[Prospective] 10 principles of technology

Howard Rheingold, in the feature, posted some responses to Neil Postman's 10 Principles of Technology. 4. A new technology usually makes war against an old technology. It competes with it for time, attention, money, prestige and a "worldview". Again, I will take advantage of my position as first co...

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[Research] Activity Theory: sketching the structure of the activity

This picture (taken from Françoise Decortis, Samuel Noirfalise, Berthe Saudelli: Activity theory, cognitive ergonomics and distributed cognition: three views of a transport company. Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud. 53(1): 5-33 (2000)) is an interesting example of how to describe an activity according to ...

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[MyResearch] About the relevance of importing theories in CSCW

The paper "Activity theory and distributed cognition: or What does CSCW to do with theories?" by C. Halverson discusses a very hot issue that I have to deal with for my phd: what are we doing with all the theories/conceptual framework CSCW/HCI adopted. HCI indeed 'imported' lots of framework: activ...

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[TheWorld] Comparing apples and oranges

Patel and Groen (1993) : "it may be illogical to compare apples and oranges, but it is possible to put them in the same basket. Nevertheless, it is incorrect to conclude that a theoretical framework is superior to another. " ...

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[Metacognition] Cognitive attractors and office work

I stumbled across a very informative paper about a cognitive analysis of work/flow disruptions: Cognitive attractors and office work by Saadi LAHLOU. It is unfortunately in french but here is the english abstract: The Cognitive Overflow Syndrome (“COS”: too many things to do, not enough time, etc) ...

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[TheWorld] Figure of the nerd in relation to race and gender

Race, Sex and Nerds: from Black Geeks to Asian-American Hipsters by Ron Eglash he development of technological expertise requires not only financial resources, but also cultural capital. Nerd identity has been a critical gateway to this technocultural access, mediating personal identities in ways t...

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