[BITS] Reading List for "Computers, Culture, and Distributed Cognition"

Rohit Khare (rohit@bordeaux.ICS.uci.edu)
Thu, 12 Feb 1998 19:11:55 -0800


Phil's been an astounding lecturer for the breadth of his background and the
freewheeling class discussions that ensue on the politics, economics, and
philosophy of standardization.

This is a reading list for another class of his he taught at UCSD. The book he
refers to has a lot to say on how boys and girls react to computers in K-12
settings, in particular, which is a huge determinant of our current crisis in
female/minority participation in CS.

Yesterday, I was talking with a CS teacher in a local Catholic school (~1600
students). 1 woman out of 13 in pascal class; 1 out of 30 in Web design and
development. [PS: can you believe they're shifting the AP CS exam to C++? what
a loser move!]

He also recommended an article I asked for debunking "qwerty considered
harmful":

> In response to a question of Rohit's, here is one attempt to debunk Paul
> David's claims about the QWERTY keyboard: S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen
> E. Margolis, The fable of the keys, Journal of Law and Economics 33, 1990,
> pages 1-25. You'd enjoy this journal, Rohit.

FWIW, I've read a chunk of the articles for this class in previous
history-of-technology courses and a current one on the sociology of science.
They're starred in the list below.

In particular, I'd like to read the pieces from the final week, on Networking,
especially in the context of FoRK...

Rohit

------- Forwarded Message

From: Phil Agre <pagre@weber.ucsd.edu>
To: standards@ics.uci.edu
Subject: "Computers, Culture, and Distributed Cognition"

I've enclosed the syllabus for the course on "Computers, Culture, and
Distributed Cognition" that we organized at UCSD last year. The reason
I'm sending it out is that it includes the book by Janet Schofield that
I mentioned in class yesterday.

Phil

[...]

Here are the readings for each week.

October 4th. Visitor: David Kirsh.

David Kirsh, Adapting the world instead of ourselves, to appear in Adaptive
Behavior.

October 11th. Theoretical background.

[*]
Bonnie Nardi, Studying context: A comparison of activity theory, situated
action models, and distributed cognition, Proceedings of the East-West HCI
Conference, St. Petersburg, August 1997.

Friedrich Hayek, The uses of knowledge in society, in The Essence of Hayek,
edited by Chiaki Nishiyama, Kurt R. Leube, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press,
1984.

Emile Durkheim, selections on the modes of solidarity, in Selected Writings,
Edited and translated by Anthony Giddens, Cambridge University Press, 1972.

Bryan Pfaffenberger, Fetishised objects and humanised natures: Towards an
anthropology of technology, Man 23(2), 1988, pages 236-252.

Supplementary reading.

Bryan Pfaffenberger, Social anthropology of technology, Annual Review of
Anthropology 21, 1992, pages 491-516.

October 18th. Visitor: Ed Hutchins.

Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, MIT Press, 1995. Chapters 3 and 9.

Supplementary reading.

Reviews of "Cognition in the Wild" by Charles Bazerman and Bruno Latour, with
Hutchins' response, Mind, Culture, and Activity 3(1), 1996, pages 51-68.

[*]
Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in
Cold War America, MIT Press, 1996, pages 1-22.

[*]
Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind, MIT Press, 1985. Chapters 1 to 4.

October 25th. Visitor: Mike Cole.

Michael Cole and Yrjo Engestrom, A cultural-historical approach to distributed
cognition, in Gavriel Salomon, ed, Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and
Educational Considerations, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Michael Cole, Cultural-historical psychology: A meso-genetic approach, in
Laura M. W. Martin, Katherine Nelson, and Ethel Tobach, eds, Sociocultural
Psychology: Theory and Practice of Doing and Knowing, Cambridge University
Press, 1995.

November 1st. Cyborgs.

[*]
William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, MIT Press,
1995. Pages 46-77, 86-107.

Sandy Stone, Split subjects, not atoms, or, How I fell in love with my
prosthesis, in Chris Hables Gray, ed, The Cyborg Handbook, Routledge, 1995.

[*]
Donna Haraway, A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism
in the late twentieth century, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Routledge,
1991.

N. Katherine Hayles, Designs on the body: Norbert Wiener, cybernetics, and the
play of metaphor, History of the Human Sciences 3(2), 1990, pages 211--228.

Supplemental reading.

[*]
Mark Poster, Databases as discourse, or Electronic interpellations, in
David Lyon and Elia Zureik, eds, Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

[*]
Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Will the real body please stand up? Boundary stories
about virtual cultures, in Michael Benedikt, ed, Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT
Press, 1991.

Randi Markussen, Subjects of technology: Cyborg identities, experience and
politics of intervention, paper presented at the workshop on "Subject(s) of
Technology", London, June 1995.

Geoffrey Bowker, Information mythology: The world of/as information, in Lisa
Bud-Frierman, ed, Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge
in Modern Business, London: Routledge, 1994.

November 8th. Education.

Charles Crook, Computers and the Collaborative Experience of Learning, London:
Routledge, 1994. Chapter 7.

Janet Ward Schofield, Computers and Classroom Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995. Chapter 5.

Timothy Koschmann, introduction to Computer Supported Cooperative Learning.

O. K. Tikhomirov, The psychological consequences of computerization, in James
V. Wertsch, ed, The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology, Sharpe, 1979.

Supplementary reading.

Monty Neill, Computers, thinking, and schools in "the new world economic
order", in James Brook and Iain A. Boal, eds, Resisting the Virtual Life:
The Culture and Politics of Information, San Francisco: City Lights, 1995.

Michael G. Dolence and Donald M. Norris, Transforming Higher Education: A
Vision for Learning in the 21st Century, Ann Arbor: Society for College and
University Planning, 1995. Chapters 1 and 5.

Mark Warschauer, Computer-mediated collaborative learning: Theory and
practice, Research Note #17, Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center,
Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1995.

November 15th. Visitor: Andrew Feenberg.

George Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, Cambridge: MIT Press,
1968. Pages 83-100.

Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991. Chapter 8.

other reading TBA

Supplemental reading.

Andrew Feenberg, Lukacs, Marx, and the Sources of Critical Theory, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Chapter 3.

Susan Leigh Star, The politics of formal representations: Wizards, gurus, and
organizational complexity, in Susan Leigh Star, ed, Ecologies of Knowledge,
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

November 22nd. Networking.

Barry Wellman, An electronic group is virtually a social network, to appear
in Sara Kiesler, ed, Research Milestones on the Information Highway, Erlbaum.

Liam Bannon and Kjeld Schmidt, CSCW: Four characters in search of a context,
in John M. Bowers and Steven D. Benford, Computer Supported Cooperative Work:
Theory, Practice and Design, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1991.

[*]
Rob Kling and Suzanne Iacono, The mobilization of support for computerization:
The role of computerization movements, Social Problems 35(3), 1988, pages
226-243.

Eevi E. Beck, Changing documents/documenting changes: Using computers for
collaborative writing over distance, in Susan Leigh Star, ed, Cultures of
Computing, Blackwell, 1995.

Supplemental reading.

[*]
David M. Levy and Catherine C. Marshall, Going digital: A look at assumptions
underlying digital libraries, Communications of the ACM 38(4), 1995, pages
77-83.

Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia, Net surfers don't ride alone: Virtual
communities as communities, paper presented to the annual meeting of the
American Sociological Association, 1995.

Steven G. Jones, Understanding community in the information age, in Steven
G. Jones, ed, CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community,
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995.

Craig Calhoun, The infrastructure of modernity: Indirect social relationships,
information technology, and social integration, in Hans Haferkamp and Neil
J. Smelser, eds, Social Change and Modernity, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992.

December 6th. Visitor: Ellen Seiter.

Readings TBA.

Supplemental reading.

Christina Allen, What's wrong with the "golden rule"? Conundrums of conducting
ethical research in cyberspace, The Information Society 12(2), 1996, pages
175-187.

------- End of Forwarded Message