Psychology and Phenomenology
Nov 8th, 2009 by Michele Brannon-Hamilton
Being part of DLG 8 was a great experience. We worked well together and the topic of Psychology and Phenomenology was most intriguing. We called ourselves Team Phenomena and used the Ning.com website to display our work. Ning was a great platform for our readings, summaries and videos because it allowed us to display the information clearly while also allowing us to be creative. Our classmates seemed to appreciate the visual side of our website, especially our piano staircase, love of technology and monster mash videos.
Back at the Vista forum, we presented our classmates with questions about evocative objects and the human attachment to technology. We received a wide variety of responses and thoroughly enjoyed facilitating the conversations. I’m amazed at how we started with a collection of ideas on Google.docs and ended up with a Ning website. Viewing the website certainly evoked an emotion in me, pride. Our classmates said our site was fun and engaging.
Besides the fun, we summarized and discussed articles by Nardi and Turkle in great length.
Nardi
I found the Nardi article very difficult to read. It covered three theories of teaching and learning: Activity Theory, Situated Action Model and Distributed Cognition. Although I understand the purpose of each, I found the Activity Theory most applicable to my own teaching and learning. This seemed to be the general consensus among our classmates as well.
Turkle
I found the Turkle article very interesting because I had no idea about the developments in artificial intelligence. I’d also never really thought about our physical and emotional connection to technology in the form of cyborgs and evocative objects. Much of our Ning presentation was based on these topics including the videos we created. Our classmates also seemed to find these topics intriguing and soon became immersed in lively discussions.
For more information, you can find our website for Psychology and Phenomenology at http://etec511.ning.com/
References
Nardi, B. A. (1996). Studying context. In B. A. Nardi (Ed.), Context and consciousness (pp. 69-102). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Turkle, S. (2004). Whither psychoanalysis in computer culture. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 21(1), 16-30.