. This generated a problem centered around tacit knowledges and the translation of knowledge in practical and performative environments. In short, the problem was that know-how for certain groups of people was not a universal knowledge, but highly located knowledge. So while they understood that word document could be edited, and understood that an HTML document could be edited, they did not see that it was the same thing, thus when presented with a block of code that could be edited they did not make always the inductive leap even upon presentation and instruction. In the end, I started moving away from those problems and thinking about other questions involved in getting certain populations using certain things in certain ways, and i started looking at nodes of translation in actor network theory and similar things. Somewhere in one of my archives, i have a paper started on using undergraduate logic classes as the point of translation for understanding certain digital technologies. In short, it was about finding a common way of understanding how things operated and then allowing certain groups of students and faculty to leverage that point of translation to further their own understanding and interest. However, 2001, i closed cyberassistants as the fundamental structure of the program changed due to personel changes, and that ended most of this line of enquiry for me, though I still find it interesting and if others are interested in trying similar types of programs at their school, and I think we did manage to export some of the principles to some programs trhough SURA, I'd be interested. I'm also interested in how informal programming learning occurs, because that is inherently what cyberassistants were supposed to be learning in one part of their job and to some extent they did. Irene Berkowitz wrote:
This is an interesting thread. With respect to knowledge management and fostering involvement in online communities, I have been working with the term open source learning (OSL) that lends itself quite well here. We are currently seeking to measure this kind of involvement in a community learning network study, using the metaphor of open source to describe the kind of iterative participation and development of social capital within community networks in general. Also of interest may be Rajiv Shah's (who is on this list, I think) work on the social construction of code. There are interesting parallels between what I term open source learning (to describe the process of learning within networks) and the discussion about how code, as socio-technically constructed, contributes to this process. Rajiv can say more, but I have found his ideas very useful. He has an article linked from here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=328920 Also, I have a short article about OSL online here: http://smaug.java.utoronto.ca/~luke/articles/network_society/osl_cop.htm called open source learning: developing communities of practice in the network society I am very interested in these ideas, as they relate very much to my own work on community learning networks, digital citizenship, diversity and accessibility, etc. Also relevant is Lucy Suchmans work on situated actions, and Lave and Wengers community of practice work. Best, Robert jeremy wrote:
yes, i have Brown and Duguid and have read some of it. i find it goes well with much of the work on tacit knowing in technological fields such as found in Michael Polanyi's work amongst others. learning tacit knowledge is also somewhat exemplified in leviathan and the air pump by shapin and shaffer, seeley brown also has some interesting work on the web like http://www.creatingthe21stcentury.org/JSB4-motorbike.html but all of this ties in with that huge set of literatures on organizational learning, org. theory, knowledge management, etc. which then takes us back to looking for in open source. Now, I'm sort of approaching these open source questions through the rubric of 'epistemic communities' which i sort of take from *Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge by Knorr-Cetina, but you can find it elsewhere. If you google on some of these terms with open source, interesting papers arise here and there.
A while ago, '2000', when myself and a few others were running a side-program called cyberassistants, which was a program oriented toward using undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities and social sciences to 'span the gap' in higher education computing support in various disciplines, I set about developing a set of knowledge trees* which led from basic skills toward complex skills, such as starting in web design and ending up in scripting, databases, etc. or from basic maintenance to advanced trouble-shooting, etc, I ended with having people learn by doing. This generated a problem centered around tacit knowledges and the translation of knowledge in practical and performative environments. In short, the problem was that know-how for certain groups of people was not a universal knowledge, but highly located knowledge. So while they understood that word document could be edited, and understood that an HTML document could be edited, they did not see that it was the same thing, thus when presented with a block of code that could be edited they did not make always the inductive leap even upon presentation and instruction. In the end, I started moving away from those problems and thinking about other questions involved in getting certain populations using certain things in certain ways, and i started looking at nodes of translation in actor network theory and similar things. Somewhere in one of my archives, i have a paper started on using undergraduate logic classes as the point of translation for understanding certain digital technologies. In short, it was about finding a common way of understanding how things operated and then allowing certain groups of students and faculty to leverage that point of translation to further their own understanding and interest. However, 2001, i closed cyberassistants as the fundamental structure of the program changed due to personel changes, and that ended most of this line of enquiry for me, though I still find it interesting and if others are interested in trying similar types of programs at their school, and I think we did manage to export some of the principles to some programs trhough SURA, I'd be interested. I'm also interested in how informal programming learning occurs, because that is inherently what cyberassistants were supposed to be learning in one part of their job and to some extent they did.
Irene Berkowitz wrote:
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As long as others are interested, I will add my two cents here (esp. since j has informed me that lurker mode is no longer working). Below is a piece on "online self-organizing social systems" we published in Quarterly Review of Distance Ed. The goal is to see if principles of biological self-org can be used to describe what's happening in a very large web board environment (I'm an instructional technologist by trade). http://wiley.ed.usu.edu/docs/ososs.pdf As a trivia bit, "osu" (pron. "oh - s") in Japanese translates loosely "what's up?", so we decided that ososs would be a great acronym, since is sounds like two people greeting each other. =) D Robert Luke wrote:
This is an interesting thread. With respect to knowledge management and fostering involvement in online communities, I have been working with the term open source learning (OSL) that lends itself quite well here. We are currently seeking to measure this kind of involvement in a community learning network study, using the metaphor of open source to describe the kind of iterative participation and development of social capital within community networks in general.
Also of interest may be Rajiv Shah's (who is on this list, I think) work on the social construction of code. There are interesting parallels between what I term open source learning (to describe the process of learning within networks) and the discussion about how code, as socio-technically constructed, contributes to this process. Rajiv can say more, but I have found his ideas very useful. He has an article linked from here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=328920
Also, I have a short article about OSL online here: http://smaug.java.utoronto.ca/~luke/articles/network_society/osl_cop.htm called “open source learning: developing communities of practice in the network society”
I am very interested in these ideas, as they relate very much to my own work on community learning networks, digital citizenship, diversity and accessibility, etc. Also relevant is Lucy Suchman’s work on situated actions, and Lave and Wenger’s community of practice work.
Best, Robert
-- http://wiley.ed.usu.edu/ "I'm much more interested in being right today than I am in maintaining that I was right yesterday."
Those of you who have looked at research subjects' experience of online form filling... any chance of contacting me off-list to give me a bit of advice with some questionnaires I am setting up? Thanks, Ben
Ben, Check the archives of air-l. There was discussion of this before, at least twice. Once all throughout June and into July, 2002, and once in late October/early November of 2001. I saved a bunch of these messages, but rather than forwarding, I figured you might want to check the archives. Ulla ---------------------------------------------------- Ulla Bunz Assistant Professor Department of Communication Rutgers University 4 Huntington Street New Brunswick, NJ 08901 Email: bunz@scils.rutgers.edu ---------------------------------------------------- -----Original Message----- From: air-l-admin@aoir.org [mailto:air-l-admin@aoir.org] On Behalf Of Ben Davidson Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 6:41 AM To: air-l@aoir.org Subject: [Air-l] research subjects' experience of online form filling Those of you who have looked at research subjects' experience of online form filling... any chance of contacting me off-list to give me a bit of advice with some questionnaires I am setting up? Thanks, Ben _______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l@aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l
participants (6)
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Ben Davidson -
David Wiley -
Irene Berkowitz -
jeremy -
Robert Luke -
Ulla Bunz