Cognition in the wild a reading

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Cognition in the wild - a reading
Seminar Theorizing work practise Eric Monteiro,
NTNU and UiO Oslo,1999
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Contents

• Situating it
• Core ideas and arguments
• Critique

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Cognitive sciece

• Cognition - what is it?
• Main-stream cognitive science
• Individual
• artificial intelligence (AI)
• Separation of individual from context
• Internal representations

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Computation

• Formal systems BUT
• Material artefacts
• Socially distributed and circulated

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Why bother reading it?

• Real-time work - with cultural history
• Surrounded by technology artefacts
• Inscription and delegation of work
• Robustness of work practises

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ANTish

• Humans non-humans
• Network
• Inscription
• Irreversibility
• ANT - Latour -gt M Berg -gt Hutchinson

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The chart (I)
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The chart (II)

• More than represenation (Wood, Suchman)
• Pre-computation
• Inscribes routines
• Distribution over time
• Accumules practise (genealogy)
• We are all cognitive bricoleurs (p. 172)

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Crystalization of practise

• beyond the individual
• genealogy of practise - accumulation
• inscribed in artefacts - carriers of practise and
  knowledge (Micronesian oral)

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The tides

• direction --gt time
• 24 hours / 32 point 45 minutes, ca. 48min.

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The control revolution

• Problems produce solutions which produce ..
• Alignment - dependencies
• Ex.
• almanac cronometer
• Parallel ruler Mercator map

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The social

• Materal symbols collective symbols

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A script?

• No global script BUT
• Conditions
• Delegation of tasks
• Buffers/memory

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Robustness

• overlap - redundancy - errors (Nonaka)
• Redundancy
• Competance
• Representations
• Network of dependencies

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Organic tissue
We can think of the team as a sort of flexible
organic tissue that Keeps the information moving
across the tools of the task. When One part of
this tissue is unable to move the required
information Another part is recruited for
it p. 224
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A critique

• why bother with computations?
• Routine vs. non-routine
• Learning adaption? Radical change (Nonaka and
  the rest)