Thought Question: In the article by Bonnie Nardi, she has compared Activity Theory, Situated Cognition, and Distributed Cognition. In the end, she argues that Activity Theory is the most comprehensive and useful for studying learning in contexts. Keeping in mind that she is coming from an HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) perspective, do you agree with this? Why or why not?
Thought Question #3
Learning covers a wide range of practical, theoretical, analytical, abstract and skill acquisition in a variety of learner contexts. To claim that one theory can better look at all learning in context for a wide variety of objectives oversimplifies the challenge. Nardi’s HCI background explains her clear focus and preference for Activity Theory over Situated Action and Distributed Cognition models.
These three theories examine external forces and cultural interactions between human artifacts in a goal driven socially mediated environment. According to Flor and Hutchins (1991) Distributed Cognition is a study of how knowledge is represented “both inside the heads of individuals and in the world” (p. 37). This is the only theory that puts ‘some’ weight on the internal cognition of the participant. Nardi overemphasizes the situation, its artifacts and the community goal and minimizes the importance of the individual’s inner cognition. Activity theory does not answer why we can each be involved in the same event but end up with different learning outcomes.
Nardi’s structuring of Activity Theory makes it less relevant in the classroom. Engeström views that Activity Theory puts motivation and emergent behavior above predefined goals. (Engeström 1990). Nardi (1995) has ethical concerns about a theory that equates humans and objects equally and asserts that Activity Theory puts humans and computers on different planes.
We believe that a combination of theories would best facilitate understanding of the complex ways people learn in a variety of contexts. We disagree with Nardi that Activity Theory is the only framework to best study how learning takes place as people learn differently in a variety of contexts. We support the idea that acquisition of knowledge fosters collaborative learning. Activity Theory is a good framework to study how learning takes place, but does not cover the variety and richness of different learning contexts.
References:
Engeström, Y. (1990). Activity theory and individual and social transformation. Opening address at 2d International Congress for Research on Activity Theory, Lahti, Finland, May 21–25.
Flor, N., and Hutchins, E. (1991). Analyzing distributed cognition in software teams: A case study of team programming during perfective software maintenance. In J. Koenemann-Belliveau et al., eds., Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Workshop on Empirical Studies of Programmers (pp. 36–59). Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing.
Learning Theories Knowledgebase (November, 2011). Activity Theory at Learning-Theories.com. Retrieved November 9th, 2011 from http://www.learning-theories.com/activity-theory.html
Nardi, B. A. (1995) Studying Context: A comparison of activity theory, situated action models, and distrubuted cognition. In B. A. Nardi (Ed.) Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 35-52). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.